10 December 2014: Naked, Screaming, Beer-Soaked Women

NAKED, SCREAMING, BEER-SOAKED WOMEN

or, MY FORAY INTO FRENCH THEATER

It's been nearly two months since I last posted. I'm not proud of it, but it's a fact. I guess I could say that time flies when you're having fun keeping up with the grocery shopping, your freelance deadlines and your grad-school-swamped husband? (It's been stressful, to say the least.)

In reality, the past two months haven't flown by as much as they've jogged by like they're training for a marathon: fast enough, but with so much huffing and puffing that you're not sure why you even signed up for the marathon in the first place.

Amidst this time of stress, however, there's been a respite that I can only describe as not a respite at all, more like a further test of my patience and commitment to staying somewhat sane in the middle of brain-melting boredom and frustration. In short, we've been going to the theater.

French theater was something of a novelty for us when we first got here—we'd attended a few shows when we lived here in 2010, but they were mainly English-language musicals or...actually, no, that's the only thing we saw. So when Joshua had the chance to audit an undergraduate theater course that would involve attending a theatrical performance somewhere in the city practically every week, we eagerly signed up (I was able to get in on the class group rates, which made the opportunity even more attractive).

So we started regularly attending theater at some of the largest, most well-funded public theater institutions in the city—spaces like the Théâtre de la Ville, du Soleil, des Abbesses, d'Amandier Nanterre, de la Colline, de la Bastille, the Odéon and lots more. Companies in the middle of the city, on the outskirts in the suburbs, in beautiful old buildings and new-fangled warehouse spaces—it was a theatrical education of epic proportions that left us with a collective impression of all the theater Paris has to offer. Unfortunately, that impression is overwhelmingly, "Man, this sucks."

Workin' hard for the money at Macbeth

Without fail, each production we attended disappointed, enervated, infuriated or bored both of us to the point of spending each metro ride home venting about the abuse our senses had just endured. Apparently, it's a mark of French theater and their "appreciation of" (read: distaste for) their audiences that allows most shows to run as long as four hours with no intermission. Four hours. NO INTERMISSION. As someone with a bladder, this is not just inconvenient, it's pure torture. As someone with a brain and a sense of time, this is just mind-numbingly rude. And it wasn't just one show here and there that made our asses fall asleep in the chair as we surreptitiously checked our watches and noticed how many patrons had fallen asleep (or, worse, appeared to be just as rapt by hour three as they were at curtain)—it was every. single. show. We saw a production of "Macbeth"—Shakespeare's shortest show—that clocked in at three hours and 45 minutes (albeit with an intermission of a half an hour, but only because they were selling dinner in the lobby). No one needs to see a play that runs three hours and 45 minutes that includes five-minute-long scene changes that the company has added to the script. (I wish I were exaggerating, but literally every scene contained some sort of ground-covering that had to be swept up by cast members feverishly wielding brooms before the next scene of ponderous, self-indulgent "speechifying" could commence.)

Bladder-bending break-free run-times aside, the plays seemed to be daring us to revolt. Daring us to get up and say, "I'm done for now, I could really use a pee." Daring us to admit that we're just not hip enough, educated enough, cultured enough, whatever enough to submit ourselves to such irritating theatrical malfeasance. We sat through one particularly interminable production of a reimagined "My Dinner with Andre" in which a few patrons got up and left at the three-hour mark and the actors yelled at them from the stage. Yelled at them. Told them that it was "almost over, just wait." (Which was in fact a lie, considering an hour later we were still sitting there, listening to them philosophize about love and death while choking on their cigarette smoke and watching them finish the complete meal they'd eaten during the course of the show.) I'm all for immersive, interactive theater, but if someone traps me in a room full of cigarette smoke and food smells and yammers for four hours and then chastises me for finally having enough and quietly leaving the theater, that's not immersive. That's idiotic.

Perhaps the most disappointing part of this hellish actor's nightmare (where the actors are the nightmare) was that the theater has been my happy place since I was a kid. I've been a performer since age 6, I participated in every school production possible, auditioned for extracurricular theater workshops, took singing and dance lessons and finally started doing professional theater at age 15. Theater is my haven, my place where I feel the most "me." So when the chance to go to my happy place every week in my new, adopted country to discover the theatrical culture around me, I was psyched. And every week, after getting angrier and angrier at the ridiculous, badly-done, fully-funded French crap that I was being told was "good" theater in this town, I finally had enough. Or so I thought.

The second-to-last play we attended was by a Spanish woman who had just been invited to perform at the Venice Theatre Festival. Fresh off this acclaimed appearance, she brought the "dance" piece to Paris to perform at one of the biggest national theaters in the city. I got excited in spite of my wariness, choosing to believe that perhaps we were finally going to see something amazing that would make the last three months of schlock worth it. Hope springs eternal. It also apparently springs stupid.

The inspiration for the title...

What we witnessed was a two-and-a-half hour sensory beat-down that included almost all of the male cast members getting completely naked onstage, almost all of the female cast members getting completely naked onstage, simulating rape, screaming like an infant complete with fist-pounding temper tantrum, beating 20 large drums so long and so loud that my head felt like it was going to split open (the cacophony actually made Joshua sick to his stomach), and finally, in what felt like a middle finger to not only the audience but also the stage management crew (who I pitied more and more each passing moment as more and more messy objects were crushed, thrown and broken onstage), the writer and star proceeded to stand center stage and douse herself in beer. A case of beer. Beer that she partially chugged, then tossed over a shoulder, poured down her chest and sprayed around the stage. This is, of course, after removing her underwear and performing some sort of strange Russian bottle dance that flaunted everything her mamá gave her. (Her mamá probably wishes she could take it back now, whoever and wherever she is.)

Needless to say, we left when there was still a full forty minutes left in the show, but our pounding heads just couldn't take any more. I've never been so content to squeeze into a crowded metro car than when I was leaving the naked, screaming, beer-soaked banshee behind (no offense intended to any banshees who may be reading this).

So has this experience turned me off theater for good? Of course not, but it has certainly made me appreciate the performances that I've enjoyed over the years. It's a rare, magical thing to truly enjoy a piece of live theater, especially when you can't help but see the wing and a prayer that it's riding on because you've ridden that same shoddy apparatus every time you yourself have stepped onstage. But I'd rather see the string and duct tape and missed cues and flubbed lines in a piece that doesn't feel like an artistic assault than suffer through a pontificating play that's "good for me" or "high art." You can be speaking Shakespeare's words or reciting Racine, but if it's hour four and I have to pee so badly my eyes are watering, you can keep your cultural superiority and Parisian profundity. 

Personne n'a du temps pour ça. Ain't nobody got time for that.

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