Frank Pullen's theatre company The Journeymen has long been one of my favorite troupes. With the tiniest of budgets and in the tightest of spaces, this indefatigable writer/director/producer is endlessly inventive in throwing up provocative and well-though-out shows year-round.
With his frequent collaborator Jean-Paul Menou, Pullen's latest presentation is an adaptation of Jean Cocteau's underground classic Le Livre Blanc, or The White Book, the multi-faceted artist's semi-autobiographical fiction on coming to terms with his homosexuality and with love in general at the turn of the last century.
Menou plays Cocteau with a gentle impishness that also reveals the author's inner pain without ever turning maudlin. Strapping Victor Holstein and chameleonic Christopher Zimowski will have moved on to other projects when the work re-opens at the Gerber-Hart Library space in Edgewater later this month, but I'm confident that The Journeymen will find fitting replacements for them in this moving and captivating 75-minute work.
LE LIVRE BLANC / THE WHITE BOOK
Andrew Patner / WBEZ Radio
I loved this piece. It’s strange using the "L" word so freely, but it’s an honest expression marking the respect I hold for Chicago’s The Journeymen Theatre Company and their production of Le Livre Blanc: the white book, presented at the Greenwich Street Theatre, as part of the 2003 New York International Fringe Festival.
Jean Cocteau’s Le Livre Blanc: the white book was written and published anonymously in France in 1928. It is a semi-autobiographical account of the love affairs of a young man in the early years of the last century. Frank Pullen’s adaptation is written in a narrative style bringing to mind Stephen Spender’s letters to Christopher Isherwood and the more contemporary diaries of composer Ned Rorem. It is an honor to witness a performance of this Modernist play, taking into account the risks taken by Cocteau to write so honestly about same-sex desire in a time when homosexuality was most certainly an unspoken hidden reality.
The company of actors includes Jean-Paul Menou, Mark Konold, and Joseph Krstyen. Menou handles the narrative text beautifully as he brings to life Cocteau’s mirror image of himself. Konlod and Krstyen effectively move throughout the piece portraying a multitude of lovers, intimates, and desired adolescent boys and young men.
The production is guided by the sensitive hands of director Pullen, who tells this story through the simplicity of a gesture, the ease of a pose, and the honesty of a moment. Stephen Arnold’s lighting design finds its success in the subtlety of each transition as he illuminates Cocteau’s characters in the shadows of light. Ian Goodman’s original music evokes a Parisian cabaret with a seductive period accuracy.
If you enjoy narration spoken as text and care for a glimpse into our hidden gay past, this is a production you must see.
NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL FRINGE FESTIVAL
Kevin Connell / Theatermaina
