The It’s Alive! semi-staged play reading series presents Bettencourt Boulevard: A Story of France by Michel Vinaver, directed and translated for the first time into English by French director and actress Gabriella Maione, with the participation of MIT students and faculty.
Bettencourt Boulevard takes a retrospective look at the famed Bettencourt Affair around the heiress to the L’Oréal fortune, while wading through France’s muddy contemporary history. Michel Vinaver draws upon the searing Bettencourt case and analyzes the intimate, political, and economical aspects that compose it by putting into words the most salient information from the case. Tracing the history of L’Oréal founder Eugéne Schueller back to World War II, the author intermingles timeless components of legends and myths with a story that still attracts media attention today. At the heart of Vinaver’s play one finds truth in Shakespeare’s declaration: all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely actors and spectators.
About the Author
Michel Vinaver, born in 1927, is generally acknowledged as one of France’s major living playwrights, named the French Chekhov and known as the foremost dramatist of the « every day’s theatre ». He has sought to dramatize the realities of industry and marketing under the late twentieth century capitalism. He is the author of more than twenty visionary works regularly staged by leading directors, including L’ordinaire (High Places) which entered the repertoire of the Comédie-Française. His last play, Bettencourt Boulevard published in 2014, will premiere in Paris – Villeurbanne, in its original French version, in November 2015.
About the Director
Gabriella Maione, born in Rome, is an Italian-French theatre and film director, playwright and actress. Her work and conceptual achievements are described as a premonitory « time-collapsed universe where Greek tragedy and today’s world are fused in perpetual simultaneity » (Jonathan Kalb, theater critic for The New York Times). Stout-hearted, ironically fierce and enigmatic, Maione’s theatre constantly experiments, in her multi-language wording, layers of epical memory, echoing today’s catastrophy and off-beat ancestral myths as well as, in her directorial creations, she is inclined to challenge the paradigms of time, music and staging. Her questioning the socio-political influence of today’s conventions and power is the essence of what she calls « passion for risk, rebellion and glimmering from the past ». Her direction of her own play Symptômes, shown at Opera Bastille, was described as « highly poetic, compelling and poignant like a Pasolinian oratorio » by theater critic, Sorbonne scholar Georges Banu.