‘No Exit’, ‘The Chairs’, to each his own hell…perhaps the ultimate torture is the one that repeats itself eternally, no matter the language or the season.

‘Huis Clos’, ‘Les Chaises’, à chacun son enfer…le supplice ultime n’est-il pas celui qui se répéte éternellement, quelque soit la langue ou la saison?

LILA students and teachers awarded a standing ovation to eight performers who took them on a 90-minute examination of the meaning of Hell.  The students were attending the January 25th performance of adaptations in French and English of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos/No Exit and Eugène Ionesco’s Les Chaises/The Chairs presented by Les Illustres Comédiens of the Cours de Jeu Théâtral and their director, Jackie Planeix, at Silverlake’s Lyric Hyperion Theater.

The field trip was the culmination of an arts integration project that some of the secondary teachers had worked on directly with Ms Planeix. Teachers participating in the project were Mmes. Marissa Harris, Isabelle Lesouple, Sylviane Rebaud, and Laurence Leroy. Subsequently, the 9^th grade students attended the show as an introduction to their theater unit in French class, while the 12^th grade IB class was able to utilize the performance as a companion piece to their IB literature course. The 11^th graders (FB and IB) benefited from the theme of ‘Text/Representation - Adaptation/Translation’. 

Les Illustres Comédiens is made up of eight current and past LILA students: Anika Dorschner, Turner Edwards, Maeva Elchibegian, Chloé Grison, Madeleine Planeix-Crocker, Simone Sasse, Hayley Voland, and Camille Werzowa.  Most of them have been studying French Theatre with Ms. Planeix since elementary school, working their way up through classic works of French comedy and tragedy as well as original works co-created by them under their leader’s direction. After an all-French performance of the Sartre and Ionesco works in 2009, the troupe worked on translating and adapting the pieces into English. Their most recent performances in January (a public performance took place on January 23^rd) featured their self-translated scenes in English and then in French.

The audience was transfixed as three young actors skillfully took them through an existentialist exercise of emotional torture that unearths the absurdity leading to Sartre’s famous line, “Hell…is other people.” Under Ms Planeix’s astute staging, spatial movement to music seamlessly wove one story into the next as the five other actors continued the theme of comic absurdity, offering up Ionesco’s complex and sometimes nonsensical text with ease. The English language performance was followed immediately by a fluid transition into the French version, ending with a closing interpretive dance by the entire troupe.

A post-performance question and answer session clearly demonstrated that the students in the audience had firmly grasped the meaning of the performance. Ms Planeix’s expressed wish for “young people throughout the world to be familiar with the work of these two great French playwrights” had most certainly been granted in that theater that day.   As soon as footage is available, I will try to work up a quick video that will be posted in the popular videos section to give parents a front row view of this magnificent project!

For more information about the work, contact Jackie Planeix  bluepalm@prodigy.net

Press Contact:  Ai-Lin Grison     grison.ailin@gmail.com    323-336-0894