Theater Review: History of Violence pungently explores sex and race.

History of Violence

Written by Édouard Louis

Directed by Thomas Ostermeier

Starring Laurenz Laufenberg

schaubühne berlin

St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn NY

November 14, 2019

This excellent, jarring play was adapted from a memoir/novel by French author Édouard Louis in 2016 by Thomas Ostermeier, the author and company director of the modernist German company schaubühne berlin. It made for quite a multinational evening…a French book portrayed in German by a multinational cast, done in a Brooklyn theater. The German text was translated with supertitles on a screen behind the actors which, common to many modern plays, served a major role in the production via many handheld camera projections. The play was an excellent commentary on both modern sexuality (not really so modern as it turns out) and class/racism in Western countries, and did so with a visceral, immediate fusion that made me reflect more than most such plays with political points to make. The memoir/novel stemmed from the personal experiences of Mr. Louis, a young gay author who was sexually assaulted in Paris by a North African man after they first hooked up for a night of consensual sex. The text fully explores the conflicting emotions of the young, horny Édouard, with upper class guilt over French exploitation of underclass emigrants, then mixed in with his terror after the perfect evening of sex and class equalization with the hunky Reda turns very bad. The play artfully begins with just the horror—in the opening scene we see the thin, blonde Édouard (an outstanding, multilayered Laurenz Laufenberg) cowering in the corner as three crime lab technicians clad in space-suit appearing garb minutely go over his apartment for clues. This was the first use of handheld cameras in the play, showing ultra-zoom close shots of the fibers and fingerprints on his floor, all projected on the backstage screen, making the opening feel less like a human drama than a creepy science experiment. The play evolves so that we first see Édouard’s halting testimonies about the assault, but something seems missing. There is certainly the fear and guilt often seen in rape victims, but also an odd ambivalence in his initial testimony to the officious cold policemen. As the play goes on, we learn more about the actual backstory, including the protagonist’s innocence, attraction to darker skinned men, and charming seduction on the streets of Paris. To the credit of the author, no easy answers are provided. Was this criminal violence, an unfortunate extension of male sexuality, a repressed class/race conflict, or (likely) a mixture of all three? How should the victim see himself and society after such an experience? The author avoids the traps most American authors fall into of either creating a dramatic conclusion that gives the viewer an “answer” or engaging in speechifying and hitting us over the head with his/her philosophy. Instead, Mr. Louis allows us to form our own conclusions. I appreciated that.

The play was set on a mostly blank, black set except for the video screen in back. At times the six actors used microphones, often to amplify intimate discussion (as in during sex) but sometimes for no apparent reason. The handheld cameras were excellent, and used with real purpose. For example, when Édouard talks about showering after the assault to rinse every bit of his assailant’s skin and smell off of his body, the camera clinically (not erotically) panned over every inch of his naked body as he showered on stage. The addition of high-tech video and audio effects now seems standard in modern theater, but as always, the best directors do not just use it for glitz or showmanship, but for a true dramatic purpose. The German actors were uniformly fine, some playing multiple roles. I thought the interaction between Édouard and Reda were convincing, mixing lust, tenderness, fear, and awkwardness in the proportions often seen in first-time sex, but rarely shown so convincingly on stage or screen. The physical types of the two actors helped there, as Édouard thin, waiflike and blonde, while Reda was muscular, tall, and bearded. There was nudity (pre-theater safe space warnings!), but no explicit sex, as the author chose to have us use our imaginations there. 

Overall, this play had provocative shock value in making me think about sex, maleness, violence, class, and race. It was more potent than the similarly conceived The Slave Play, now on Broadway. Both plays used sex as an avenue to discuss power, race and class, but this seemed more gimmicky in the American play, which shocks with sex, then degenerates into a ruminative philosophical talkfest. Perhaps the most comparable play I have seen in terms of examining sex vs. violence was Bleach, in which the intimacy and immediacy was conveyed by our being 2-3 feet from the assaulted young male callboy in a tiny Brooklyn apartment “theater”. That History of Violence could achieve a similar visceral punch in a big theater is a credit to the author, director, and actors, and to perhaps the best use of modern AV technology I have thus seen on the stage.