One sister's birthday party becomes one of the rare occasions where four sisters from one of Montreal's "better" French-speaking districts must spend the evening together. Conflict is inevitable and their many differences and disappointments, with each other and themselves, are forced out into the open. This is comedy of manners, a bourgeois drama in which the characters embody contrasting views on just about everything, including culture and the theatre.

« FERNANDE : There's more of Outremont left in you than I realised. / LORRAINE, ironically : Indeed, the peasant woman and the femme du monde are locked in mortal combat… / FERNANDE : Judging from your behaviour, the former has it, hands down. / LORRAINE : I should hope so! »

"Michel Tremblay's L'impromptu d'Outremont is a four-part etude on the subject of culture that explodes - mostly in laughter - like atoms in a nuclear reactor." Maureen Peterson, The Gazette, Montreal, April 17, 1980.