Yasmina Reza
James Brown Wore Curlers
In James Brown Wore Curlers, the desperate Hutner
couple cannot come to terms with the fact that their
teenage son Jacob no longer wants to be himself, having
taken on the identity of Céline Dion, the Canadian singer.
Alienated from his parents but at peace with himself, he lives contentedly in a sanatorium in the middle of a beautiful park, nurturing his voice and planning singing tours around the world. He is friends with a boy who is white, but firmly convinced that he is black. Together they try to save an exotic plant that has found itself in a hostile environment of native flora. The unhappy parents visit him regularly, but are increasingly saddened to realise that they are clearly not going to get their son back. They ask themselves many questions about their own lives. The psychiatrist they talk to also has a surprising personality, including a habit of driving her car in such a way that she never uses brakes, and in her lecture she gives a completely new and interesting perspective on the Cinderella fairy tale.
James Brown mettait des bigoudis, 2022
A funny tragedy
First Slovenian production
Premiere: 6. March 2025
Performance length is 1 hour and 20 minutes and has no pause.
Creators
Translator and dramaturg
Alenka Klabus Vesel
Director and choreographer
Jana Menger
Set and lighting designer
Borut Bučinel
Costume designer
Bjanka Adžić Ursulov
Composer and repetiteur
Laren Polič Zdravič
Language consultant
Martin Vrtačnik
Sound designer
Miha Peterlič
Dramaturg assistant
Blažka Gantar
Actors
Pascaline Hutner
Nataša Tič Ralijan
Lionel Hutner
Gaber K. Trseglav
Psychiatrist
Saša Pavlin Stošić as guest
Jacob Hutner
Ajda Kostevc k. g.
Philippe
Filip Samobor
Yasmina Reza (1959), a world-renowned French playwright, is known as an astute observer, characterised by her mordant humour and sharp cynicism. With precisely measured words and venomous criticism, she exposes the hypocrisy of a seemingly refined bourgeois milieu. In this latest play, her view of the state of the world is no less profound, but rather delivered with surprising grace and lenience, still with humour, but also with a touching poignancy. She uses numerous metaphors to address the contemporary problems such as alienation and loneliness, quest for identity and the crisis of the classic patriarchal family structure. It aims to promote positive attitude towards difference, draw attention to the pitfalls of globalisation and the problem of immigrants, to the stillunrooted racial prejudices, growing poverty and man’s destructive attitude towards nature. It calls for tolerance and courage to maintain one’s course. The blunt obedience to social dictates leads to shallowness and narrowmindedness, and kills the relaxation without which there is no creativity and no appreciation of beauty.
Yasmina Reza took one of the stories from hercollection of novels Happy Are the Happy (Heureux les heureux, 2013) as the basis for her new play, which she describes as »a fantasy about identity and difference«. Much in the play remains unexplained and her writing, as she puts it, »does not offer a key, because there is no such key«. James Brown Wore Curlers premiered in March 2023 at the Residenztheater in Munich.
