Princeton University to host French theater festival

The university’s French student theater workshop, L’Avant-Scène, will present the Molière comedies L’Ecole des Femmes (School for Wives) in October and Les Femmes savants (The Learned Ladies) in December.  In November the Lewis Center’s Program in Theater will present a new version by James Magruder of Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, entitled Der Bourgeois Bigwig.  Also in November well-known French actor Guillaume Gallienne will be in residence at Princeton.
 
The Princeton French Theater Festival, which is free and open to the public, will bring a new generation of French actors and directors to the university and local community.  The Festival has been organized by Florent Masse, Senior Lecturer in the Department of French and Italian and director of L’Avant-Scène.  Performances will be in French.
 
Actor Stanislas Roquette will perform in two shows directed by French scholar, author and director Denis Guénoun that are currently touring national theaters in France, including Théâtre National de Chaillot, Paris, and Théâtre National Populaire, Villeurbanne.  The first of these shows is Qu’est-ce que le temps? Le Livre XI des Confessions d’Augustin, which explores theautobiography of St. Augustine and will be performed on September 27 at 10:00 p.m. The second show to be performed by Roquette, Artaud-Barrault, is based on letters between Jean-Louis Barrault, considered the greatest French actor of the twentieth century, and Antonin Artaud, the visionary theater director and philosopher, and is being performed on September 29 at 5:00 and 8:00 p.m.
 
Louis Arène, a former student of the Paris National Conservatory for Dramatic Arts (CNSAD), who just joined the Comédie-Française, will perform his one-man show La dernière berceuse on September 25 at 7:00 and 9:00 p.m. This show, which tells the story of a struggling young actor encouraging himself to believe in his craft, has won critical acclaim in theater festivals in France and across Europe.
 
Two monologues by other former CNSAD students will complete the program. Elie Triffault will present Faust, his one-man reflection on Goethe’s masterpiece, with texts by Dante, Gérard de Nerval and Heiner Müller, on September 26 at 8:00 p.m. and September 27 at 5:00 p.m. Victoire Du Bois will present Hope, a performance developed with her former drama teacherDelphine Eliet in which an 88-year old woman who lives in a public bathroom recounts her life as a prominent gangster.  Eliet is the director of L’École du Jeu, a new private drama school in Paris whose innovative pedagogy has won acclaim and recognition in the profession. Hope will be performed on September 26 at 6:00 p.m. and September 27 at 7:00 p.m.
 
The Festival will open on September 25 at 4.30 p.m. with a panel discussion, “French Theater Today – Meet the Artists of theFestival Seuls en Scène” moderated by Masse in East Pyne, Room 010.  All four actors performing will participate in the panel discussion, which will be in English.
 
The Festival is being presented as a collaboration between the Lewis Center, the Department of French and Italian, and L’Avant-Scène through the Lewis Center’s Arts Initiative Partners program, which annually seeks unique arts partnership projects with other university departments and affiliated groups and individuals.  Additional support is provided by Cultural Services of the French Embassy.
 
Masse, who curated the Festival, was trained as an actor and director at Lille National Theater under Daniel Mesguich and later pursued his theater studies at Amherst College as a Levy-Despas Fellow and teaching assistant in the Department of French. It is there he originated the program of L’Avant-Scene, which combines linguistic and dramatic training.  He has directed three dozen student productions of both recitals of classical French theater scenes and full-length plays of some of the most popular works in the French theatrical canon.
 
Most Festival performances will take place in the Lewis Center’s Marie and Edward Matthews ’53 Acting Studio at 185 Nassau Street. Qu’est-ce que le temps? will be performed at the Whitman College Class of 1970 Theater.  Admission is free but reservations are strongly recommended by sending an email to ftw@princeton.edu Subject Line: Festival.