KINGSTON, R.I. — October 15, 2018 — Jean-Rene Lemoine, a contemporary French playwright, director and actor, will visit classrooms and deliver a staged reading of his play “Erzuli Dahomey, Goddess of Love” on Oct. 23 as part of the University of Rhode Island’s Distinguished Visiting International Artist Program. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will be held from 5:30 to 7 p.m. in Swan Hall, Doody Auditorium, 60 Upper College Road.
This play brings together a Haitian Voodoo goddess, a lost African phantom, and the deceased Diana, Princess of Wales, in a Chekhovian melodrama that speaks to the historical anxieties of contemporary France. During his time at URI, Lemoine will work with students in the classroom to translate the piece and also to do a public staged reading of this translation.
French Department Chair and Associate Professor Karen de Bruin invited Lemoine because she thought that URI students would really appreciate his plays, which focus both on human fragility and strength in the face of unforgiving loneliness, and which push the limits of gender, sexuality, race, class and understanding.
“I chose this playwright because he deftly accomplishes the improbable: he unites the brute force of Greek tragedy, the trauma of Haiti, and the anxiety of contemporary France in verse that soothes, reassures and transcends the contingencies of our daily lives,” said de Bruin.
Lemoine, born in 1959 in Haiti, spent his early childhood in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), his adolescence in Belgium, and eventually moved to Paris in 1989, where he resides today. After his career as an actor, Lemoine devoted himself to directing and writing.
His play, “Erzuli Dahomey, Goddess of Love” is officially part of the repertoire of the Comédie Française, a world-renowned theatre and acting company. His inspiration for this play came from a vision he had of a black phantom arriving at the home of a white, French, bourgeois family and the shock of existing between two worlds: a Europe in which he recognizes himself and a Caribbean to which he no longer belongs but that still belongs to his heart.
Lemoine has published several plays, starred in films and his plays have received some of the highest literary and artistic honors in France: le prix SACD, from the Society of Authors and Dramatic Composers, le prix Emile Augier, from the Académie Française, and the Grand Prix de la Critique for best literary creation.
De Bruin wanted to invite Lemoine to the University as part of an ongoing partnership between the author and one of her French seminar classes. After reading his plays, in the fall of 2017 students in the class wrote Lemoine letters with their reflections and reactions to his work. The students worked in three groups for seven weeks on translations and produced three complete translations. They then had a Skype session with Lemoine to talk about their experience. This semester, students have picked up on the previous students’ work to perfect the translations and bring to the URI public and greater RI community a lively, melodramatic play that will be sure to surprise, enchant and move.
URI’s Distinguished Visiting Artist Program aims to enrich URI’s cultural life and provide students and faculty with a deeper understanding of arts in contemporary culture. The program is sponsored by the URI Office of the Provost.
Emma Gauthier, a student writer in the URI Marketing and Communications Department and a journalism major, wrote this press release.