Doreen

David Geselson | France

Start Date: 16-09-2021 - 08:00 (07:00 CET)
End Date: 18-09-2021 - 08:00 (07:00 CET)

Doreen
based on Letter to D. by André Gorz

André Gorz was born in 1923 in Austria, acquired French nationality under the name Gérard Horst, and settled in Paris in the late 40s. In 1958, he published The Traitor, an autobiography in the form of a philosophical investigation, somewhere between self-analysis and a critique of the capitalist model of society. He met and befriended Sartre in 1946. Sartre later wrote the preface for The Traitor and, in the 60s, hired Gorz as a contributor to his journal Les Temps Modernes. This was the beginning of a career as a journalist that would lead Gorz to participate in the launch of the news weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. At the same time, he developed the foundations of what would become political ecology and wrote numerous books dealing with these issues.

In 2006, he stepped away from his theoretical and political works to publish Letter to D., a confession to his wife, Doreen Keir, who was suffering from an incurable disease. One year later, in September 2007, André and Doreen were found dead in their bed.

Gorz’s letter tells the story of his love for Doreen, from their youth and their years of political activism through to their withdrawal from public life. Both revealing and modest, Gorz steers us through a confession that is at once an homage and a repentance, giving us access to the intimacy of a deeply moving love over the course of an entire life.

As with Gorz’s letter, our project will seek to enter the couple’s intimacy, the better to confront us with our own private lives, our spells of romantic dizziness, our moments of emptiness and our desires. Doreen will be a counterpoint, a fragment, a parallel to this confession made public: the portrait of a woman we imagine based on what Gorz tells us about her, and the portrait of a couple we watch living together in extreme proximity. A moment to pause, away from the noise of the world.

D. will be Doreen here. The goal will be to imagine and write a voice for her, which in reading “Letter to D.” is dreamed rather than known.

André and Doreen speak to us about their insecurity at being in the world, through the tumult of a 20th century that they somehow managed to traverse, indispensable to one another. They bear witness to the bond that unites them and which makes their existence possible. A man and a woman with shifting identities, who will soon die: it is September 2007, in the living room of their house in Vosnon.

It is evening. They have prepared a meal and some drinks and welcome us into their home. In an hour, they will commit suicide. In the meantime, they talk. Doreen will start telling the story of their love; we will also hear the Letter in her words. And it is likely that André (who is actually Gérard—André Gorz is a pseudonym he used for his essays) will also speak, eventually.

Reality will serve as a starting point for tracing a larger landscape beyond them. This is an adaptation, an attempt, somewhere between documentary reality—the story of André Gorz-Gérard Horst and Doreen Keir—and the actionalization of the gesture of this couple and this beloved woma,n whom we do not know and who is going to die with the man who says he owes her his life. There will therefore be three voices: that of the Letter to D., that of Doreen, and that of Gérard.

Language: French, English
Subtitles: English, Greek

Watch the video greeting here

Doreen
based on Letter to D. by André Gorz

Script/direction: David Geselson
Stage design: Lisa Navarro
Costume design: Magali Murbach
Video: Jérémie Scheidler Thomas Guiral
Lighting design: Jérémie Papin
Sound design: Loïc Le Roux
Construction: Flavien Renaudon
Lighting control: Sylvain Tardy Arnaud Olivier
Sound and video control: Arnaud Olivier, Julien Reis
Collaboration: Elios Noël, Jean-Pierre Baro, Jeanne Candel
Stage management: Sylvain Tardy
Production: Compagnie Lieux-dits
Production management: Noura Sairour
Tour management/ Press relations: AlterMachine ICaroleWillemot

On stage: Laure Mathi, David Geselson

Coproduced by
Théâtre de Lorient, centre dramatique national, Théâtre de la Bastille, Théâtre Garonne, Scène Européenne – Toulouse, Théâtre de Vanves.

With the help of DRAC Ile-de-France, du Fonds de dotation Porosus, Spedidam and Arcadi Ile-de-France
The text Doreen received the support of creation from Centre national du Théâtre

Thanks to Théâtre Ouvert – Centre national des Dramaturgies Contemporaines, to La Chartreuse de Villeneuve Lez Avignon – centre national des écritures du spectacle et de l’IMEC – Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine and to Nouveau théâtre de Montreuil, centre dramatique national.

Residencies at Carreau du Temple (season 2015/2016) Compagnie Lieux-dits is accredited by the ministère de la Culture – DRAC Île-de-France.

Doreen is the Winner of the critics Prize 2017 for the Best French play.

The text Doreen is published by Lieux-dits publishing. The text Doreen is laureate from CONTEXTO Artcena and translated in English by Jennifer Gay.

I discovered André Gorz through his Letter à D., a few months after it was published in 2006.

Deeply moved by this text, I decided to work on acting and directing it for the stage.

After the production of En Route-Kaddish, a close collaboration with the actor Elios Noël allowed this new writing project to take shape, and to totally leave behind the auto-fictional questions raised in that first show.

I decided to try to write a voice for Doreen. Then from this voice, Gérard also reappeared. Finally, the idea of a fictional framework took hold.

I had written En Route-Kaddish, my previous project, over a long period, after doing a great deal of research in my own family’s documents and archives. This family history paralleled a larger history, that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It dealt with familial and intimate legacies, with history and politics.

For Doreen, starting out with the narrative in the Letter to D., I tried to learn more by looking at the couple’s archives. Several months before their suicide, Gérard had arranged what would happen to their papers after their deaths, leaving all his professional and personal archives--research documents, essays, reviews, newspaper articles, manuscripts, correspondence, family records, photos, films, stamp collections, LPs, and valuable objects--to IMEC (The Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives). After spending time conducting research at IMEC and reading Gorz’s work, I gradually attempted to take a stab at recreating the story of their love. Many elements were missing: Gorz had left a lot of archival material dealing with his philosophical and journalistic work, but relatively little about his private life. Meeting members of his circle allowed me to learn a little more. But the closer I got to the real model, the more I felt I needed to move away from it to be able to write action. So, I decided to delve into the holes and gaps they had left behind, and make up a Doreen and a Gérard who would tell us as much about the real couple of the last century as about a couple with whom we could identify today, close to 10 years after their suicides. It is this zone of friction behind an absolutely real past and fictional present, played by two 35-year-old actors who will span human ages and historical eras, that presented itself as having the potential to guide the creation of a theatrical object based on André Gorz’s text. There is also mirroring at play: in Letter to D., Gorz himself fictionalizes and creates a representation of the couple he formed with Doreen. His work also drew on that specific form of representing the real that discreetly uses fiction to serve the narrative. Doreen offers a theatrical parallel to this literary representation, to this fulcrum of the real and fictional. We will invariably move from documents and real-life anecdotes to scenes from married life imagined and improvised by the actors on the basis of these documents. How do the political and social questions Gorz tackled in his essays surface in his private life?

As Gorz did by publishing his Letter to D., we will invite the world to enter the couple’s private life. We will devise a form of staging that seeks to blur the boundaries between actors and audience, reality and fiction, to find the right proximity, the possibility of respectful revelation that touches you the way you’re touched by the solitary reading of the devastating romance between two people who chose to die together rather than risk surviving each other.

The show will deal with love and abandonment, with utopia and political disillusion, and with what remains after you’re gone. Gérard and Doreen had no children. Gérard said he did not want children because “I would have been jealous of them, I wanted to keep Doreen for myself!” Over the 20 years they spent in Vosnon, he would plant a grove of 200 trees. A few months before their suicide, André said: “What will remain of us is the trees.” But in these times, as we face the barbarity he regularly discussed in his writings, as that barbarity is beginning to show on our era’s terrible horizon, it seems that the Letter will remain behind as their real legacy.

Writing a few months after Letter to D. was published, André’s friend Paul Virilio wrote: “In this world of catastrophes, we still have this. I thank you for existing; for showing that instead of being withdrawal into yourselves, love can be renewed and flourish throughout a life, by fitting with the successive mutations of the era in which you as, a couple, were also active participants.”

We will try both to pass on this legacy and to be among its heirs.

David Geselson

David Geselson

David Geselson author, actor, director. He wrote, directed and performed Doreen -Winner of the critics Prize 2017 for the Best French play- (based on Letter to D. by André Gorz), En Route-Kaddish, Lettres non-écirtes. He wrote and directed Le silence et la peur. He directed Eli Eli by Thibault Vinçon and Les Insomniaques by Juan Mayorga, Poing by Pauline Peyrade at Teatro Español of Madrid. He will direct La Bohème at the Opéra de Nancy. He published Lettres non-écrites (Unwritten Letters) at Le Tripode publishing.

He recently acted in Bovary under the direction of Tiago Rodrigues created in 2016 at Théâtre de la Bastille and will act again under his direction in Le Choeur des amants, created in 2021 and in La Cerisaie by Anton Tcheckov, created in July 2021 at Festival d’Avignon in La Cour d’honneur of the Palais des papes.

He was trained at the École du Théâtre National de Chaillot, the École de théâtre “Les Enfants Terribles” and the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’ Art Dramatique.

He has acted on the stage under the direction of Brigitte Jaques in La Marmite (Plautus’ Aulularia), Cécile Garcia-Fogel in Foi, Amour, Espérance (Odön Von Horváth’s Faith, Love and Charity), Gilles Cohen in Théâtre à la campagne by David Lescot, David Girondin-Moab and Muriel Trembleau in Le Golem (a stage adaptation of Gustav Meyrink), Christophe Rauck in Le Revizor (Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector), Gabriel Dufay in La Ville (Yevgeni Grishkovetz), Jean-Pierre Vincent in Meeting Massera by Jean Charles Massera, Volodia Serre in Les Trois Soeurs (Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters), Juliette Navis and Raphaèle Bouchard in a collective work entitled Mont-Royal, and Jean-Paul Wenzel in Tout un homme.

He has also acted on the small and big screen, under the direction of Elie Wajeman in Alyah and Les Anarchistes (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs – Cannes 2012 and Semaine de la critique – Cannes 2015 ), François Ozon in Grâce à Dieu, Isabelle Czajka in La Vie domestique, Olivier de Plas in QI, Rodolphe Tissot in Ainsi-soient-ils (seasons 2 and 3), Vincent Garanq in l’Enquête, as well as in short films directed by Muriel Cravatte, Antonin Peretjatko, Marie Donnio and Etienne Labroue.

David Geselson founded Compagnie Lieux- Dits in 2009. Compagnie Lieux- Dits is primarily concerned with the creation of contemporary texts and experimental works for the theatre. The junction between fiction and non- fiction is at the heart of the work. The tension between the power of politics to intimately affect and transform individuals, and the way in which they can then transform history in their turn, is a common thread in their productions.

At the centre of their vision, is a powerful dynamic between a writer and a team of actors focused on creating texts and works for the theatre that tackle current political, philosophical and poetic issues.