Belleville

Very good play

A hipster white girl stubs her toe, and the whole world consequently collapses in blood and flames.(bringing hardship and loss to a young hardworking African-European couple and their children, whom dozens of obtuse reviewers seem to treat like stage properties and scenery, flora and fauna of Belleville, to the bitter amusement of the playwright _in advance_.)So: a really rare, amazing thing: this is a profoundly political, polemical, furiously intelligent, sly, acutely analytical, quasi-allegorical, painfully true play about US imperial culture, white privilege, solipsism and entitlement, the useless generation of woke lumpen bourgeoisie, gentrification, the fraudulence of NGO progressivism, and Brownstone Brooklyn's therapy-recovery-self-care culture of tiresome egoist victimology, disguised as a kind begrimed and sardonic version of a cable comedy dissection of the imploding marriage of upper middle class mediocrities who refuse to accede to adulthood and responsibility.(Hipster Dude says he's in Paris sacrificing a lucrative career as a physician to do research to protect children from AIDS; what he is really doing is jerking off to porn, smoking weed and catering to/controlling his infantile wife who is suffering from advanced perpetual kvetching and demanding disorder, while occupying, in the imperial sense, an apartment effectively seized and swindled and sponged from a striving African immigrant couple trying to build a business and a comfortable life for themselves and their children. Eh voilà.)Everything about the play's construction and conceit fuses to its themes, including the shunting to the sidelines of the true protagonists, a young Franco-Senegalese couple, by the monstrous vanity, self-pity, greed and sociopathic self-obsession of the charming hipsters, in masquerade as heroic saviors of sick children, slacking and freeloading and defrauding (or really, ironically observing themselves slack, freeload and defraud) in the gentrifying 11th arrondissement of Paris. It's absolutely effing brilliant.

The play opens upon the scene of two American newlyweds living in an apartment in the Belleville neighborhood of Paris. The year is sometime in the first decade of the 21st century, and this couple and their Nigerian landlords are in their late-20's. She comes home early because no one showed up for the yoga class she teaches and finds him at home (instead of at his job as a researcher for pediatric AIDS) masturbating to online porn. Not a big deal, but bellwethers like this continue to appear: she has gone off her anxiety meds, he smokes more weed than usual with their landlord, he's behind on the rent, she goes on her one-night-a-year bender, etc. Herzog rather subtly uses such peccadilloes to build to the play's conclusion, which is both shocking and somehow expected. Motifs, such as a kitchen knife, appear several times, giving us a feeling of unease while allowing Herzog to explore the themes of identity vs. one's core self, managing the demands of a new marriage vs. the demands of friends and family, the possibilities vs. the difficulties of an expat life, the quagmire of escapism vs. the quagmire of the truth, etc. I really enjoyed reading this play, which then sent me searching YouTube for clips of performances of it. There's not much there, so I'll keep my eye out for productions of this short but powerful play. BTW, the kindle version was fine.

Spoilers below....In an effort to read more plays, I picked this one for the name - a Parisian neighborhood I once lived near about Americans living there. I was intrigued by the summary enough and liked that part of the play was in French with conversations with their local landlord and wife. The ending did what I suspect it meant to do, shock me. But I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised. It felt more like art than a story to me, left open to so much interpretation that a suicide ending felt like an easy out. I did like the dialogue though as it felt real and raw, like they could be people I know.

I was pulled into the story and the characters right away. The twists and turns were believable and surprising at the same time.

'Belleville' is raw, so it is not for everyone. I was drawn to the examination of Zack and Abby's relationship and its imperfections, especially in comparison to Alioune and Amina. The set takes some creative thinking, but overall this a solid and fast paced drama.

I bought this because the Canadian theater company started by superb actor Allan Hawco (Republic of Doyle) did the play. It is an amazing piece of work. Strange and unnerving at times, it kept me riveted to the pages. Would love to see it made into a movie with Hawco in the lead.

My favorite play. I sobbed while I was reading this. Everything was so fleshed out and natural. Herzog is a master at writing complex simplicity.This story stays with you and makes you speculate the mundane. I recommend all of Herzog's work.