Ma chambre froide

Estelle is a model employee. For her coworkers, she covers their shifts, takes their blame, cleans up, stays late, opens early, asks for advances on her salary to loan them money and even lets the boss take advantage of her. In "Ma chambre froide", Joël Pommerat adds a new anti-héroine to his world of workers pitted against implacable market forces and each other, except that this time, Estelle is perhaps not the simple sum of the hours she works and the company balance sheet.

"Ma chambre froide" is also not the obvious sequel to Pommerat's trilogy on the same themes. After "Au monde" (2004) "D'une seule main" (2005) and "Les Marchands" (2006) [see this blog and parisvoice.com for reviews], which explored the pressure exerted on family and society by an unethical work "ethic" and economic crisis, "Ma chambre froide" considers what happens when colleagues and work supplant family and private life altogether, with a previously unsuspected comic vein. Common to all however is Pommerat's brutal vision of human nature in its 21st century struggles with globalization, downsizing, unemployment and their related ills, in a particularly French interpretation of the social contract.

The play imagines a certain Blocq, self-made entrepreneur and CEO of four successful businesses, whose crass and dismissive attitude towards all earns him the hatred and scorn of his staff, with the notable exception of Estelle. When he learns he has weeks to live, he leaves ownership of all his holdings to his eight "store" employees on the condition that they remember him once a year in a public display of their thanks. When Estelle has the idea to write a play about his life, her colleagues start to doubt her sincerity and even her sanity, especially when she starts imposing late-night rehearsals and animal costumes at the same time profits take a downturn and the whole staff is called upon to make enormous personal and moral sacrifices in the so-called collective good. That Estelle inadvertently refers to the store's cold chamber (chambre froid) as her own room suggests the extent to which the characters have been overtaken by the same pressures that consumed Blocq.


Like last season's "Cercles/Fictions", "Ma chambre froid" tells an episodic story that builds in suspense with each succeeding installment. But unlike that work, it does so with both feet more or less in a recognizable reality and a biting sense of humor. Less fantastical and figurative than his earlier plays, this latest piece has all the intrigue, suspense and surprises of a criminal investigation, while the exasperated insults with which the characters take each other down and Estelle's comic attempts to direct her colleagues create some very funny moments. What interests Pommerat though are the mysterious zones that theater provides to question human experience and explore alternative possibilities to what can be known and lived in real time and space. Who is Estelle in fact? What was Blocq's intention?

The actors of his Compagnie Louis Brouillard prove yet again to be invaluable guides through Pommerat's rich and strange worlds, creating with their characteristic cool precision equally familiar and monstrous characters within the close confines of the arena-like, 360-degree space, in contrasting tones of bleak neon or total darkness. They are masters of the transformative powers that Pommerat's work presupposes. His writing and direction, so exact from the timing of the scene changes to the irony of the sound track, here deserve the best of their talents,

If Estelle is right that it is always possible to change a bad situation, in "Ma chambre froide" liberation comes with a price that only the best, or the worst, are willing to pay.

To March 27, Tues-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 3 pm, Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe/Ateliers Berthier, corner of rue Suarès and bd Berthier, 17e, Métro Porte de Clichy, 6-28 euros, tel: 01.44.85.40.40.

Photo Credit: Alain Fonteray

Please Kill Me

If you remember that Robert Hell was the father of the Mohawk as a hair statement and safety-pins as a fashion accessory, then “Please Kill Me” is right up your alley. The latest show from Mathieu Bauer and Sentimental Bourreau takes its material and its name from the collection of interviews compiled by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain with everyone who was anyone in the punk music scene that started in New York in the early Seventies: Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Joey and Dee-Dee Ramone, Johnny Thunders, Blondie, Malcolm McLaren… Subtitled “The Uncensored Oral History of Punk”, the book holds no punches but shoots off more than a few, recounting overdoses, animal defenestrations, groupies, the pogo and the sweating steamy clubs where it all went down.

From that dense and not always fascinating body of anecdotes, Bauer has assembled an intelligent show that translates the style, the sound and the stunts of CBGB’s circa 1975, without ever attempting to recreate them. Actors Kate Strong and Matthias Girbig channel more than mimic the furious energy and nihilistic personas that shot to notorious fame in New York and then London, shouting, whispering and growling with the shadow of a Sid Viscious scowl or the sinuous muscularity of an Iggy pose. Of different generations and genders, they embody the scene from blast off to burn out, its major and minor players, its crossing of sexual codes. Bauer, on percussion, aided by Sylvain Cartigny on guitars and Lazare Boghossian on synthesizer do “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “Blank Generation,” not like the Stooges and the Voidoids did but rather how adolescent memory and forty-something experience have moved them, as talented musicians in their own right and certainly far more musically sophisticated than the Sex Pistols ever were. Bauer makes use of a mostly blank set and a huge back screen to subtitle the VO text, delivered with deadpan humor by Strong, and to create context and atmosphere, using original album artwork and live and prerecorded video montages.

Long before the music business became an industry, the stories retold and alluded to, as outrageous as they were, seem strangely from a more innocent time. The show doesn’t quite keep the pace of a Ramones’ song, and an unnecessary and overlong coda weights the finish, but “Please Kill Me” gets the message of the t-shirt Hell wore proclaiming that same statement: attitude is everything, just don’t take it too seriously.

To March 22, in English and French, Mon-Sat, 7:30 pm, Sun, 3:30 pm, Théâtre de la Bastille, 76 rue de la Roquette, Mº Bastille, 13-22 euros, tel: 01.43.57.42.14.

Photo Credit: Romain Etienne

Une Saison chez Césaire

Living legends are rare but Aimé Césaire was one. In his lifetime (1913-2008), his name was synonymous with Black consciousness for French colonial subjects, or Négritude. One of France’s first and only colored députés, he delivered a blistering attack on French colonialism and racism in 1950, and was also the face of modern Martinican politics, as both the mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to 2001 and the author of Martinique’s request to become a French Overseas Department. First and foremost however, Césaire was a poet who developed a personal esthetic of surrealism - astonishing even to André Breton - to evoke the unique mal-de-vivre of French West Indians caught between a calculatingly generous “motherland” and aspirations for self-actualization. He was also the author of an equally acute theatrical body of work that is unforgiving of history and the political and economic machine that dictated it in his part of the world. “Nègre fondamental” and “éveilleur de conscience”, Césaire provided the foundation and the vision for African and West Indian literatures and identities.

The play “Une Saison chez Césaire”, conceived by his daughter Michèle and Haitian director Ruddy Sylaire is an invitation to rediscover Césaire's poetico-militant preoccupations in this year of celebrations of France’s overseas territories (“2011 Année des Outre-mer”). Splicing scenes from his four plays, the piece explores his principal concern, that of “le Nègre en lutte pour des lendemains meilleurs”. From the fugitive slave who aspires to be the Inventor of oppressed desires (“Et les chiens se taisaient”) to Christophe, the liberator/dictator of Haitian history (“La tragédie du roi Christophe”); from Lumumba, visionary of African unity (“Une Saison au Congo”) to Caliban, symbol of the brutalization of African-American identity ("Une Tempête"), Césaire challenges official lip-service to human rights and France’s own cherished motto of liberty, equality and fraternity for all.

If Césaire’s metaphorical language and Sylaire’s direction feel limited by the narrow confines of the Déchargeurs, the four actors give generously to their performances as a host of idealists trapped by history and crushed by unstoppable forces. The production is a simple and direct tribute to Césaire’s writing, as minimal in its dramatic language as it is symbolic in its few concessions to set (two poteau-mitan and a hanging sculpture evoking the lianes of the Martinican rain forest, both charged with rich symbolic implications for his work). Césaire’s voice rings loud and clear in this too brief “season” of his yet too pertinent discontent.

To April 9, Tues-Sat, 9:45 pm, 2 pm Sat, Théatre les Déchargeurs, 3 rue des Déchargeurs, 1e, Mº Châtelet, tel: 0892. 70.12.28.

Timon d'Athènes

The critic Harold Bloom is said to have credited poetry slams with the death of literature, but an adaptation of “Timon of Athens” with three stars of the underground rap scene demonstrates that slam and Shakespeare have plenty in common. Fundamentally popular arts, both relish in bringing the spoken word to the people by pushing language to heights of musicality and imagery. They’re also blisteringly human and a lot of fun to watch. Those qualities are only part of the success of the “Timon d’Athenes” directed by Razerka Ben Sadia-Lavant, who has astutely seen in Shakespeare’s last play, a work made for the slam stage.

That is to say that the play has a checkered history. Unfinished, rarely produced and with an ambiguous story allowing little comfort or a clear moral, Timon lurks in the curtains as Hamlet and Lear steal the spotlight again and again. That marginal position lies easily with the show’s performers who represent the underclass of a politically and socially engaged form of rap that is far from the genteel melodies and lyrics of MC Solaar or the marketing machine of Diam’s. French rappers of West Indian origins, Casey and D’de Kabal are joined in the project by former Nuyorican Poetry Slam (NYC) laureate Mike Ladd, along with actors Denis Lavant and Marie Payen. They form an intimidating team to tell the story of Timon, a wildly generous but equally naive idealist who goes to his grave hating mankind when wealth then friends recede into the horizon. Asking the questions of friendship’s “price” and the power of moolah to create obsequious flatterers, the play’s themes are similarly in keeping with the rap scene’s penchant for bankrolls and bling.

These connections lead to a truly inventive adaptation of Shakespeare, but one that retains a sense of measure while offering a piercing reading of the text: a quality which lifts the struts and swaggers, the gold gloves and the omnipresent mikes from mere vehicle to interpretative insight. Lavant plays Lavant, a live wire if ever there was one, and his mere presence adds a dangerous unpredictability to Timon, who literally collapses under the weight of his rage. D’de Kabal lends his impressive stature and vocal register to Alcibiades, the rebellious general, and Marie Payen fills in the supporting roles from the artist and merchant classes, as well as Flavius, Timon’s faithful servant; her casting brings the sole hint of sex to Timon’s Athens, obsessed with money at the expense of human relations. As Apemantus, the cynical philosopher who scorns Timon’s hangers-on, Casey gives the most astonishing performance. This female rapper from Seine-Saint-Denis via Fort-de-France has built on an androgynous appearance to enter the macho world of hip-hop, but her softer physicality sets Apemantus off from Alcibiades and makes for a a fascinating, insult-hurling show-down with Lavant’s tiny Timon in the play’s final act.

Those verbal jousts of which Shakespeare was a master, 400 years before Grandmaster Flash, are, in Timon, particularly well served by rap’s pulsing braggadocio. Besides commissioning a translation that has its ear to the language of the streets (by Sophie Couronne), Ben Sadia-Lavant had the excellent idea to invite American spoken word master Mike Ladd to deliver Timon’s significant monologues in a sizzling half-sung, half-rapped VO: some of the most exciting moments of the show. The production does away entirely with set and movement, leaving only the text in a poetry slam atmosphere, the performers delivering their lines from five microphone stations. The sole concession to the dramatic genre is their repeated costume changes, to signal character shifts and to mark Timon’s demise from wealthy benefactor to destitute misanthrope. Even with prodigious Doctor L. on percussion, guitar and synthesizer, the show clocks in at a mere 75 minutes. Purists be damned: it’s a slam all right, but one that does Shakespeare proud.

To March 12, Tues-Sat, 8 pm, Sat, 7 pm, Maison des Métallos, 94 rue Jean-Piere Timabud, 11e, Mº Couronnes, 10-14 euros, tel: 01.48.05.88.27.

Le Musée de la Mer

Author Marie Darrieussecq broke onto France's literary scene in 1996 with a Kafkaesque story about a woman who finds herself turning into a sow. Surprising transformations and ambiguous relations are not unusual to the dozen novels that followed. For her first play, « Le Musée de la mer », she dives into the murky waters of crisis and conflict to fish out dystopian anxiety along with some strange marine life.

Director Arthur Nauzyciel is drawn to intercultural collaboration as well as to Darrieussecq's themes and writing. He has directed two Koltès plays for the Emory Theater in Atlanta and a "Julius Caesar" with the American Repertory Theater of Boston. In 2009, he got Darrieussecq on board to adapt "Ordet" (1925), by the Danish writer and Lutheran minister Kaj Munk.

This background seems important in trying to understand what we see on stage at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers. Never dotting too many of her « i »’s in her unsettling fictional worlds, Darrieussecq writes for the program notes that she has relied on Nauzyciel to fill in much of the detail of “Musée”. Where the text stops and Nauzyciel's vision takes over cannot be known, but it is a wonder who of this otherwise talented duo will take responsibility for the undefinable creature from the deep
which occupies center stage for most of the performance.

"Belle" is described as possibly a lamantin (sea cow), in the program notes. She is, from what is to be gathered from the text, all that remains of the museum's marine life, decimated by the consequences (largely famine) of an ambiguously defined war which encroaches on this windswept corner of an equally unspecified country. "Her" uncensored suffering, which is communicated by unnerving moaning and even singing, is undoubtedly meant to illustrate the unstated feelings of the largely stoic characters: two couples and the two children of one of these. Dancer Damien Jalet goes to admirably painful lengths to give life to Belle, but, as insensitive to her metaphorical importance as the comment may be, the formless thing never looks like more than a lumpy orange bag with a man inside.

Another curiosity is the plastic-draped set, dominated by an enormous bubble. Characters enter it at times, ostensibly extending the narrative space, while their presence there is alternately dream-like and grotesque. There is also the matter of a kind of basin, or even a trap leading into the open sea, where the last (rubber) fish are caught. We're not sure where we are, but it certainly isn't real, with consequences for the intended message regarding wartime, concessions and survival.

The children who arrive at the museum's door, and their siamesesque contortions, provide the most interest here. If their presence is meant to underscore the characters' uncomfortable need for each other under stress, that is perhaps the most powerful message of the play.

"Musée" was created with Iceland's National Theater and a multicultural artistic team. The Icelandic connection lends a hint of wild spaces and dramatic contrasts to Darrieussecq's oblique text, but "Le Musée de la mer" remains as slippery as a fish or as taciturn as a fisherman, its intended effet never quite clear.

Seen at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers, Feb. 3, 2011.

Photo Credit: Frédéric Nauzyciel

Your Brother. Remember?

Zachary Oberzan is finding fame with some of the most weirdly adventurous performances in miniature one might ever see. He was the star of Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s “Rambo Solo”, a retelling of the novel First Blood and its film remake, "Rambo", performed on film by Oberzan in his studio apartment and simultaneously live. The experience led to a full-length feature film redux, “Flooding with Love for the Kid”, where he plays all 26 roles, again in his 225 sq. ft flat. In addition to being an accomplished musical autodidact and sought-out actor, performing last year with New York experimental theater the Wooster Group, Oberzan is also, to judge from his latest piece, an action movie addict since his earliest years. In fact, “Your Brother. Remember?” answers the questions audiences to his previous projects might have pondered while watching him crash painfully around his apartment, such as: “Why does he do this??” If the story of “Brother” is any indication, it's because, as the child of a broken marriage in Maine in the ‘70s, he and his brother Gator bonded by watching Jean Claude Van Damme in “Kickboxer” (1989) as well as other inanities only teenage boys could get into.

The show finds Oberzan once again reproducing, gesture for gesture, video sequences that play behind him, trading John Rambo for Kurt Sloan, Van Damme’s character sporting a full-body pancake-makeup tan throughout. In these, clips of favorite scenes from the movie are interspersed with home video of the brothers precisely enacting the same segments, first as teenagers twenty years ago in their living room, and as adults today: more accomplished in Zachary’s case but rather worse for wear in his brother’s. Whatever artistic or conceptual motives may underlie Oberzan’s intersecting interests in video and performance (American society’s penchant for home video “bloopers” and Candid Camera gags, to hypothesize a couple), “Brother” doesn’t rise much above a homage to lost boyhood and above all Gator, now 100 lbs heavier and a methadone addict with a prison record. Extended footage of him and sister Jenny talking about the fun they had filming the project or retelling scatological prison tales may be meant to evoke those "Making Of" extras now common on movie DVDs , but a sudden glimpse of Gator coming down from meth makes for a suddenly startling reality show.

Oberzan’s considerable talents may owe much to those early film-making experiences, and he proves here again to be the highly versatile actor of his preceding projects. His fascination with acting is ultimately what lends needed weight to the show’s stunts. A scene where Oberzan meticulously acts out Van Damme monologuing about his start and struggles in the profession is the most interesting moment of the piece, engaging, in the pop culture terms of Oberzan’s language, with theories of acting, from what Diderot had to say about the “paradox of the actor”, who must only appear to feel the emotions he portrays, to Lee Stasberg's Method Acting.

Oberzan’s DIY approach to film and limitless physical exploits and costume gags have opened doors across the Continent. Next stops: Sweden, Norway, Italy, Austria, Germany, Portugal, and Belgium. What foreign audiences will make of this thoroughly made-in-America project is anyone's guess.

Seen at MC93 Créteil, Jan. 25, 2011

La Niaque

“Niaque” is slang for a fighting instinct. It’s what helped Chad Chenouga survive an extended stay in collective foster care to go on to a career as a filmmaker. In the autobiographical monologue he directs and performs, la niaque is also the irrepressible energy that gives hope to the story of his protagonist Nassim and the other “enfants de la DASS” (child-wards of the Département des Affaires sanitaires et sociales) with whom he lives in a foyer in Fontenay-aux-Roses. Among these “cas sociaux” (social cases) as such children might be more pejoratively referred to, Nassim stands apart, however: a good student, curious, easy-going, he looks with the same equanimity at mates La Savate, Liesse, Malek and Prosper, Africans and Rebeus (backslang for beurs, or French-born North Africans) like himself, as he does at the “éducs” (éducateurs / social workers) who try to strike a balance between their reputations as “distributeurs de baffes” (a little too ready to use their fists in a conflict) and their role as foster parents. A year in their company exposes Nassim to much of what he already knows, as the orphan of a broken marriage, preferring the street to a too-volatile home, but also offers his first experiences with love and a chance to start over.

In his simple, forthright piece, Chenouga captures the best and the worst of a system endowed with considerable means for raising at-risk children (a highlight in the show is when Nassim and pals are taken to receive their monthly stipend of 300 euros, which they promptly blow on counterfeit D&G jeans and Ray-Bans at the Puces de Clignancourt), yet handcuffed by lingering racism and the French state’s weak promise of an ascenseur social to equal rights and opportunities for all. Like the suspicious fire in the director’s office that destroys all their files, these adolescents burn with an incandescent desire to be acknowledged and to have their say, a feeling translated on stage by two hip-hop/Krump dancers who punctuate Nassim’s narration with their repetitive, staccato gestures that hover between collapse and control like a spinning top in the moment it starts to wobble. Nassim’s struggle is not so much with his mother’s addiction, his father’s disappearance or the suicides and murders that punctuate his year at the foyer, but rather with the feeling of relief he discovers to be free of an unbearable personal history and to be at ease with himself in the new life that the foyer and a change of lycée provide.

Chenouga tells his story in the slang of the streets, the language of his characters, who nevertheless grapple, like Nassim, with the codes and forms of standard French. The dual registers speak in plain terms the distance that separates mainstream French society from its disenfranchised youth, whether they live in foyers or HLMs. Nassim’s “niaque” or desire to shake off that status creates a vibrant piece of theater that is never self-pitying but rather genially combative. Chenouga and dancers Wrecker and Romuald Brizolier/Migue Ortega (in alternating performances) use impressive restraint to tell a story that more usually leads to a police record, with salutary laughter and an exemplary will to live.

To February 12, Tues-Sat, 9 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, RER A Nanterre-Préfecture + navette, 12-25 euros, tel: 01.46.14.70.00.

Photo Credit: Pascal Victor