Drôle de genre and remettre en cause

The end of December is a time of personal reflection for many people, as we think back on what happened in this old year and make resolutions for the new. The French expression for self-reflection is se remettre en cause. The same expression, without the reflexive pronoun, is used for the re-examination of any matter, large or small, individual or societal. Indeed, French social and political thought has a strong strain of calling into question subjects that were previously thought of as settled, re-opening discussions that many thought closed. Based on my limited views of both countries, I’d say that France is overall a more radical society, while the United States has become decidedly more conservative over the past 50 years. The spirit of remettre en cause in France lies behind everything from calls to overhaul the retirement system to the alarming percentage of French people who swallow homeopathic remedies. The French constitution was amended 16 times from 1996 to 2008; the US Constitution was amended only once in the last 50 years — to ratify a proposal made in 1789 !

I recently read two contemporary plays built around the theme of remettre en cause. Each one operates at two levels: an event happens within a family that causes them to revisit settled questions in a new light, which allows the playwright to re-examine a larger social issue together with the audience. The first play is Drôle de genre, by Jade-Rose Parker, which premiered at Théâtre de la Renaissance, Paris, in February 2022 (I’ll write about the second, Demain la revanche, by Sébastien Thiéry, in another post).

Drôle de genre has the form of a drawing-room farce. It’s staged in the main room of an upscale apartment and has lots of biting dialogue with witty zingers reliably hitting the audience’s funny-bone without particularly injuring the other characters. There are people trying to stop each other from revealing information and lots of shouting. But all this disguises a more serious tragedy. In the opening lines of the play a woman in her fifties, Carla Dumon-Chapuny, tells her husband that she has cancer of … the prostate. This is her way of revealing, after 30 years of marriage, that she is transsexual and was born Carlos, a man. While the sexual reassignment surgeon did an excellent job on all the observable parts of her anatomy (even in the marital bed), the prostate was left in place.

Carla’s husband François is the mayor, nominally a man of the Left and a strong supporter of LGBTQ people, doesn’t take the news well at all. He’s incensed by the decades of deception, angry at Carla, and concerned for his political career (it’s election season). It turns out he’s more a supporter of other LGBTQ people, not of his own wife being trans. The revelation also forces him to reexamine their whole married life. Does this mean he’s gay? Should this change how he views their choice to adopt a daughter 25 years ago? Carla argues that she’s the very same person François has lived with all this time, so why should one medical letter with a diagnostic result change anything? But François isn’t interested in anything beyond limiting the damage to his political career. He forbids Carla from telling their daughter Louise, as much for his own sake as out of concern for her.

Speaking of Louise, she knocks on the door at the start of act two, come to dinner with her fiancé Rachon and a big announcement: she’s pregnant ! When Carla shares her news («Je suis un homme.»), Louise is lovingly supportive while François is even more angry and alienated from the whole family. But then Louise shares some more news: she’s decided to go in search of her birth parents to discover her origins and why they gave her up for adoption. This drives Carla and François back together in joint opposition, as they insist that they are Louise’s real parents, and she shouldn’t need anything more. In fact, she should be grateful they took her in and provided her with everything for years! Louise accuses Carla of hypocrisy:

The dialogue gets more and more heated from there, Rachon gets himself in trouble too, and finally they each storm off one by one, to the exit door or the spare bedroom. Act two ends with Carla alone in the relational ruins of her living room, dancing the death scene from Swan Lake in a way «qui traduit à la fois le rejet, le désespoir, et la solitude».

Act three is short, though not sweet. It is an exact replay of act one, right up the point where Carla Dumon-Chapuny tells her husband that she has … un cancer du sein.

Noir. Le lac des Cygnes (thème principal) rugit, déchirant.

FIN

Sleep well, kiddos.

Overall I thought the play was an interesting effort to blend vaudeville farce with a serious treatment of a delicate subject. I think it has limited goals, and it succeeds on its own terms. Playwright Jade-Rose Parker stated «J’avais envie de faire une pièce grand public […] La comédie est un bon média pour cela. Drôle de genre n’est pas une pièce militante, […] mais j’espère qu’en sortant, il en reste quelque chose. Je voulais une pièce qui interroge, qui fasse réfléchir sur le monde d’aujourd’hui, et sur soi». The play is not terribly deep and the characters are barely more than their few traits, but Jade-Rose Parker’s writing is witty. Her jokes stay on the safe side of the wokisme line, though she doesn’t sugar-coat society’s continued failure to allow trans people to live openly without cost. This is her first produced play; should I have the occasion to see her next one, I’ll buy a ticket.

A few final notes, one language and one theatrical. When Carla first says to Louise that she is a man, her daughter at first misconstrues this as an announcement that Carla is biologically a woman who feels herself to be a man. Here’s the lines clarifying the situation:

The capitalization is rendered that way in the script, drawing the listener’s attention to the correction of which past tense to use. The best description I’ve heard yet of the distinction between the passé composé and imparfait is that the passé composé is a bounded tense, while the imparfait is an unbounded tense (another, less helpful phrasing I’ve heard for this is that the imparfait is for actions that were ongoing or continuous in the past). Carla’s first stab at explaining things uses the unbounded imparfait, but she corrects herself to the passé composé to emphasize definitively that her being a man has ended. I don’t know how you would translate that distinction cleanly – “No, I was a man … I used to be a man.” doesn’t cut it. The French version is a neat grammatical trick of dialogue that may not be available in English.

The theatrical note is this: Jade-Rose Parker indulges in a short bit of fourth-wall breaking during act two which I imagine is very effective. At the peak of his rage, François claims that by “passing herself off as his wife” for 30 years, Carla has effectively taken him hostage. When Carla points out this analogy is ridiculous, François asks the audience for validation:

I can envision the uncomfortable tension among the audience as each person tries to calculate whether an actual hand-raising response is expected, or whether they can sit as passive spectator. What exactly does not raising my hand endorse ? And if I do raise my hand, what have I just committed myself to in front of my friends and the community of theater-goers? It’s a microcosm of the real-world situation where we reveal our political convictions through inaction as much as through action. If it is this unsettling to be put on the spot in a theater performance, no wonder it can be so hard for some citizens to wrestle with these political issues in real life.

Happy remettre en cause, everybody.