[au fait !] Proposed by La Criée, in Marseille, Alice Zeniter's new play, Édène, deals with class violence, thwarted loves, and the precariousness of the authors. But also emancipation through writing. Marcelle joins the last performance, come!
Alice Zéniter*, the author of “The Art of Losing” (2017), who won the Goncourt for high school students, returns with “Édène” (2024). The first name of the heroine of his novel, Édène, echoes Jack London's masterpiece, Martin Eden. Based on the questions posed by this novel written in 1909, Alice Zeniter offers a contemporary version. Brittany replaced California. And Édène, a needy young black woman, Martin, the sailor born in the depths and ignorance. The play is performed at La Criée in Marseille, before a wonderful tour in France.
From dream to emancipation
Of modest means, Édène reads everything she can get her hands on. The works unearthed in the homes she occupies, public book boxes and market stalls. A chance meeting with a well-born young girl, from a cultured bourgeois family, will change her life: Édène will move from dream to emancipation. Her journey, which began with a desire to educate herself, led her to glimpse a literary future. From then on, she is determined to write a masterpiece, despite her social environment, her precarious condition, the contempt of others and her fatigue. The stubborn woman spends the day in the slaughterhouse laundry, where she works to pay her rent. And devote the night to writing. She is inhabited by literature, but especially by Rose, sister of her well-born friend, whose heart Édène wants to conquer. Through this quest for love, she will discover that of writing. Now, could a book allow “a person who plays the violin” to love “a person who washes pig’s blood on clothes”?
Reading and writing: a path to emancipation?
What is the legitimacy of Edène? Where does this conviction come from that she can become a writer even though her original social environment seems to forbid it? Is it possible to produce beauty when you sell your labor power in exhausting conditions?
⇒ Sunday December 1, 2024,he performance at La Criée will be followed by a meeting around the question of emancipation through reading and writing. With Alice Zeniter and three facilitators from the ATD Fourth World Street Library. This association aims to combat exclusion by promoting access to reading. In Marseille, she works with two audiences: children from a housing estate in a priority district, in the 15th, and Roma children in a squat.
⇒ Preferential “friends of Marcelle” rate (be careful, there are only ten places left): 19 euros full price (instead of 26 euros), 6 and 9 euros reduced rates. Performance at 4 p.m. (duration 2 hours 15 minutes) Register with this link.
*Novelist, translator, screenwriter, playwright, Alice Zeniter is also an author and theater director. She questions contemporary inequalities, politics, war, racism, colonization and feminism.
Édène is a show co-produced and hosted in residence by La Criée. In 2023, the Marseille national theater hosted its previous show, “I am a girl without history”.
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