What happens when Virginia Woolf and Marguerite Duras make dinner together? Irina Brook’s “La Vie Matérielle”
“You say I idealize women? Possibly. Who can say. What’s wrong with a woman being idealized a bit now and then?” – Marguerite Duras
“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.” – Virginia Woolf
Answer: a first course of righteousness, an entrée of liberation-via-striptease while standing on chairs with like-minded females, and a finale of homemade soup.
Irina Brook describes her homage to Marguerite Duras’s La Vie Matérielle and Virgina Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as “more of a feast, a gathering of talents, a sense of sharing thoughts, laughter, music, and tears in one’s kitchen, than a classic reading.” In Irina Brook: La Vie Matérielle, quotes from each author’s text resonate as a talented cast of women seamlessly share them with one another while performing domestic tasks, breaking into the occasional song, and yes, laughing.
The audience entering FIAF’s Tinker Auditorium is instantly greeted by the smell of homemade soup. With the lights still up, we come upon the actresses in various stages of preparing a meal in an endearingly cluttered kitchen with various slotted spoons, pots, and pans dangling from the wall around the 1950’s-esque oven. Obie-award winner Winsome Brown is the lanky Virginia Woolf, dressed in a long white dress and modern apron, standing at the stove in a motherly fasion and stirring; former French Vogue editor Joan Juliet Buck (last seen in Julie & Julia) is a dead-ringer for a younger Duras in her black roll-neck scarf and thick, red glasses, sipping wine at a nearby table while chopping onions with vigor (Duras’s greatest passions besides sex and writing were alcohol and cooking). Duras is accompanied in her tasks by actress Nicole Ansari (HBO’s Deadwood), while violinist Yibin Li folds basket upon basket of clothing to stage right and British singer/songwriter Sadie Jemmet (whom the program informs us decided on her career path after hearing Joni Mitchell’s Blue album) strums thoughtfully on her guitar to stage left.
There is a lot going on on this stage— a commentary on how a woman’s work is never done—but throughout, each woman, no matter what her domestic task at hand (and they take turns doing everything), listens to the woman speaking. Some of the great lines cross the stage: the ghost of Shakespeare’s sister is raised from oblivion, Buck as Duras speaks of the history of an old home she now inhabits, worn down by the hands and bodies of the families that called it home before her. Together, the women examine the truth in the statement, “It’s only when they [children] leave the house that they look at it.” There are no children present on stage, but their recorded laughter causes all to pause and muse on what that laughter means to them: what offspring take from their mother’s body, what their existence brings to their lives, and how motherhood has changed them permanently.
Then there is, of course, the gentle ribbing at the male sex (no pun intended), as immortalized in Woolf’s lines: “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.” Men are also absent from the stage, and only discussed in relation to how women care for them. Duras, several glasses of red wine into the production, marverlously slurs: “You have to really, really like men to love them.” These affirmations often lead into song, with Li on violin in a female jam-session with Jemmet.
Yet the piece is saved from a Lilith-like atmosphere by the raucous humor that permeates the production- these girls know how to have fun, and the actresses are clearly enjoying themselves on stage. The most memorable moment of the night was when Brown as Virginia Woolf put on “Deshabillez-moi” and began to gyrate her hips to the bawdy French ballad. As she lost herself more and more in the song, Brown began to hoist up her dainty white dress to reveal black men’s socks slouching on her white ankles. Standing on a chair and completely lost in the moment: oblivious to her frumpy socks, apron, and dress, she celebrates her inner sex goddess, tussing up her hair with her hands before sliding them down to her hips. The music is infectious, and soon, all of the actresses join in the fun, dancing around the kitchen with no inhibitions. The last to go is Duras who at first remains still, suspiciously sipping her wine as she looks shiftily from left to right. Eventually she, too, gives in to her body’s urges, though Buck’s humorous portrayal gives the writer moves more spasm-like than sexy as she awkwardly bops along, at one point swapping tops with Ansari and rocking a skull-and-crossbones sweater.
The play closes with all of the women sitting down to dinner, breaking bread, pouring wine, and still laughing, relishing one another’s company. They don’t break as the lights go up, and the audience leaves the play as they entered it, a lucky fly on the wall given an hour’s glimpse into the lives and hearts of these inspired and inspiring women.
Brooks’s play is reaffirming, and best enjoyed with close girlfriends, sisters, or mothers
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“You say I idealize women? Possibly. Who can say…..