“ Tu as raison,” his father supposedly said to him at the very end, accepting his revolutionary politics. It’s not appealing, this use of a human being. Eventually, a black-and-white video clip plays on the wall of Édouard dancing in slow-motion in the surf. His father has lived in a gray town, never visiting the nearby sea, Louis says. He meditates on the few glimpses he has seen of his dad’s younger days a picture of the supposedly hypermasculine laborer in drag hints at a never-discovered kinship. In this he explicitly draws a line from his father’s inhibitions to his current freedom. Speaking of cliché, between the spoken sections, Louis lip-syncs to the songs he loved as a boy - first Aqua’s “Barbie Girl ,” later Britney Spears’s “… Baby One More Time” - as he romps across the stage. Now, this is right out of Cliché 101, specifically the class on “pathetic fallacy.” Why must they underline and emphasize Louis’s sadness this ham-handed way? Moisture is good! Fog is fine! Stubble in a field is perfectly natural. In an unvarying tone, riddled with silences, Louis recounts miserable memories from his youth, including one incident where he deliberately causes a fight as a way to punish his mother for calling his evident queerness “disgusting.” The back wall of the stage fills with moody projections, either a dashcam view of foggy highways or desaturated photos of Louis’s hometown, Hallencourt, shot when stubble in the fields looked the most like blackened teeth. But Ostermeier’s show turns the script from pathos to bathos. Edouard louis cracked#The content is wrenching stuff, proceeding through his father’s decay and the way the hateful man of his childhood has been cracked open and turned soft by pain. For a long time before that, Louis speaks lugubriously into one of several onstage microphones - either directly to us, or to an empty, spotlit chair that represents his father. These literal fireworks come only in the final, relatively brief section of the piece, however. He pins their pictures up on a clothesline and throws exploding caps at them. Louis also knows specific people made those back-to-work policies, so he names names. In Who Killed My Father, he discusses his father’s health, ruined first by an accident at a factory, then by diabetes and high cholesterol, then by dragging his wrecked spine back into the workforce.īoth book and monologue adaptation begin with a reference to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as the exposure of some populations “to premature death.” Written as if he’s addressing his father, the text tracks a number of -isms responsible for his premature health problems: the machismo that made Louis’s dad choose “manly” work rather than the effeminacy of further schooling, the neoliberalism that wouldn’t let him rest even after his injury. His three blockbuster books deal with the rise of French right-wing nationalism and the reciprocal evils of poverty and masculinity culture, as well as homophobia, racism, and his experiences with assault. Louis has been a respected author and public intellectual since his early 20s. Here, with only each other, they amplify their worst traits - Louis is an awkward nonperformer, and he makes Ostermeier’s usual bag of tricks (microphones, video backdrops, dance breaks) seem rote and manipulative, while the sleek image-maker Ostermeier makes Louis … insufferable. Cutting the intermediary was a mistake in performance, there’s magic in the middleman. The pair have worked beautifully together before, as when Ostermeier adapted another of Louis’s memoirs, History of Violence, bringing in Laurenz Laufenberg to play Louis. Yet no one seems to have been seeing clearly. Why did no one flag down Louis or his director, Thomas Ostermeier, when the project was congealing into this? It was Ostermeier’s job to notice the wreckage, of course, since he’s the acclaimed theater director and Louis the (internationally famous author and) nonactor. What, and I say this with concern, the hell. Yet it takes him more than 90 minutes to perform, thanks to the effortful creation of this foot-on-your-neck mood: Between every whispered line, he pauses, makes shy eyes at us, fingers his hair, lapses into melancholic reverie. Edouard louis crack#The performance text (single-spaced, tightly kerned) of Who Killed My Father is only 14 pages long even the source material, a swift polemic of Louis’s own, doesn’t crack 100 pages. I have never seen a performance so intent on muffling its audience, so effective at freezing a room into a sepulchral, silent gloom. Ann’s Warehouse.Īs we rolled past the hour mark of watching Édouard Louis murmur in French to a chair, the room settled into a deep despond. Édouard Louis in Who Killed My Father, at St.
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