Strange Plays for Strange Times

PARIS — Picture this holiday season scenario. After an indulgent lunch, stomach discomfort turns into uncontrollable gas; you’re forced to excuse yourself repeatedly to stagger to the bathroom, all the while trying to maintain some composure. It’s the stuff of nightmares — and a gold mine of comedy for the French theater company Les Chiens de Navarre.

The riotous collective is back with a new production, “Not Everyone Can Be an Orphan,” presented at the MAC de Créteil, a popular venue in the Paris suburbs, before a transfer to the inner-city Grande Halle de La Villette. In the play, mundane social situations veer out of control at a breakneck pace, and scenes like the one above take surreal turns. A bathroom floods around an earnest daughter-in-law betrayed by her digestive system (Charlotte Laemmel), and a brown hand reaches out of the toilet to drag her into the bowl, in a grotesque metaphor of her ordeal.

In 1989, the American author Bruce Sterling coined the word “slipstream” to describe fiction in which elements of fantasy seep menacingly into reality, or, as he put it in the magazine SF Eye at the time: “These books tend to sarcastically tear at the structure of ‘everyday life.’” A number of contemporary French theatermakers are leaning toward strange, disquieting spins on prosaic events — slipstream drama, so to speak.

“Not Everyone Can Be an Orphan” starts in anodyne fashion: The audience is seated on both sides of a traverse stage, where a middle-aged couple and their grown children are chatting happily around a dinner table, the family’s Christmas tree twinkling in the background. But when the father announces he has sold the house, the reunion descends into chaos. One of the Christmas gifts — a chain saw — becomes a weapon; the couple’s daughter (played by Judith Siboni) attempts to hang herself with a garland before smashing a bottle over her head and electrocuting herself.

It’s the kind of unpredictable ride that Les Chiens de Navarre, founded in 2005 by the director Jean-Christophe Meurisse, have perfected over the years, and the production’s series of vignettes frequently hit that sweet spot between relatability and wackiness. In another scene, the group’s small talk — about the health of relatives and the best route to the family home — is repeated on a loop, with increasingly over-the-top details. Meanwhile, the stuffed deer head above the fireplace becomes animated, as if ready to join the conversation.

Often, Les Chiens de Navarre’s choices are hardly subtle: When the sons pretend to be babies, and attempt to breastfeed, the comedy doesn’t really lead anywhere. Yet the troupe’s appeal goes beyond the stunts they pull. Even the most preposterous developments often hint at the fears and neuroses woven into the fabric of family life. During a more serious interlude, when we see the children helping their older, frailer father take a bath, the non sequiturs in the dialogue aren’t funny anymore: They are evidence of his memory loss.

Les Chiens de Navarre’s slipstream sensibility speaks to the sense that reality has grown more unsettling. Watching the down-to-earth characters react to absurd events onstage triggers a palpable sense of relief — catharsis, perhaps, for the postmodern age.

Some directors are bringing this sense to both recent and classic plays. A double bill at the Théâtre de la Tempête, directed by Frédéric Bélier-Garcia, attempts to bridge the gap between the contemporary Russian playwright Ivan Vyrypaev and the work of Eugène Labiche, a master of 19th-century vaudeville. Vyrypaev’s “Summer Wasps Bite Us Even in November,” a short play for three actors, is performed first, with the same actors returning for Labiche’s one-act “The Lourcine Street Affair,” written in 1857.

The central riddle of Vyrypaev’s concise play remains unresolved. When we meet the characters, Sarah and her husband, Robert, are entertaining their friend Donald. Sarah swears she saw Robert’s brother Marcus the week before; Donald swears Marcus was with him and his wife at the time. Both have witnesses who confirm their versions of the events.

While their quest for the truth leads them only to a logical fallacy, darker truths about the two families are uncovered in the process. The trio of actors (Camille Chamoux, Jean-Charles Clichet and Stéphane Roger) play up that paradox with performances alternately emotionally realistic and Beckettian, and attempt the same with “The Lourcine Street Affair.”

Labiche’s brand of comedy is much more straightforward, however. The plot of this play is on the darker side — two men wonder whether they killed a woman the night before while they were drunk — but it’s clear they didn’t. As a result, Bélier-Garcia’s attempt to impose a tone similar to Vyrypaev’s leads to performances that look mannered, and a little too cerebral for what is ultimately a harmless farce.

While the tales of “One Thousand and One Nights” belong to the realm of fantasy, a new adaptation at the Théâtre de l’Odéon tackles them with a contemporary, slipstream touch. Its director, Guillaume Vincent, has devised an astonishing opening scene, which sees terrified-looking brides slowly trickle into a waiting room. Periodically, an alarm rings loudly and a door opens to let one of them into the apartments of the monarch Shahryar, who marries a new woman every night and beheads her the next morning.

The menace feels diffuse and invisible: There is no dialogue, yet the way each woman pauses and looks back before being swallowed by the set is chilling beyond the tale’s circumstances. Scheherazade, one of the designated brides, stops the bloodshed by entertaining Shahryar with stories every night. Vincent stages a selection of these stories with varying degrees of success. At times, they obscure the production’s own dramatic arc.

At its best, however, “One Thousand and One Nights” — helped by a strong, diverse cast — finds eerie modernity in its characters. The tale of Aziz and Azizah attains new life as a story of unrequited love set in the 21st century. The cross-dressing princess Budur, who reveals her feminine identity to her bride, Hayat, only after their wedding, meets with acceptance. There, a sense of contemporary realism suddenly colors the myth — or perhaps it just feels no stranger than reality.

Tout le Monde Ne Peut Pas Être Orphelin. Directed by Jean-Christophe Meurisse. Grande Halle de La Villette, Nov. 26 to Dec. 11.
Les Guêpes de l’Été Nous Piquent Encore en Novembre/ L’Affaire de la Rue de Lourcine. Directed by Frédéric Bélier-Garcia. Théâtre de la Tempête, through Dec. 1.
Les Mille et Une Nuits. Directed by Guillaume Vincent. Odéon–Théâtre de l’Europe, through Dec. 8.

Source: Read Full Article