A few weeks ago, I got a phone call from my grandmother’s best friend, whom I’d never met before. She’s French and lives in the United States, but she came back to France to visit her sister in Paris. My grandmother had told her I was in Toulouse, so she called me to ask if I wanted to visit her in Paris over the weekend. She offered to pay for my train ticket and she wanted to take me to the theatre Saturday night. How could I refuse?
After a six-hour train ride, a walk through an outdoor market and a visit to Sacré Coeur, the Arc du Triomphe and the Champs-Elysées, my new “aunt” took me to the Théâtre de l’Atelier. The theatre isn’t too far from a bigger, more well-known theatre called the Opera Garnier, which is a sacred temple of art whose majesty lifts the spirit even just with its outside appearance…but I refused to visit it earlier in the day.
Why? Theaters are my favorite places. The space, the shadows, the silence…all of these qualities bring about unequalled peaceful and magical qualities. But after the end of my artistic career, once I had definitely left these places, entering a theatre became extremely painful. But in Paris, I sat in the second balcony of a small theatre, watching a play called “The Father”. The play tells the story of an old man who is losing his memory and of how his daughter takes care of him. As the story unfolds, you discover that it’s told from the father’s point of view, as the events do not happen chronologically.
I was afraid to go to this play because the theatre reminds me of something I miss and also because the play was in French. It’s true that I cried for a moment at the beginning, when the stage first lit up. But afterwards, the story enveloped me and I forgot that it was in French. The words weren’t too difficult, maybe because the magic of the theatre and the universal language of the arts are always comprehensible.