This was one of those long travel days that make a mockery of distance. I began this day with café crème and pain du chocolat with my friends at a little place on the corner of Rue des Archives and Rue de Bretagne. Paris was cool from the rain last night, and we were up early enough on a Saturday morning that the city had just a smattering of traffic and people walking their dogs as we waited for our van to the airport. Later today I found myself in my local supermarket in the Bronx picking up a few groceries till I figure out what to do tomorrow. So close and so far and seen through a sense of time distorted by jet lag.
Now that I’m not married I don’t have to spend obsessive amounts time shopping for accessories (shoes, handbags, watch bands). I wanted to see what was happening in the Paris equivalent of Off Off Broadway theatre. So, I did. This was a trip filled with serendipities, by the way; the best things I found seemed to be making a point of manifesting themselves without my looking for them. This was how I found the Théâtre du Marais, at 37 rue Volta, in the 3rd Arrondissement, not far from my hotel, off the Place de la République: On Thursday I had stopped off at an ATM to get more euros and the damned machine rejected my card (thank you, you damned beautiful blessed machine!). So I combed the streets looking for another ATM half wondering if the computers at Chase had cut off my card for suspicious activity (i.e. cash withdrawals in a foreign city). If they’ve cut off my card, I’ll let them have an earful, I’m thinking as I wander up and down alleys past cheap shoe stores looking for a main street with banks and ATMs. I turned a corner and there it was: Could I believe my eyes? It could be a storefront theatre in New York. Rue Volta, no need to write that down--I had an adviser in college named Volta. The play was Les Abîmés.
My friends, Marty and Rebeca, were busy the next night with Marty’s relatives, which gave me a chance to go see the play. At 10 minutes to 7 I headed out of my hotel for the 7:30 show--or, as the French say, “19 h 30”--and could not find the theatre. I could not remember the name of the street. Now every street name looked familiar and I couldn’t remember the mnemonic about my college adviser’s name. I started looking for narrow streets with cheap shoe stores. I started looking for the ATM that had rejected my card except now I was coming across more ATMs than you ever thought Paris had. I tried to find the ATM that had accepted my card and work backwards from there. Then it started to rain. A walk down a long narrow street on a warm night with plenty of rain. I turned a corner--a different one from the night before--and there it was. They were just setting up to sell tickets.
I checked my phrasebook, looking up how to say “Is a seat available for tonight?” The man said yes and sold me a ticket (€15). He then asked me (in French) if I realized that the play was in French (wow, my accent must be really bad if I can use a grammatically correct and complete phrase out of my book and still sound like I have no idea what I’m talking about). I told him I understood.
Can I level with you? That wasn't exactly true. My French is not very good. My listening and reading comprehension are easily 10 times my ability to create my own sentences and say them and be understood. And when I say “listening comprehension,” it’s like a very static-y radio that lets you have wisps of phrases here and there supplemented by occasional disconnected words.
Someone in the doorway asked me--with a resonant voice that I envy--something in French. I thought he was asking me whether I was from New York. But I wasn’t sure; however, if he was, he was using real French rather than the schoolbook formal French that gets foisted off on students as if they would never be able to learn to read Flaubert if they learned colloquial French first (colloquial is harder to learn, by the way, not some lazy shortcut). Anyway, my mind went blank trying to think of the phrase to ask the guy to repeat his question. I gave up and told him that I didn’t speak French--which as soon as I said I regretted, because I wanted to say I didn’t speak French well (the phrase is only one word different in French as well as in English).
As the rain grew heavier and then lighter the rest of the audience milled with me outside the theatre. This audience looked more committed than audiences I have seen at Off Off Broadway shows in New York. For one thing it wasn’t demographically overweighted toward any particular group. There were trendy-looking young people, there were couples, there were people who came alone (I wasn't the only one), there were old people, I saw what I took to be a mother and her daughter, and so on. Yay culturally astute audiences who support the theatre and are rewarded with fine contemporary plays!
The house opened. The Théâtre du Marais is a small black-box theatre that seats about 45. There were 25 or 30 audience members--not a bad turnout on a rainy night for a contemporary play that costs €15.
Les Abîmés is about two couples, played by a marvelous cast in their early 20s to early 30s (Bénédicte Budan, Nicolas Martinez, Rébecca Azan, and Philippe Meimoun). I don’t know whether the play, written by Michaël Cohen, has been translated into English. The word “abîmé” means “hurt” or “damage” but it also has a meaning of--or at least a resonance with--“gulf” in the sense of a chasm. The couples are not complete emotional cripples, but they do have difficulty making contact across emotional chasms and this inability is played out in different ways. Bénédicte Budan is pretty and willowy and her scenes with Nicolas Martinez tend toward the tenuousness of human connection. Rébecca Azan makes her entrance marching onto the stage mid-tirade--and to her credit as an actress, the vulnerability of the character seeps through her tough façade. Her scenes with Philippe Meimoun and their tendency toward anger and high energy as a substitute for (and impediment to) intimacy illustrate a different way for a couple to not cross the emotional chasm.
A clip has been posted on YouTube:
Unfortunately that clip left out what I thought was most affecting action in the play, that of Bénédicte Budan placing Nicolas Martinez’s hand on her face to show him how to reach her.
Hurry if you want to see this play: It closes on May 13th.
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