U.S. Stage Debut of “Hiroshima mon Amour” Honors the Sensuous, Memory-Laden Vision of Resnais and Duras

The lights go up on a man’s shoulder blade and a woman’s delicately curved spine; she runs her hands up that blade and into his hair, grabbing it in her fist before taking his hand in hers, their naked bodies pressed up against a vertical black wall. As the audience looks on, she lazily rolls against the black surface, creating the illusion of an aerial view of a couple in bed.

“Tu n’as rien vu a Hiroshima…”

Director Christine Letailleur’s stage adaptation of Hiroshima mon Amour by Marguerite Duras, which made it’s U.S. stage debut on Thursday night at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, is largely faithful to the style of Resnais’s film, masterfully using light and sound to traverse a universe of memory as a Japanese man and French woman become lovers in Hiroshima, confiding in one another and searching the other’s memories—and bodies–for recognition of the same buried pain.

Valerie Lang is a sensual, languorous “Elle,” while Hiroshi Ota is a perfectly lovesick “Lui.” The chemistry between the two lovers is electric, and indeed, it must be: they spend half of the play caressing one another in the nude.

Their world contracts and expands around them; in moments where they are enraptured with one another, the limit of the light is their entwined bodies. Then there is the intrusion of memory—sudden vertigo on the stage created by tricks of light that shatter the safe cocoon of the bedroom, as when “Elle” describes her time in the cellar in Nevers, imprisoned for consorting with a German soldier during the Occupation. Our aerial view collapses and we come tumbling down the tunnel of memory, all our attention sucked into a single flashlight beam horizontally dissecting the stage, pointed at “Elle’s” face as she her hands search and scratch along the walls of the stage’s perimeter while the hollow sound of slowly-dripping water is blasted in stereo. The sound and light create a vast, horizontal feeling; while the constant motion of the man following “Elle,” holding the flashlight as he circles around her—even stepping between the audience and the woman at times—creates a hunted, enclosed, maddening feel as she recounts going mad herself.

In the ultimate superposition of the past on the present, “Lui” lies on the floor and becomes the dead body of her German lover. “Elle” lays on top of him, telling him how she lay down upon her soldier’s dying body after he was shot, unable to recognize the moment of death because she could not figure out where his body ended and hers began.

In contrast to the personal trauma of “Elle,” illuminated by a singular flashlight beam, the devastation of Hiroshima takes up the whole stage, flooding it with images and light. “Lui” steps out of the vertical dream world of the bedroom and out towards the audience, while aerial views of the bombed-out city are superimposed onto vastness of the stage and over his body. The aerial views become street views and mutilated faces and bodies appear; meanwhile, “Elle” steps out in a white nurse’s uniform as the images swirl around them. Her uniform is the brightest thing on stage; he tells her it was easy to find her in Hiroshima. Seeing the faces of burned victims projected onto her smiling face, it is easy to see why.

The dreamlike, at times nightmarish quality of the staging was an effective alternative to showing a tired flashback. On stage, the past was literally superimposed on the present with the use of a projecter, past “actors” from Elle’s traumas re-appear and play out past scenes in the present: only the body has changed.

While I loved Resnais’s film, the choices he made seemed to devote equal time to, indeed almost to equate, the personal trauma of “Elle” to the collective trauma of the H-Bomb, which indeed, it can be argued, is a concern with Duras’s screenplay. Letailleur’s stage version presents “Elle’s” personal traumas as claustrophobically terrifying, yet the sheer vastness, the dizzying lights, the multiple images bombarding the viewer of Hiroshima suggest the sizable difference in scale between the collective horror of the H-Bomb (which “Elle” announces in the opening scene that she has a stake in- she “saw” it all at the museum) to the intensely private pain of “Elle’s” lost love. Yet while the traumas were on different scales, they shared visual points of entry: the violent scene of “Elle’s” hair being shorn off by a fellow Frenchman as he sings the Marseillese echoed the repeatedly-projected image of a beautiful young hibakusha, looking in the mirror with horror as clumps of her own hair come out in her hands.

Perhaps Letailleur, in her Director’s note, describes her vision of the relationship between public and private memory the best: “Remembering is a fundamental and courageous act that is vital to the creation of awareness and of a sense of belonging to the world’s history…individual memory is a necessary act that contributes to the making of the collective memory.”

Hiroshima mon Amour is playing through Saturday, March 6, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center as part of the “In the Words of Duras” festival.

Tags: Alain Resnais, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Hiroshima, Marguerite Duras

This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 1:11 am and is filed under Film & Theatre, The Francophile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.