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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

This Is Not My Beautiful City: “Belleville” at the Studio Theatre

Americans in Paris find fear and suspicion instead of marital bliss.
Bellevillle

A young American expatriate in Paris comes home one afternoon to find her husband, a doctor working on pediatric AIDS for Doctors Without Borders, unexpectedly home in the middle of the day and watching porn. This setup, which could lead to a farce or a realistic domestic drama, instead gets the suspense-flick treatment in Amy Herzog’s tense and thought-provoking “Belleville” (at D.C.’s Studio Theatre through October 12).

I’ve seen three Herzog plays so far (and reviewed “4000 Miles” and “After the Revolution” for TAC) and “Belleville” is by far the best: character-driven, propulsive, and full of tough moral and cultural commentary. As we watch Abby (Gillian Williams) and Zack (Jacob H. Knoll) play out typical couples’ quarrels and reconciliations—all those jokes which teeter on the edge of real resentment—we start to intuit how much Zack is really hiding. The American couple’s lives intertwine with the lives of their landlords, the even younger Muslim married couple Alioune (Maduka Steady) and Amina (Joy Jones): four outsiders in France, two couples in which the husbands are keeping secrets. Four characters, three countries, two days… and one knife.

Abby, an underemployed yoga teacher, is increasingly aware that she’s pretending to be an adult. Her sister is about to have a baby; Alioune, whom she had assumed was older than her because of his familial and work responsibilities, turns out to be four years younger. “Were you ever told, growing up, ‘It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you’re happy’?” Abby asks Alioune. When he says he was not, she calls this line “the worst thing you can say to your kids”–which got a laugh of recognition from the D.C. audience. Abby was raised to be happy, not to be good or dutiful or responsible, and so of course she is miserable.

Playacting adult life rather than living it is one of the central themes of “Belleville.” Abby and Zach have some of the trappings of adult life: “We were the first of all our friends” to marry, Abby notes. But there’s something ersatz about their grown-up life. They’re celebrating what Abby calls “our first grown-up Christmas” with a teeny, tiny fir tree. “A starter tree,” she says optimistically.

Twined around this theme are the many distractions which allow liars—or, let’s say, people in denial—to pretend that everything is okay. Pot, porn, pet names for your spouse, moving to a different country: There are so many ways of postponing the inevitable.

All four of the characters were easy to relate to, at least for me. Amina is the most grown-up. She’s stern, but she’s not wrong. (She might even come across as too much the stereotypical “strong black woman,” if not for Joy Jones’s nuanced performance.) Alioune is the guy torn between conflicting loyalties and aspirations, between his friendship with Zack and his responsibilities as a husband and breadwinner. Abby is frightened, trying to tell herself that everything is still forgivable, nothing’s gone too far just yet. (Williams is excellent throughout most of the performance but does get a bit actressy, heavy on the big shaking voice, toward the very end.)

And Zack is the only one who knows, from the very beginning, just how trapped they all are. Many of us eventually reach a point where we’ve concealed the truth about our circumstances for so long that exposure seems impossible to bear, a fate worse than death. There’s a powerful parallel between the morning-after scene where Abby tries to piece together her disastrous drunken night, and the situation in which Zack has been living from the very beginning. You wake up inside something you did.

Lies both spring from and strengthen shame and mistrust. You don’t trust another person with the truth about yourself, and so you keep secrets; and the fact that you’re keeping secrets becomes another secret you have to keep. Distractions help you keep yourself from noticing the steady growth of shame and erosion of trust. Meanwhile the other person trusts you, but is starting to notice a quiet voice inside, saying, Something’s wrong.

“Belleville” captures that willful suppression of the voice of conscience, the desperation which prompts it and the even greater desperation which it causes in turn. The play also suggests, I think, that the American insistence on happiness–on having the right emotions, not just doing the right things—perversely makes it harder for us to acknowledge and understand our interior lives. Demanding happiness makes us more ashamed, and less self-aware.

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