D.C. has long been a cradle for international cultural exhibitions. World Stages, the Kennedy Center’s International Theater Festival, redefines the concept of the global, however, by shining a spotlight on contemporary, quirky masterpieces produced by great artists from 19 countries around the world.
The Voice was invited to see the most recent production, Savannah Bay, produced by Théâtre de l’Atelier and directed by Marguerite Duras, a U.S. premiere, like most of the plays at the festival. Originally performed in the bohemian Montmartre neighborhood of Paris, the play swept the audience with its exploration of love, memory, and death. The French-language performance was somewhat difficult to follow with its overhead subtitles to bridge the language gap for the American audience.
A granddaughter and grandmother, both unnamed, are the sole actresses in this play, which takes place in a minimalist white room that makes up the stage. Beware the plainness of the staging and small cast, however: the plot, themes and characters of this French play are anything but simple, and far from boring.
The work interweaves the dramatic narratives of three generations of women in a French family living by the seaside. The young woman deals with her grandmother’s deteriorating memory and her mother’s tragic suicide a day after her own birth by swimming through her mother’s brief narrative alongside her grandmother, as each fills in the other’s incomplete fragments of memory.
The granddaughter epitomizes, albeit to a perhaps unrealistic extent, an idyllic response to a grandparent’s degenerative memory in her cheery humming, adoring smiles and loving dialogue, while the grandmother takes the stage, quite literally, by launching into her past as an actress as she attempts to relay the story of her own daughter. Time becomes a perplexing vortex as the young woman appears in her mother’s black bathing suit, the grandmother lapses between the telling of her daughter’s story and her own, and the room becomes a bay, looking out towards the sea in which the narrative transpires.
The festival also featured renowned Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, a fascinating microcosmic look at Chile under Pinochet’s military dictatorship, Australian David William’s Rupert, a critical and intriguing look at the infamous media mogul, and a Lebanese Canadian playwright’s powerful story Incendios, that was turned into an Academy Award nominated Best Foreign Language Film in 2011, performed by a Mexican theater company.
In the upcoming days, the festival will offer a quirky take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in a combination of human and puppet performances envisioned by critically acclaimed War Horse artistic director Tom Morris and Cape Town’s Handspring Puppet Company.
The festival will also present Penny Plain, a marionette show featuring a blind protagonist awaiting the end of the world who is visited by a series of bizarre characters, including a survivalist, a cross-dressing banker and a serial killer. Not by Bread Alone, a product of the Israeli Nalaga’at Theater, is a play plagued by darkness and silence through a deaf-blind acting ensemble that give a tour of a bread-making process, to create a proposed intimate, laconic connection with the audience.
Other upcoming plays include the National Theatre of China’s production of Green Snake, an edgy, contemporary take on a romantic Chinese myth; South African Solomon and Marion starring two-time Olivier Award and once Academy Award nominee Dame Janet Suzamn; and Les Souffleurs commandos poétiques, a Japanese theatre company’s collaboration with a French nontraditional performance company in which the performers whisper literary and philosophical utterances to an audience seeking an enlightening respite from the quick pace of quotidian life.
The World Stages Festival, packed with new plays and even a few staged readings, forums and art installations, will come to an end on March 30th with a production of the famous Scottish Robin Hood geared towards younger audiences.
The plays each seem to present a fascinating twist to the classic national theatrical traditions, intertwining the contemporary and the global to create a surely entertaining viewing experience.
The Kennedy Center
Now through March 30th, 2014
2700 F Street, N.W.
kennedy-center.org/worldstages
