City Garage presents the U.S. Premiere of

by Enzo Cormann

translated by Priscilla and Michael Sheringham

June 18 – July 25, 1999

Directed by Frederique Michel

Produced by Stephen Pocock

Cast:

Bernard Jeff Boyer

Paul John Burton

Maud Victoria Coulson

Gwenn Liz Hight

NelIy Elizabeth Oakes

Will Mark Phelan

Hugo Stephen Pocock

Barmaid Anna Pond

Bartender Paradorn Thiel

Vera Doria Valenzuela

Chris Erin Vincent

Production Staff:

Set, Sound and Lighting Design Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.

Assistant Director Joel Drazner

Light and Sound Operator Aram Weintraub

Costumes Michele Gingembre

Production photography Carlos Alvarado

Place and Time:

Paris, 1999; 1:00 a.m., a deserted party buffet after a wedding next to a room where people are dancing.

The play will be performed without on intermission.

Enzo Cormann was born in 1953 and lives in Paris. He is the author of several published plays: Berlin, ton donseur est Ia mart, broadcast on French Culture in 1981; Credo, presented by the Théâtre de l’Athénée in 1 983; Le Rodeur, produced by the Théâtre du Graffiti in 1985; Noises, first performed by the Théâtre Ouvert at the Jardin d’Hiver. Other plays include Cabale; Tern porolia; Exils; a radio play, H.P.; and Tête a Tetes, an adaptation of Rêves de Kafka; Diktot; Corps perdus; and a play on the Marquis de Sade, Sade, concert d’enfers. His work has been translated into Spanish, German and English.

Cormann is highly influenced by jazz and has his own performance company, La grande ritournelle, which blends spoken word and music. He and his saxophonist, Jean Marc Padovani, have participated in numerous jazz festivals and present concerts in jazz/poetry/opera form. His writing reflects this musical influence: it operates spatially rather than linearly; it eschews conventional narrative logic in favor of a more freeform, explorative mode that focuses on the internal lives of character exposed in brief, jagged fragments. He shifts ground rapidly from percussive, explosive beats to slower, more lyrical passages, and then to staccato exchanges both brutal and elusive. Cormann is most at home with outsiders: immigrants, exiles, artists. His characters inhabit solitary worlds of personal chaos. Like the ravaged figures of the painter Francis Bacon (his favorite), they project gnarled, violent inner worlds before us. They hide from their own nightmares, and they indulge in random acts of self-destruction, yet within these self-destructive acts Cormann finds the act of possibility of self-regeneration: an ordeal by fire of the self.

In Noises, we see Cormann in a more ironic mood. He describes the play this way: "Noises is both squabbles and sounds. A series of Polaroid photos of a particular group of people whose only dramatic link is that of being together at the same party. Between two doors, two glasses, between the room where people dance and the buffet, nine people meet, drink, talk and jostle each other. They stir up desire, disgust, utopias, creativity, nausea and anxiety."