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PLAYING FRENCH:

NOTES AND REFLEXIONS

 

Yannick Mercoyrol, the French cultural attaché in Chicago, wrote in issue no17 of Actes du Théâtre about establishing, de facto, the first festival of contemporary French theatre in the United States. Playing French, which was held between October and December 2004, was a great success, thanks to the fabulous energy he was able to communicate to people before and during the event. The festival was rewarded and saluted by the public and the press.

With his characteristic enthusiasm and sharp analysis, Yannick Mercoyrol shares a few thoughts with us here, inspired by his tribute to contemporary French playwriting on Chicago’s stages.

The idea of launching Playing French, the first French theatre festival ever held in the United States, in Chicago, grew out of something that was obvious to me. With over 200 companies, Chicago is an extraordinarily active hub for theatre troupes, ranging from the little black box to the large-scale Broadway-style machines, mainly focusing on the American repertoire. Our contemporary plays are virtually absent here, a direct consequence of the total lack of knowledge about any French playwrights since the days of Beckett.
In this new and favourable context we decided to contact several companies we thought might be interested in taking up the challenge. The idea was to orient the festival of current French theatre around new kinds of playwriting, and to confront people with a way of staging plays that is completely different from the usual European tradition. The intention was for the festival to create a new dialogue between current French playwriting and how the plays would be transposed onto American stages, perhaps adding a new twist in the process.
After a preliminary selection of contemporary playwrights whose work had been translated, we worked closely with sacd and Entr’Actes to put together a list of 70 plays likely to arouse the curiosity of our local partners. The plays aptly represented the diversity of the contemporary French repertoire, from the more well-known playwrights to younger talents, as well as a wide range of authors from other French-speaking countries. The outlines of Playing French gradually took shape as the companies’ reading committees got acquainted with the plays. The list was open-ended, even infinite. It showed the different aspects of the current French scene, with a majority of plays by our most well-known playwrights, still unknown here (Koltès, two plays by Minyana, Novarina, two by Lagarce, Vinaver, Sarraute and Haïm), and a variety of more recent playwrights (Spycher, Py, Melquiot, Israël-Le Pelletier, Darley), as well as authors from wider afield in the French-speaking world, always sought after in the u.s. (two by Césaire, and Arrabal first and foremost, then two by Visniec, Pliya and Ghazali). The new language in theatre being the very basis of the festival, Playing French had decided to finance the productions of work by Novarina, Chevillard (adaptation of Le Hérisson by Dominique Frot) and Prigent (a reading of Une phrase pour ma mère by Jean-Marc Bourg). The plays were the keystones of a genuine linguistic challenge. It would be tedious to cite the entire programme here in detail. Suffice it to say that 23 performances (full productions and staged readings), a series of 7 films dealing with the theatre (including the world premiere of Chant public pour deux chaises électriques by Gatti, with the author in attendance), a three-day international symposium, a seminar and twenty guests composed the wide-ranging, original panorama offered to Chicago audiences over a two-month period.
Audiences responded well to this innovative programming throughout the festival. About 5500 spectators attended the various events. The exceptional coverage by the press highlighted its success. You have to take into consideration the unusual nature of the festival and the huge amount of cultural activities going on in Chicago at that time of year. The press frequently spoke about the concept and originality of Playing French, saluted the effort to open up an unknown repertoire and the willingness to cooperate with local partners.

“This is what we need right now: it sounds prosaic, but we need to hear what playwrights from abroad have to say.”
The articles written about the festival in the local press could be summed up in the following statement: “a massive effort to spread the word about this aspect of French culture.” One of the most influential critics was won over, declaring: “this is what we need right now: it sounds prosaic, but we need to hear what playwrights from abroad have to say.” That opinion is a clear allusion to the isolation of the u.s., particularly on a political level. The theatre is seen as an ideological opening greatly desired by cultural circles, which have a majority of Democrats. However, American theatre today is itself a victim of that very isolation, and for a long time to come. Indeed, many people in the theatre are not in the least interested in breaking out of that isolation, as attested by their low attendance at the performances. Some of the reviews revealed how the plays by Minyana and, more surprisingly, by Koltès, made some of them uncomfortable. These contemporary French-language playwrights have had a major impact on aesthetic ideals in their own countries. Nonetheless, it is understandable that audiences confronted with their writing for the first time might be confused. But this spatial and ideological distortion cannot entirely explain the difficulty experienced by some, as could be seen both in the press and on stage.
Perhaps the festival could lead to some interesting reflections on the thriving and fascinating gap between these two approaches to theatre. American theatre, inspired by Stanislavski, is a blend of physical exuberance, political messages – and entertainment, on the more commercial side. It’s obvious that directors can’t have the same impact as in European theatre under such conditions. The interplay between words and action, found in different forms in the works of Minyana, Novarina and Lagarce, is totally foreign to American theatre, especially in the way language is used. There may be a few exceptions (successful ones like Robert Maxwell, for instance). But for me, playwrights like Bond, Sheppard, Kushner, and all the others whose work I’ve seen here, describe in a more or less critical style a “state of affairs”; whereas French playwrights more often distort common situations to heighten a crisis, and think of the stage as a place to be reinvented. It’s a huge difference. On one side, the language of theatre seeks its meaning in reality; on the other, the dramatic structure is enhanced through the use of a new kind of vocabulary no longer constrained by reality. In short, they are the two opposite sides of a political substratum already familiar to the Greeks, interpreted in its exterior expression in America and in its inner aesthetic in Europe, or in France at any rate.

The most convincing experience of all in organising such a festival
This radical strangeness does not exclude similarities, and even exchanges, which should be a good enough reason to hold further events of this kind in the United States. One of the most moving of these exchanges happened between André Marcon and the young American actor performing Novarina’s Le Monologue d’Adramélech for the first time in America. The play was first staged in France in the early 1980s, starring Marcon. Guy Bennett recently translated the play – an amazing feat. The two actors worked together for two weeks, creating a new English-language performance. While closely following Marcon’s coaching, this highly talented actor managed to perform the play in a very personal way. The story is worth telling. The American actor, Hilario Saavedra, a recent graduate from CalArts, the famous California drama school, stood in at the last minute for a fellow actor who couldn’t perform the part due to a medical emergency. Hilario took on the part eight weeks before opening night, displaying a disturbingly calm demeanor, which I later became accustomed to and recognized as his exceptional presence and power of concentration. He dove into the text, working hard and on his own. He not only memorized the text, but also captured the exact breathing, punctuating it with as many seamarks as required by his body to make the words his own. The audience was flabbergasted by the result, admiring his performance, and also, beyond the technical exploit, deeply moved by the quality of this lad, willingly immersed in a verbal world totally different from what he had known until then. To me it was a crucial experience, maybe the most convincing of all, in organising a festival like Playing French. It was the kind of event that builds bridges between cultures – a vital way of communicating that’s written deeply into the reality of the performances. Not the trivial, vulgar kind you hear and see all day long, but the kind that is the expression of a fruitful marriage of two traditions, experienced together at the very moment they are created. It takes talent to achieve that kind of result. It requires inspiration, and providing what it takes to make that kind of encounter possible – including time (and therefore money) first and foremost. The festival highlighted the strong points in French theatre, as in the interplay of mirroring and distancing so brilliantly established by Montesquieu in his day. While there may be things to change or reform here and there, it showed the crucial importance of public funding during the whole process of theatrical creation in France today. It enables directors like Nauzyciel (Black Battles with Dogs presented in Chicago), playwrights like Novarina and others, as well as companies and actors, to take the time needed to bring a new work to fruition. And then to share those strengths abroad in order to expand into different fields of investigation and open up a new future.

Yannick Mercoyrol
Cultural Attaché in Chicago