Paris des Femmes Festival

Abstract

Reviewed by: Paris des Femmes Festival Elaine Molinaro PARIS DES FEMMES FESTIVAL. Paris, France. January 10–12, 2019. On Saturday, January 12, 2019, as had been happening all over France every weekend since the previous November, a yellow-vest protest against the Macron government took place just a short distance from La Pépinière théâtre where the eighth edition of the Paris des Femmes (Paris of Women) Festival was being held. Protesting among other things crippling taxes and stagnant salaries, the working-class marchers converged upon Paris from the overlooked and left-behind rural areas of France wearing their symbolic neon-yellow visibility vests in order to “be seen.” Police in riot gear filled the [End Page 104] plaza of the opulent Palais Garnier Opera House armed to quell any violence. Click for larger view View full resolution Anna Mouglalis in Puisqu’il fait jour après la nuit. (Photo: Francesca Mantovani.) On a side street off of the Opéra plaza, another overlooked group who faces reduced salaries and frequent violence also gathered in an attempt to be seen. Over the three days of the Paris des Femmes theatre festival, nine women premiered staged readings of their original short plays and monologues. In an interview, festival director Anne Rotenberg stated that works by women represent only 21 percent of plays produced in French theatres. She explained that the theatre world in France is still a very masculine environment, so culturally many women writers do not imagine playwriting and more easily gravitate toward writing novels. In an effort to encourage women to write for the stage, in 2012, Rotenberg, also a theatre director, founded the festival with journalist Michèle Fitoussi and writer/actor Véronique Olmi. They invite women, often novelists, to write original plays on a preselected theme in an effort to develop new playwrights and raise awareness of their work. The theme of the 2019 festival, “Noces” (weddings), offered a rich opportunity to explore feminist concerns, which many of the authors keenly drew out, despite Rotenberg’s claim that the theme was not necessarily feminist. One of the newest emerging authors in the festival, Adélaïde Bon’s first novel La Petite Fille sur la banquise (The Little Girl on the Ice Floe) is a personal narrative as a survivor of rape at age 9. Her play La Photo de famille (The Family Photo) raised the specter of a potential violent backlash by a jilted groom when the bride, remembering the sad fates of her mother and aunt in their marriages, left him at the altar and ran out of the church. Following her out, the groom attempted to reassure and convince her to return, at first gently and lovingly, but he grew ever more exasperated and condescending as she held firm in her resistance. By the end, his increasingly threatening behavior supported the case to call off the marriage for both the bride and the audience. As with Bon, many of the playwrights exposed and examined the issue of violence against women. Carol Fives’s humorous yet tragic play This Is Not a Love Song, titled in English after a Sex Pistols song, portrayed a couple boycotting their fifteenth wedding anniversary by going to bed early. They were, however, kept awake when they overheard their neighbors engaging in what at first sounded like consensual rough sex, but became ever more apparent as domestic abuse. In a welcome stylistic [End Page 105] choice, Fives combined dramatic tension with corny musical comedy enhanced by director Michel Vuillermoz’s light-hearted staging. Throughout the scene, as they sat up in bed, the middle-aged couple broke out into song. With the international hit “(This Is Not a) Love Song,” the couple expressed their ambivalence between respecting the neighbors’ privacy and intervening in the face of dangerous abuse. Recognizing with increasing alarm that the female neighbor’s screams of pain initially mistaken for passion were “not a love song,” the wife convinces her husband to call the police, who proved to be woefully unhelpful. As the couple tried to ignore the racket, the wife brought up being accosted in the street or on the subway at least...