Getting Back to Normal...in some ways

Jim's Musings from Paris

Paris, March 2023, 20th Arrondissement. Photo by James Slowiak.

The garbage is piling up around Paris. Strikes and demonstrations have become more frequent and hard hitting as the month of March marches on and France faces a “moment of truth” as the legislature gets ready for a final vote on pension reform—a reform that two thirds of the country opposes. Throughout the last few weeks, people have taken to the streets, not only in France, but also in the UK, Israel, Georgia, Greece, Nigeria, and protests continue in Iran and Peru. Workers’ rights and attacks on democracy are the most common causes for the current wave of international unrest. But there is also a strong feeling of betrayal by governments rife with corruption and negligent of the people’s safety and well-being. March is women’s history month and this year marks the first time that women’s rights have actually moved in a negative direction around the world, with the loss of reproductive rights in the USA, severe restrictions imposed on women in Afghanistan, and crackdowns in Iran and elsewhere. While the world deals with the aftermath of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, the cyclone in Madagascar and Malawi, the train derailment and chemical spill in Ohio, banks fail, inflation rises, and the war slogs on in Ukraine with Russia sending thousands of ill-prepared young men to their certain death at the front lines in a bizarre replaying of the horrendous scenes from World War I depicted in films like All Quiet on the Western Front and 1917.

Demonstration in Paris, March 2023. Photo by Jairo Cuesta.

And what am I doing? I continue my slow recovery and return to physical and social normalcy. I’m not running up and down the countless steps of the Paris Métro yet, but I’m walking more and more each day, using only one crutch right now to check my equilibrium and give my nerve and muscle-compromised right leg some extra support. I go to physical therapy three days a week and recently started cooking at home again (which makes me very happy). Going to the market, though, demands more than I can do on my own at the moment. I still need help navigating the aisles of the supermarket, battling the crowds at Marché Aligre, and getting the groceries home without losing some leeks or lemons along the way. Each day brings a different challenge and I try to remain modest and careful as I work my way back to a healthy state.

And then I watch the news…

We went to the movies for the first time in more than four months, spending a chilly, gray afternoon at the cinema, watching two overly-long, self-referential Hollywood movies: The Fabelmans and Babylon. Neither of these films convinced me of their excellence. Nor did Tár. In fact, after seeing many of the Oscar-nominated films, I revisited Everything, Everywhere, All at Once and decided that it truly deserves its many accolades. Although, at first, it comes off as confusing and definitely too big for the small screen, as a film it makes demands on the viewer, stretches the boundaries of the form, and features excellent, provocative performances. I want to see it again.

Speaking of seeing something again: every once in a while, I feel the need to re-watch all of The Godfather films. The urge hit me this month—maybe I needed some kind of an escape—and, as I immersed myself once more in the Corleone family, I was reminded of why I so admire these masterpieces: director Francis Ford Coppola’s attention to detail and finely tuned storytelling, the exquisite performances, the riveting tempo-rhythm, haunting score, and stunning look of all three movies. These films transport me. We also started watching The Offer, the Paramount + series about the making of The Godfather. Here is a Hollywood self-referential project that works. I’m enjoying the insights into 1970s Hollywood and the obstacles encountered in making a movie. I don’t understand how any movie ever gets made. It’s such a different world from the world of theatre.

Which reminds me that another World Theatre Day is upon us on March 27. This year’s message, from Egyptian actress Samiha Ayoub, sounds many familiar tropes, including theatre’s ability to find light and life amidst the bleakness of world events. Over the past few weeks, we have attended three very different theatre performances here in Paris. Le Consentement (Consent), a solo performance based on a popular French memoir, tells the traumatic story of a 13 year old girl seduced by a famous and lauded writer, who operates openly for years as a pedophile. The book’s publication in 2020 shined a spotlight on France’s historically lenient attitudes towards child sexual abuse and ignited a reassessment of the country’s laws about rape and consent. The play features cinema actress, Ludivine Sagnier, and is directed by our friend, Sébastien Davis. Gauche, gauche, gauche, an ensemble piece and collective creation by recent graduates of the École Jacques Lecoq, explores the obstacles one encounters in dealing with French bureaucracy, using a variety of physical theatre techniques. The play featured our friend, Eliana Fabyi, who, as a Case Western Reserve University undergraduate, joined Jairo and me one summer in Italy for a month of Performance Ecology work sessions. Finally, we attended an evening of classic Japanese Nô Theatre and Kyôgen, sponsored by Théatre du Soleil, at their marvelous space in La Cartoucherie.

Did any of these performances shed light on the darkness of today’s world as Samiha Ayoub describes in her World Theatre Day message? For me, they each accomplished more in this direction than the three films that I mentioned (The Fabelmans, Babylon, and Tár). The theatre performances created a space where I could remember what it is to be a human being. In this post-human age of drones and Artificial Intelligence, the theatre is the last refuge of the human being and, even though these three plays had their problems, as I sat in the darkened laboratory of the theatre, I was able to reconnect with some very human aspects of my own existence—compassion and courage—and, as Ayoub says, “truth, goodness, and beauty.” Vive le théâtre! Maybe that’s the difference that I feel between film and theatre: Film transports us; theatre wakes us up. When I want to get lost, I watch The Godfather again. When I want to be found, I go to the theatre. The theatre doesn’t let me forget what’s happening in the world.

March also brought a reunion with some dear old theatre friends: Ken LaZebnik, a colleague from Macalester College who gave me my first directing gig and now runs the MFA Program in Writing and Producing for Television at Long Island University in Brooklyn; and Kate Fuglei, an accomplished actress and writer, who was a member of At Random Theatre Ensemble, the company I founded in the Twin Cities in the early 80’s. Kate and Ken came to the apartment for lunch with Jairo and me. Ken served an integral role in getting Jairo his green card in the US. I made David Lebovitz’s Chicken Pot Parmentier from his book, My Paris Kitchen, which has quickly become an essential part of my Paris kitchen. The only change I made was to use leeks instead of pearl onions. The meal was delicious and added to the conviviality of the day as we reminisced and filled each other in on what we had been doing for the last 24 years or so. It turns out we had not seen each other since 1999, when Kate and Ken came to UC-Irvine to see NWPL’s production of Woyzeck that we performed as part of an autumn conference on Grotowski’s work following his death in January 1999.

Terence Cranendonk and Jairo Cuesta in NWPL’s Woyzeck. Photo by Lisa Black.

Travel is a performative action that can actually work both to transport and to wake up. This month we made a way too short visit to the UK (Nottingham, to be specific) to visit family. Jairo’s brother, Rafael, and his wife, Chris, welcomed us into their home for a long weekend of delicious food, wine, laughter, and good conversation. Songs were sung, games were played (and played again), and pints raised at several pubs along the way. We visited Wollaton Hall, the estate used as Bruce Wayne’s mansion in The Dark Knight series of Batman films, and Léo, now six years old and sporting a terrific Robin Hood hat and bow, shot invisible arrows at the “rich,” whenever he had the opportunity. With my two crutches in tow, I was able to test first hand the UK’s progress with accessibility and I give the country an A+, especially as compared to France. Even a tiny museum in the back of an out of the way tea salon along the canal had a lift up to the second floor history exhibits. I’m not sure how accessible the Underground in London is these days, but each train station we visited had lifts to all the platforms, making transfers very easy.

Wollaton Hall. Photo by Jairo Cuesta.

I was also able to use this trip to connect with family of my own. In the past year, I discovered, through the wonders of Facebook, that I had a previously unknown first cousin living in England. He grew up not knowing who his father was. His son decided to try to find out some information and managed the search on Facebook using the few clues they had available to them. When we made contact and they shared the story with me and their few artifacts, I became convinced that he was truly my cousin. We arranged a meeting at a pub in Nottingham and, over fish and chips, I was able to learn about his life and introduce him to some details of his father (my uncle) and his father’s family (my mother’s family) that he had never known. It was an emotional meeting that made me very aware of the toxicity of family secrets and parental control and the marvelous resilience of the human spirit. I was transported and I was awakened.

My newly discovered cousin with me. March 2023. Photo by Jairo Cuesta.

I also spent time with my nephew, Peter, who is in the US Air Force and currently stationed on “the island,” as he calls it. Peter joined us in Nottingham for a day for the meeting with our new cousin. He hung out with us for a while, played tennis with Léo, and told us about his life in the military. He’s already done duty on a base in Niger and on the Polish-Ukraine border. Peter, soon to be 21, looks exactly like my father did at that age. He’s a strong and focused young man. I marvel at his youthful courage and my heart hurts a little bit as I think of the life he has chosen—the solitude and the danger. I’m glad that he knows that he has family only a short train or plane ride away and I look forward to introducing him to Paris sometime in the near future—perhaps after the mounds of rubbish have been cleared away and I have returned to some kind of normalcy—or not.

First spring coffee on the balcony. Photo by James Slowiak.