‘Terraces’ review: A breathtaking tragedy revisits the Paris terror attacks

Outdoor café terraces are an integral part of the Parisian lifestyle – meeting places for socializing and people-watching of all ages and social classes. But the French word for them also means to knock down or cause someone to fall.

On November 13, 2015, the worst Islamist terrorist attack in French history did just that to Parisians, shocking cafes and entertainment venues with a series of coordinated shootings and bombings. Now Laurent Gaudé, a renowned French author and playwright, has channeled that night’s collective trauma in a stunning play “Terraces,” which had its world premiere at the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris on Wednesday.

If you were on the town that night in 2015, fielding panicked calls from family and friends as the news reports blared, the prospect of a show that conjures up those memories may be cause for concern. And “Terraces” brings it all back – the punch in the gut, the nausea. But Gaudé and director Denis Marleau create just the right amount of distance and emotional finesse to pursue wounds rather than reopen them.

This is not the first attempt to dramatize the attack. In 2017, a book by Antoine Leiris, whose wife was among the victims, was adapted for the stage, and several short plays focused on the stories of survivors.

With “Terraces,” however, Gaudé operates on a much more ambitious scale. Its structure is choral: the text weaves together not only the experiences of the victims, but also the voices of people whose lives were changed in other ways that night. Passersby, spouses, parents, paramedics, special forces and a janitor show up, with stories that overlap and lead to a collective memory of the attack.

Extensive research obviously went into the production, but “Terraces” doesn’t quite fit into the genre of documentary theater. His characters are composite creations rather than real people: many introduce themselves by multiple names, emphasizing that they are collective stories. While some characters appear repeatedly throughout the play, they often straddle the border between dream and reality, reappearing at the scenes of other gunfights or speaking from the afterlife.

The sets designed by Stéphanie Jasmin also do not attempt to recreate the various locations that the terrorists attacked. The 17 actors move like shadows on an empty stage, often speaking directly to the audience while blurry black-and-white close-ups of Parisian streets are projected onto a screen behind them. When attacks begin – in cafes and in the Bataclan, the concert hall where 90 people were killed – parts of the floor slowly tilt, a restrained and effective image of worlds being turned upside down.

Instead of verisimilitude, “Terraces” has the hallmarks of a classic tragedy. Fate is a recurring theme: from the first scene, characters going about their daily lives hint at the catastrophe to come. Gaudé, whose lyrics exude lyrical empathy, describes the arbitrary nature of murder as “the song of chance” with a recurring line: “You die, you don’t die.” Like an ancient choir, the actors often combine their voices, speaking together or repeat each other; In a harrowing scene, the silhouettes of the victims attempt to attract the attention of the first doctor to enter the Bataclan.

Marleau, the series’ French-Canadian director, does an excellent job of not getting in the way. In some scenes, when characters are killed, the actors simply silently turn away from us. When an emergency dispatcher speaks on the phone to a woman hiding in the Bataclan, he simply holds the hand of her shadow on the stage – until she falls silent and her hand falls.

Moments like this are enough to bring tears to your eyes, even after the show ends, and yet they never feel unnecessary. Neither did the plight of the recurring characters: the twin sisters who reunited in Paris to celebrate their birthdays, or a mother who left her young child and partner behind after a fight to make her way to the Bataclan.

“Terraces” begins and ends with a young lesbian couple, played with vitality by Marilou Aussilloux and Alice Rahimi. At the beginning they are feverishly looking forward to their first kiss of the evening. Then, when they engage in gunfire on a café terrace, Gaudé, in a narrative lure, revises their story and takes them to another café under attack, then to the Bataclan, and then to the crowded corridors of a Paris hospital.

Through them, life always seems to negotiate with fate. In “Terraces,” death may be their fate, but they seal it at the very end with their long-delayed kiss as the chorus watches. As tragedies of the 21st century go, this one comes close to the lofty goal of catharsis.

Terraces
Until June 9th at the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris; colline.fr.