A Play About Black Women’s Experiences, Met With Violence

One performer is missing from the current Parisian run of Rébecca Chaillon’s “Carte Noire Named Desire,” an arresting show about the experiences of Black women in France. When the actors gathered onstage for a dinner scene at the Odéon–Théâtre de l’Europe this week, Fatou Siby’s chair remained empty, and a monologue inspired by her life was delivered instead by a guest artist.

The reason for Siby’s absence? She and other members of the all-Black cast were targets of racist attacks after “Carte Noire” played this summer at the Avignon Festival, which followed widespread protests in France over the police shooting of Nahel M., a 17-year-old of North African descent.

“I need to protect myself,” Siby told the French news site Mediapart of her decision to withdraw from the Paris performances.

In one short scene from “Carte Noire,” the cast stages a game of charades inspired by anti-Black racism. To help the audience guess the answer “colonization” this summer, Siby went into the auditorium and jokingly took bags and coats belonging to audience members. (The items were then set aside near the exit to be collected after the show.)

According to Mediapart, one male audience member forcefully twisted Siby’s arm as she performed the scene. Others physically hit performers, called them “dictators” and implied they didn’t belong in France. In the days that followed, Siby told Mediapart, an audience member accosted her and her child on the street in Avignon. Since the incidents became public — in a statement, the Avignon Festival described them as “an outpouring of hate” — Chaillon and her team have also been cyber-harassed and become the subject of far-right pundits.

Sitting in the audience at the Odéon this week, I found it hard not to feel anger on behalf of the seven cast members who have soldiered on. “Carte Noire” relies on their willingness to be highly vulnerable onstage. The excessive media attention on the charades scene obscured the rest of the piece, which is by turns powerful, lyrical and visually dazzling — an ode to Black women’s imagination in a world whose default setting is whiteness.

“Carte Noire Named Desire” — the title is a play on a famous French ad for the coffee brand — offers some redress, starting with the seating arrangement. As the audience streams into the theater, a recorded announcement explains that 20 or so seats are reserved on comfortable-looking couches at the back of the stage for Black women or nonbinary people. There, they’re handed drinks, while the rest of the audience remains in folding seats for the next 2 hours and 40 minutes.

The first half-hour prompts a different kind of discomfort. On her hands and knees, Chaillon, dressed in white, with white lenses covering her pupils and white powder all over her skin, tries to scrub an all-white floor clean, even as darker liquid drips from cups above her. As the scene stretches on, she starts stripping and using her own clothes as mops, ultimately dragging herself around the floor to wipe it.

Coolly, without a word, the scene speaks to the disproportionate number of Black people in menial jobs in France. Chaillon, a bold performer and director who has been at the helm of her own company, Dans le Ventre, since 2006, excels at showing before telling. A castmate ultimately pulls her from the floor, and slowly washes the white powder off her body. Then the other women gather around her to braid oversized ropes into her hair — an evocative variation on a Black hair salon.

The scenes that follow are often humorous and surreal. Chaillon reads from classified ads written by white men looking for Black women. Makeda Monnet, a trained soprano, trills her way through a song about coffee — a product often produced in colonized countries — on a table engulfed in white foam, before being covered in a cloud of cocoa powder.

On the night I attended, however, the game of charades steered clear of its most controversial element. While the performers had audience members guess “Black Sea,” “Josephine Baker” or the film “12 Years a Slave,” the game didn’t include “colonization,” and no bags or coats were taken. While that word was intentionally removed from one Avignon performance to protect the cast, a spokeswoman for Dans Le Ventre said that its absence in Paris that night was random; charade rounds are sometimes skipped over when the game runs too long.

What remained that night was a deeply felt production, interspersed with skits and monologues that walk a fine line between true accounts of pain and quasi-performance poetry. On that day, the story of the absent Siby was delivered by special guest Alice Diop, the filmmaker behind the award-winning “Saint Omer,” who sat on the couches in the back with other Black women.

At the very end, the audience was left with an indelible tableau: Chaillon, naked, her heavy braids attached to a tangle of ropes above, as the other women sat at her feet — all assembled like roots in a tree of life. That any actor would be fearful of joining them onstage in “Carte Noire” only proves Chaillon’s point: For Black women, even an act of community is political.

Carte Noire Named Desire

Odéon–Théâtre de l’Europe through Dec. 17; theatre-odeon.eu