This dissertation involves the study of the relationship between orality and Franco-Ontarian Theatre and more specifically the way in which elements of oral practices (such as story-telling) have been adapted and transformed by Franco-Ontarian playwrights, actors and directors, to produce a specific poetics of performance that evolved exclusively within Franco-Ontarian society during the last 30 years. The corpus is drawn from those plays written and/or performed between 1970 and 2000 which exhibit characteristics of oral culture, as defined by the works of such scholars as Mircea Eliade, Arnold van Gennep, Richard Turner, Walter Ong and Richard Bauman. Our study begins by analyzing the structural and thematic links between the oral-based 'People's Theatre' of the 1970s and the text-based dramaturgy of the 1980s and 1990s. This dissertation is therefore an interdisciplinary study which takes into account a comparative approach to theatre studies, integrating notions borrowed from theatre anthropology, dramaturgy, theatre history and the study of identity forming practices which could be linked to post-colonial studies, although we have not taken into account current post-colonial theories in this thesis. Firstly, we have identified the plays performed in the 1970s by the Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario (TNO) and the Théâtre d'la Corvée as part of an existing Western trend called "People's Theatre." As a form of performance that echoed the themes and strategies of this "People's Theatre," Franco-Ontarian drama of the 1970s was a decentralized, corporeal, oral-based theatre that appeared in non-traditional spaces and was aimed almost exclusively at a local Francophone, non urban public who were, for the most part, unfamiliar with the theatre. Some changes took place in the following decades. The theatre of the 1980s and 1990s, represented by the work of directors, writers and actors such as Jean Marc Dalpé, Brigitte Haentjens, Michel Ouellette and Robert Marinier, is neither oral-based nor is it intended for an exclusively Franco-Ontarian audience. However, as it shares elements which one finds in the earlier tendencies attributed to "People's Theatre," it therefore exhibits discursive and thematic categories that suggest traces of orality, more appropriately designated as "oraliture" by Maximilien Laroche, a concept that suggest a transitional state of literary and/or dramaturgical production that lies between written and oral culture. It is this 'residual' orality which constitutes the main body of our analysis. The thesis concludes by suggesting that current transformations of the Franco-Ontarian population, the arrival of French speaking immigrants from many non-Western countries, will no doubt contribute to a renewal of the expectations and creative possibilities of audiences and artists alike, opening the way not for the 'death' of Franco-Ontarian culture, as some critics have suggested, but for the flowering of new forms of artistic expression, of which the theatre will no doubt be one of the most important.