Theater review by Naveen Kumar
Adapted from Édouard Louis’s autobiographical novel, History of Violence recounts a painful personal story, revisiting the scene of a crime and parsing the trauma it caused. As directed by the visionary German theater-maker Thomas Ostermeier, it is a brutal and bracingly intimate act of reclamation.
The violence in question is clear from the outset. The play’s narrator (Laurenz Laufenberg), a proxy for Louis, tells the audience, his sister and the police about the night he was raped and held at gunpoint in his Paris apartment. The cops don’t quite understand how ordinary it is for a gay man to invite a stranger home at 4am, and seize on a detail he wishes they wouldn’t stress: that the assailant (Renato Schuch) is North African. The incident also becomes a lens through which the narrator examines his ambivalence toward his provincial family. The performances by members of the Schaubühne Berlin ensemble are uniformly sharp, particularly that of Alina Stiegler as the narrator’s no-bullshit sister.
Ostermeier’s confrontational and probing multimedia aesthetic brings the story so close that you can make out fingerprints, sweaty pores, tears trembling before they fall. But it also keeps the night of terror at an almost clinical distance; while the action is explicit, the mediation of a handheld microphone or live-projection camera separates us from more violent and tender moments. Though not for the faint of heart, History of Violence’s impact is more cerebral than visceral—and perhaps that is necessary. Despite clear content warnings, several patrons walked out on the evening I attended, and one of them ran. Facing the darkest corners of the past can disturb as much as it can heal.
St. Ann’s Warehouse (Off Broadway). By Thomas Ostermeier, Florian Borchmeyer and Édouard Louis. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier. With ensemble cast. Running time: 2 hrs. No intermission.
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