Brefs entretiens avec des hommes hideux – 22 types de solitude

In the literary work of David Foster Wallace, overblown language is the order of the day. Shaggy, labyrinthine and cheerful. The sharp eye of the American author, the most radical and unpredictable of the postmoderns, enlightens us on American society, constantly giving an adequate form to the diffracted, exploded reality. The cosmopolitan director Yana Ross gives a magnetic theatrical adaptation in the tradition of Pynchon or Carver, exhilarating and without restraint.

We enter Brefs entretiens avec des hommes hideux (‘Brief interviews with hideous men’) through a Californian house, simple and bright, where a real sex scene takes place – interpreted on stage by porn actors. Sex is a sensitive spur that allows Yana Ross to give depth of field to the 23 short stories adapted here. And for us, to capture the roughness, the thickness and the darkness of toxic masculinity. Sex is there, in this luminous oscillation. It is a state of current society, a gauge of testicle theatre, grotesque, with a question. How far can hideous men go in the process of dehumanization in the intimate sphere?

It is in speech, ordinary pornography and the succession of dramatic and stylistic ironies such as saloon music or cowboys that Yana Ross’ staging gains its urgency, its intensity and the immediacy of the female gaze on tragic issues. We have to accept the subversive and emancipating charge, that is bewildering, even scandalous.

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