Ordinary Life

Les Éphémères, created collectively by Théâtre du Soleil, concept and direction by Ariane Mnouchkine, Lincoln Center Festival 2009, July 7–19, 2009, Park Avenue Armory, New York.

One of the directions in theatre that has become noticeable in recent years is the acknowledgment by older artists of what I would call the “catastrophic imagination.” It can take shape from many sources; for example, the death of a life-partner in the work of William Forsythe and Meredith Monk, visions of a totalitarian future by Edward Bond and Caryl Churchill or of the totalitarian past by Lev Dodin, the disintegration of civilized culture for Wallace Shawn and Charles Mee, and in the latest work of Théâtre du Soleil, Les Éphémères, the disappearance of the human race. However, the manner in which the company acknowledges this theme, in the exacting direction of Ariane Mnouchkine, is to celebrate the everyday life of human beings in varieties of the emotional register, passing through joy, grief, anger, generosity, and everything in between.

Les Éphémères is not a work about feelings or an analysis of them but an enactment of those feelings. It was made as a collective creation by the actors from the material of their own life experiences, dreams, and improvisations, reflected in the credit they are given for the miseen- scène; there is no written text. This panoramic composition, featuring nearly two dozen adult actors and several children who play multiple roles, represents a company of four generations. What emerges is a work of great warmth and compassion in its range of sentiment evoking half-a-century of French life, in twenty-nine scenes comprising Parts I and II, spread over nearly seven hours.

Les Éphémères (2006–2007) is a very different kind of theatre than one is accustomed to see from Théâtre du Soleil, which over several decades has performed many works, both classics and other group pieces, shaped by timely reflections on history and revolution and social transformation, often in exotic settings—namely, 1789, Richard II, Les Atrides, Indiade, Sihanouk. The more recent Le Dernier Caravansérail, which took as its subject the contemporary global condition of refugees and exiles, is closer to Les Éphémères because its

Top: The Marvelous Garden, Part I, scene 1.

Bottom: Sandra’s Birthday, Part I, scene 7. All photos: Stephanie Berger. Courtesy: Lincoln Center Festival 2009.

stories were told in the voices of people who experienced the migrations. If, in the earlier Le Dernier Caravansérail, Mnouchkine staged the scenes on moving platforms, signifying the characters’ physical status of refugee or émigré, now the platforms connote less a feeling of travel than of stations in a life.

In Les Éphémères, there is a reinvention of the real in the theatre of everyday life. The situations are simple: a daughter sells a house after the death of her mother, a couple sits down to dinner, a battered woman cowers silently on the sofa, someone is tracing her family history under the Occupation, someone is having a birthday. For the most part, scenes take place in the domestic spaces of the living room, dining room, or kitchen, while others unfold in an office or outdoors. Ordinary places. The activities are equally routine: cooking, sewing, arguing, laughing, signing papers, playing—all of them engaged in by mothers and fathers and children, neighbors, a transvestite, a lawyer, a doctor, a teacher. Dialogue is sparse, direct, conversational. Everyone is taking part in the mundane events circulating around home and work and school. Some of the characters are related and their stories intertwined throughout the narrative, some are seen at different stages of their lives, and others appear only once. Life moves on.

At a time when a great deal of European theatre leans toward high-concept productions of ancient and modern classics, reflections on Europeaness, and media-based spectacles, in a return of the dramatic Mnouchkine has disregarded those options to create an ode to ordinary people that focuses...