Édouard Louis’s Who Killed My Father makes its US premiere at St. Ann’s this week (photo by Jean-Louis Fernandez)
WHO KILLED MY FATHER (QUI A TUÉ MON PÈRE)
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
Tuesday – Sunday, May 18 – June 5, $49-$59
718-254-8779 stannswarehouse.org www.schaubuehne.de
In November 2019, St. Ann’s Warehouse presented History of Violence, a radical, highly inventive multimedia interpretation of the 2016 nonfiction novel by activist and artist Édouard Louis, directed by Thomas Ostermeier for Schaubühne Berlin. Ostermeier and Louis return to St. Ann’s with the US premiere of Who Killed My Father (Qui a tué mon père), an adaptation of Louis’s 2018 book, starring the twenty-nine-year-old Paris-based Louis himself in his debut as a professional performer. A coproduction of Schaubühne Berlin and Théâtre de la Ville Paris, Who Killed My Father deals with how the French government’s treatment of the working class broke Louis’s alcoholic, conservative, homophobic father. “Throughout my entire childhood, I hoped you’d disappear,” Louis writes. “You can no longer get behind the wheel, are no longer allowed to drink, can no longer shower unaided without it presenting an enormous risk. You’re just over fifty. You belong to the precise category of people for whom politics has envisaged a premature death.”
Ostermeier always brings something new to the table, as displayed in such works as Returning to Reims and Richard III, so prepared to be awed in many ways. Who Killed My Father features video design by Sébastien Dupouey and Marie Sanchez, stage design by Nina Wetzel, costumes by Caroline Tavernier, lighting by Erich Schneider, and music by Sylvain Jacques.
Thomas Ostermeier is one of the world’s most ingenious and unique theater directors, able to take a narrative and shape and twist it into something wholly unusual and unexpected. In 2017, his Schaubühne Berlin company, where he has been resident director since 1999, delivered a literally electrifying version of Richard III, while last year they brought their self-reflexive, multilayered Returning to Reims, based on Didier Eribon’s 2009 memoir, to St. Ann’s Warehouse. Ostermeier and Schaubühne are now back at St. Ann’s with History of Violence, a radical, highly inventive multimedia interpretation of the 2016 nonfiction novel by Édouard Louis, a close friend of Eribon’s; the bestselling book is based on a brutal attack Louis suffered on a Christmas Eve and its traumatic aftermath.
As the audience enters the theater, Édouard (Laurenz Laufenberg) is seated on a chair up against a large wall with a screen, looking exasperated. The play begins with three characters (Christoph Gawenda, Renato Schuch, and Alina Stiegler) conducting an intricate forensic investigation of a crime scene, in full protective gear like astronauts on the moon, using a cellphone camera and electric duster to find fingerprints as Édouard watches and Thomas Witte plays the drums stage left. The camera images are projected in stark, often uncomfortable close-ups on the rear screen; the video design is by Sébastien Dupouey, the coldly efficient, multifaceted set by Nina Wetzel.
Over the course of two intermissionless hours, the dark tale of what happened to Édouard is told in flashback, with Édouard, his sister, Clara (Stiegler), Clara’s husband, Alain (Gawend), and Édouard’s attacker, Reda (Schuch), either re-creating real-life scenes or speaking directly to the audience in the present through microphones, in both first and third person. Édouard openly shares the violation he experienced and the fear that has built up inside him, which has left him with an intense animosity for humanity. “I hated everyone. / I thought: / how can you. / That morning after Reda left, / I woke up with a strange taste in my mouth. / With the knowledge that I’d never / be able to bear the slightest trace / of anything that looked like happiness. / I could’ve slapped the next / smiling person I saw. / I’d have grabbed them by their lapels, / shaken them as hard as I could, / even children, / the frail or the disabled, / I’d have liked to shake them / and spit in their faces, / scratched them until I drew blood, / scratched their faces off, until all the faces disappeared.”
The reaction of the police and hospital personnel to the events results in a certain consternation because Édouard invited Reda to his apartment, while issues of class, sexual orientation, and race come to the fore. “The question wasn’t: / is he going to kill me? But rather: / how is he going to kill me?” Édouard explains, adding, “Later on the police and Clara / congratulated me for my bravery. / Nothing seems to me more alien to that night / than the concept of bravery.” At the hospital, he says, “I waited. / But nobody came. / I sat there feeling like / I was an extra in a story that wasn’t my own, / but had happened to someone else / that I didn’t know.”
A coproduction with Théâtre de la Ville Paris and Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles, History of Violence is another audiovisual stunner from Ostermeier, who deserves the kind of attention that is lavished on Ivo van Hove, the Belgian multimedia mastermind. The show is part of a series of Louis-related events that included the BAM Next Wave presentation of a work based on his 2014 memoir, The End of Eddy, which ran at the Fishman last week and also deals with sex and power. History of Violence, which continues at St. Ann’s through December 1, is a work for our time, telling a poignant, deeply intimate true story using cutting-edge twenty-first-century techniques with an innovative style, holding nothing back as it explores trauma in extraordinary ways.
Politics become personal — and vice versa — in Schaubühne Berlin’s multilayered, highly intellectual, and hypnotic Returning to Reims, which opened last night at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo. “It’s multilayered. It’s multilayered filmmaking. That’s my style,” director Paul (Bush Moukarzel) explains to actress Katy (Nina Hoss) as studio engineer Toni (Ali Gadema) looks on and the audience laughs, in on the joke; the quote is a reference to Returning to Reims director Thomas Ostermeier himself, a man not known to take the easy route in the many multilayered works he has made with Schaubühne Berlin, most recently evident in the fierce, unforgettable Richard III the company staged at BAM late last year. As the audience enters the theater at St. Ann’s, Paul and Toni are immersed in conversation in their glassed-in tech booth in a large, spare recording studio (austerely designed by Nina Wetzel, who also did the costumes); between them, on the back wall, is a copy of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 album, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. They leave to get coffee and Katy walks in and begins rehearsing her reading of French writer and philosopher Didier Eribon’s 2009 memoir, Returning to Reims. Toni and Paul return and Katy starts her performance within the performance, reading in a subtle, deliberate monotone that is mesmerizing.
Her reading is accompanied by projections on a big screen behind her, archival footage in addition to newly filmed scenes (by Ostermeier and Sébastien Dupouey) of Eribon returning to Reims and speaking with his mother in her home. What at first appears to be the recording of an audiobook is revealed to be narration for a documentary about Eribon and his book, in which he examines his relationship with his father, his family’s communism, his homosexuality, and the social contract. “In taking as my point of theoretical departure the idea that the complete break I had made with my family was due to my homosexuality . . . had I not at the same time offered myself reasons for avoiding the thought that this was just as much a break with the class background I came from?” Eribon’s very French investigation of pedigree and sexuality asks, continuing, “I was a class traitor, one whose only concern was to put as much distance as possible between himself and his class of origin, to escape from the social surroundings of his childhood and his adolescence.”
Nina Hoss is mesmerizing in Thomas Ostermeier’s inventive adaptation of Didier Eribon memoir (photo by Teddy Wolff)
As actress and director begin to spar, conspiracy theories, discussions of wealth and power, and what to do about genuine evil emerge from the text, while efforts to define the responsibilities of actress versus director illuminate the mutual responsibilities of citizens to call out injustice. Katy continues to act up, telling Paul that the images being projected are confusing and don’t relate to what she is reading. She is not just complaining about Paul’s choices as director — and Ostermeier’s too, since some of the projections are just as confusing to the audience — but also questioning the very nature of audiovisual storytelling, both film and theater, self-referentially reflecting, perhaps, on the creation of the play itself. All the characters go home and come back a week later for the next session, in which Paul breaks the fourth wall, Toni raps, Gil Scott-Heron upends the social order with “Whitey on the Moon” (“I can’t pay no doctor bills / but whitey’s on the moon / Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still / while whitey’s on the moon”), and Katy relates Eribon’s family experiences to those of her own, in essence asking each one of us where we fit in. “Basically it reminds me of my father; he was born in 1929, the same year of Eribon’s father,” Katy says. But it’s really Hoss’s own family she is talking about; her father was a cofounder of the Green Party in the Bundestag, and it’s clips from his life that are being projected onscreen. “He had the same background, he came from the working class, from a communist family, but he chose not to surrender to the circumstances. He went a different way. It would be good to have a little bit of that in the film. A little bit of hope,” Katy tells Paul.
Hoss (Phoenix,Barbara), perhaps best known in America as German intelligence agent Astrid on Homeland, is magnetic as Katy, the rhythm of her delivery floating in the air and reaching deep into your body; even though she spends most of the time looking down and reading, it’s nearly impossible to take your eyes off her, except to glance at what’s on the screen. Meanwhile, the score by Nils Ostendorf and the sound design by Jochen Jezussek surrounds the audience from all sides. The two-hour Returning to Reims occasionally veers off track, but Ostermeier (An Enemy of the People, The Cut) always steers it back with the help of Hoss; the two previously collaborated on Schaubühne Berlin’s The Little Foxes and Bella Figura. It’s multilayered with extra helpings of meta; in fact, it works better the more poetic license and theatrical leeway you give it as Ostermeier lifts Eribon’s words to a global level in an age where identity politics and neoliberalism are failing and populists have seized the day around the world. “I’m just thinking about the ending. Why you’re ending it like this,” Katy says to Paul. “Now you’re ending with this big task for the Left. Who’s going to do this? It’s a kind of classic, didactic ending.” In Ostermeier’s vision of society, there is a lot to be learned, and done, and the arts are as good a place as any to start.
