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    Avignon Festival Forges Ahead, Despite Virus Restrictions

    The French theater festival’s Fringe offering is giving some respite from the pandemic, even as new rules to stop coronavirus transmission are making it harder to get to the shows.AVIGNON, France — It sounds like a virologist’s nightmare: 1,070 theater productions; 116 venues, most of them within Avignon’s cramped medieval center; and everywhere, festivalgoers sitting shoulder to shoulder in indoor spaces.Yet the Fringe offering at this summer’s Avignon Festival — which runs parallel to the main event, and is known as “le Off” — has forged ahead, even as the more contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus became the dominant strain in France.Is it problematic to enjoy excellent performances under the circumstances? With the rituals of Avignon, including unmasked performers handing out publicity fliers in the street, came a sense of normalcy. Still, a sneaky sense of guilt permeated conversations with theatergoers — not least when new restrictions were announced, shortly after the Avignon Festival began.Last week, the French government decreed that a “health pass” — a QR code proving full vaccination or a negative coronavirus test result — would be required from July 21 for all venues with over 50 seats. Restaurants, bars and trains will follow from Aug. 1. (The health pass requirement previously applied only to events with more than 1,000 audience members.)Frustration was palpable in Avignon in the days before the rule came into force. While roughly half of Fringe venues are small enough to skirt it, some companies opted to leave early, and bigger shows reported ticket returns and a drop in bookings. Last weekend, as widespread demonstrations against the policy swept France, protesters filled Avignon’s biggest avenue, shouting “Liberté!” (“Freedom!”)Marc Arnaud in “The Metamorphosis of Storks,” his one-man show at the Théâtre du Train Bleu.Alejandro GuerreroWhile the Avignon Festival’s official lineup (“le In,” in local parlance) went from bleak to bleaker in its themes, Fringe fare at least offered some respite from pandemic worries, since comedy has always been a prominent part of this less highbrow portion of the festival.Two original one-man shows, by Mehdi-Emmanuel Djaadi and Marc Arnaud, combine jokes and impressions with explorations of deep-seated inner conflicts. Djaadi’s “Coming Out,” especially, is an exercise in stereotype busting. The coming out in question is religious: The show recounts the 34-year-old comedian’s conversion from Islam to Catholicism.Support for his choice was scarce, as Djaadi tells it at the aptly named Théâtre des Corps Saints (Theater of the Holy Bodies). His family, of Algerian descent, felt he was turning his back on them; a priest explained that he didn’t want any trouble; in artistic circles, many were ill at ease with what they saw as the Catholic Church’s homophobia and conservatism.Yet instead of expressing the resentment he might have felt, Djaadi looks back on his journey, from teenage rebellion and drug dealing to a Catholic wedding, with amused affection. He points to contradictions on both sides, and France’s churchgoers come in for pointed satire, too.In “The Metamorphosis of Storks,” Arnaud focuses on a much shorter stretch of time. He and his wife went through the process of in vitro fertilization, and we meet Arnaud as he is about to donate a sperm sample — a process that brings up far more feelings than he expected.Morgane Peters as Effie in “Iphigenia in Splott,” directed by Blandine Pélissier at Artéphile.Blandine PélissierAs he stalls impatient hospital staff, his monologue covers his sexual education, his attempts at therapy and anxiety about parenthood. It’s a brisk, honest reckoning with the travails of masculinity, which packed the Théâtre du Train Bleu to the rafters (before the health pass requirement was implemented).Not that Avignon audiences were turned off by darker shows. At Artéphile, one of the few Fringe venues to also function as a year-round cultural space, the director Blandine Pélissier offered a stark and convincing production, “Iphigenia in Splott.”The Welsh playwright Gary Owen is relatively unknown in France, but his 2015 reworking of the Iphigenia myth — translated by Pélissier and Kelly Rivière — should prompt curiosity about his work. Here, the sacrificial victim is Effie, from the Cardiff district of Splott, a blaze of raging energy who becomes unexpectedly pregnant. This 90-minute monologue convincingly attributes the lack of support she encounters to social and medical service cuts, and the actress Morgane Peters takes the role from hard-edge anger to pain with poignant ease.Productions with larger casts were a bigger challenge this year, given that a positive coronavirus test among the company was enough to call a show off, and the director and actress Julie Timmerman downsized her show “A Democrat” as a result. Timmerman retooled this excellent production about Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Freud known as “the father of public relations,” for just two actors (Mathieu Desfemmes and herself). The result is adroitly written and witty, a worthy look at the dangers of Bernays’ techniques when they’re used for propaganda purposes.While the Avignon Festival’s official, curated lineup involves far fewer productions than the Fringe, it was hit with a handful of coronavirus-related cancellations. The artistic teams of two choreographers, Dada Masilo and Dimitris Papaioannou, were unable to travel to Avignon, while Eva Doumbia’s “Autophagies” saw its run interrupted when members of the cast and crew had to go into isolation after coming into contact with an infected person.Mathieu Desfemmes and Julie Timmerman in “A Democrat.”Roland BaduelTwo European productions that went ahead make a lasting impression. Emma Dante, of Italy, choreographs as much as she directs, and in “Misericordia,” theater becomes dance and vice versa. In it, three women raise a child, Arturo, who is described as mentally disabled and whose mother was a victim of domestic violence. Together, they form a bickering, complex family. The dancer Simone Zambelli not only captures Arturo’s twitching, disjointed body, he spins his physical vulnerability and moments of joy into poetry, knotting himself into expressive shapes.Avignon also hosted the stage version of “Pieces of a Woman.” Before it became a film starring Vanessa Kirby last year, the playwright Kata Weber and the director Kornel Mundruczo imagined it for the TR Warszawa playhouse in Warsaw, and the Polish cast delivered a gut punch in Avignon at the Lycée Théodore Aubanel.The play starts with the same lengthy labor scene as the film, but it covers less narrative ground after the central couple’s baby is stillborn. Whereas the screen version details the trial of a midwife who attended to the birth, this is only hinted at as a possibility onstage, and Maja, who lost her child, refuses to go through with it. Instead, the characters’ grief plays out over a long family dinner at the home of Maja’s mother.The result requires more patience on viewers’ part, but rewards it with a fully formed portrait of a family adrift. In that sense, the stage version of “Pieces of a Woman” completes Weber and Mundruczo’s puzzle: Let’s hope Avignon won’t be its only international stop.The cast of “Pieces of a Woman,” by the playwright Kata Weber and the director Kornel Mundruczo.Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d’Avignon More

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    At the Avignon Festival, a Bleak Start

    Grief. Rising fascism. Utopias gone wrong. The plays were grim in the early days of the annual theater event in France.AVIGNON, France — The Avignon Festival couldn’t have set the stage any better for Tiago Rodrigues. On Monday, the director from Portugal was announced as the next director of the event, one of the most important on the European theater calendar. The same night, his new production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” starring Isabelle Huppert, opened the 2021 edition, which runs through July 25.Excitement was high, despite the enormous line to enter the Cour d’honneur, an open-air stage installed on the grounds of Avignon’s Papal Palace. The French government requires proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test for all events with more than 1,000 audience members, and the checks led to a 40-minute delay and grateful applause when the preshow announcements finally started.Two hours later, the reception was noticeably less warm. While Rodrigues has brought well-liked productions of “Antony and Cleopatra” and “Sopro” to Avignon in recent years, his “Cherry Orchard” is an oddly amorphous proposition, built around actors who often seem worlds apart onstage.It doesn’t help that Huppert plays Lyubov, the aristocratic landowner who remains blind to her family’s financial plight, like a close cousin of Amanda Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie,” which she just performed in Paris. She brings the same diction and the same childlike, brittle energy to both characters, down to her trembling lips.Alex Descas, left, and Huppert with other members of the ensemble in “The Cherry Orchard.”Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d’AvignonThe production accommodates Huppert rather than the other way around, and doesn’t require her stage partners to blend in, either. Rodrigues hasn’t enforced a specific acting style, and the community at the heart of “The Cherry Orchard” never really coheres.A few performers make the most of it. In a welcome departure from French habits, Rodrigues opted for colorblind casting: Lyubov’s relatives are all played by Black actors, as is Lopakhin, the self-made man who ultimately buys Lyubov’s estate. In that role, Adama Diop is by turns forceful and sympathetic. The role of the aging Firs, who yearns for the glory days of the aristocracy, is taken with lovely lightness by a veteran of the French stage, Marcel Bozonnet.In lieu of Lyubov’s beloved trees, the stage is filled with the Cour d’honneur’s old seats, which this year were replaced with new wooden ones. There is even a heavy-handed number about the renovation — one of several interpolations to Chekhov’s text — from Manuela Azevedo and Helder Gonçalves, who provide live music throughout.“Things will change,” Azevedo sings. “Even these chairs changed places.” It’s a nice touch, but here as elsewhere, this “Cherry Orchard” is too anecdotal to say much about the world. Rodrigues will presumably return to Avignon in 2023, the first edition he is scheduled to oversee. Let’s hope for a little more insight then.“The Cherry Orchard” aside, this year’s lineup finally gives women some prime spots, after years of male-skewed programming under the current director, Olivier Py. The premiere of “Kingdom,” by the Belgian director Anne-Cécile Vandalem, suffered its own delay because of heavy rain, but those who waited were rewarded with the festival’s finest new work up to that point.“Kingdom” is the conclusion of a trilogy Vandalem started in Avignon with “Tristesses” in 2016, followed by “Arctique.” The overall theme of the three plays is “the end of humanity,” according to the playbill, and after tackling far-right extremism and global warming in the first two, Vandalem offers a bleak tale of utopia gone wrong in “Kingdom.”Members of the cast on the set of “Kingdom,” the last play of a trilogy created by Anne-Cécile Vandalem.Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d’AvignonIn it, two families have opted to forgo the modern world and return to nature. Yet they come to resent one another because of land disputes and perceived slights, and their sustainable way of living becomes untenable.Vandalem is fond of weaving video into her work, here by way of cameramen ostensibly filming a documentary about one of the families. They follow the central characters into their small cabins, which are visible and surrounded with trees and water onstage, yet closed to the audience.Intimate moments are seen only on a large screen, and this setup draws the audience into the characters’ lives with greater realism than is achieved by many plays. The cast sustains the narrative tension with understated force — all the way to the unraveling of their small world.“Kingdom” was far from the only bleak offering of the festival’s early days. The Brazilian theatermaker Christiane Jatahy also returned, with “Between Dog and Wolf,” a creation freely inspired by Lars von Trier’s 2003 film, “Dogville.” Nicole Kidman’s role onscreen as an outsider mistreated by the community in which she seeks refuge is taken here by the actress Julia Bernat, also of Brazil.Christiane Jatahy’s production “Between Dog and Wolf,” a creation freely inspired by Lars von Trier’s 2003 film, “Dogville.” Magali DougadosThe cast is constantly filmed, with less precise editing than in “Kingdom,” and most of “Dogville’s” twists and turns are recreated, but Jatahy also finds some distance from her source material. Bernat and others address the audience directly at several points, and they break character to explain the movie’s ending. After that, they elaborate on what they see as the rise of fascism in Brazil and elsewhere.There is dark subject matter, and then there is “Fraternity,” Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s much anticipated follow-up to her 2017 hit, “Saigon.” “Fraternity’s” supernatural premise is similar to that of the HBO series “The Leftovers”: a portion of humanity (in “Fraternity,” 50 percent) has simply vanished, leaving their loved ones reeling.Unlike “The Leftovers,” however, “Fraternity” is in no way subtle in exploring grief. Over three and a half hours, it drains and badgers viewers emotionally: Many around me cried at least once. After so many people have died of Covid-19 in the past year and a half, this is dangerous territory, and Guiela Nguyen addresses people’s sense of loss like a bull in a china shop.The action takes place in a “Center for Care and Consolation,” designed for survivors to process grief by leaving video messages for the departed. These are performed by a laudably diverse group made up of professional and nonprofessional actors from around the world. (Multiple languages are spoken in “Fraternity,” with rather clumsy live translations by other performers.)Perhaps because the amateurs are still finding their feet, the acting often feels one-note, with much yelling and little in the way of emotional arcs. The plot revolves around the idea that people’s hearts slowed almost to a halt after the Great Eclipse, as the disappearance is known, which in turn slowed down the universe. Some related sci-fi developments soon grow silly, especially when an oversize plastic heart is brought in to absorb the survivors’ memories of their lost partners and relatives, in a bid to keep the planets moving.“Fraternity,” Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s much anticipated follow-up to her 2017 hit, “Saigon.”Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d’AvignonAt least Guiela Nguyen didn’t hold back on what was an ambitious, humanist project, and it’s a treat to again see Anh Tran Nghia, the star of “Saigon,” even though she’s underused. But theatermakers also have a duty to take care following a real-life tragedy. Bombarding the audience with relentless pain doesn’t necessarily lead to catharsis, and we’ve all been through enough.Avignon FestivalVarious venues in Avignon, France, through July 25; festival-avignon.com. More