Three actresses on stage, Silvia Costa, Itsaso Arana, and Audrey Bonnet, reclaim the mystery of the annunciation taking place between the Virgin Mary and the Angel Gabriel, personified by each of them in their mother tongue. Three monologues, in Italian, Spanish, French. Three performative speeches dig this furrow to question this mysterious announcement today, to draw it to the side of modernity. In this device, the public becomes the depositary of the revelation, it is in a position to receive, in the listening state of the Virgin.

What could we announce in our time? What could be the contemporary annunciations? The ecological disaster to come? The end of the world? The advent of new ages? A step backward? Everything is opened and imagination prevails.

The play is divided into three parts of equal importance: around 30 minutes for each one. The play lasts around 1h 30, a rather classical time. Three separate pictures or sequences, featuring three different places and times in history. Three acts: the first one being closest to the famous Italian Quattrocento, that splendorous era of art history, a period lost in time with its dreams of beauty and invention of very elaborate and refined pictorial artworks, painted with utmost precision and care. The second act is set in Spain, during the Holy Week. It expresses the ardent devotion, blood and passion, and the overwhelming beauty of the Good Friday procession. It is rooted in times to come, in the human quest to understand the world and its metaphysical need for answers. As for the last act, it is set in a remote future, maybe in space and in the presence of a cosmonaut. Somehow the play follows the pace of the world, starting in the past and heading towards the future, and into the unknown. Yet this time, the connection deliberately remains unclear, as if the scene were viewed through a slightly dirty magnifying glass as if things were happening behind a veil.

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This Event is Open to the Princeton University Community Only (Students, Faculty, and Staff). Masks are required in the theater.

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Sponsorship

The French Theater Festival is sponsored by Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, L’Avant-Scène, Department of French and Italian, Humanities Council, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Study (PIIRS), Department of Art and Archaeology, Department of Comparative Literature, Program in Contemporary European Politics and Society, Center for French Studies, and Rockefeller College. International sponsors include Festival d’Automne in Paris, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, the Education Department of the French Embassy, Institut français, and the French American Cultural Exchange Foundation.

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