ARIANNE MNOUCHKINE: SMALL LIVES, EPIC SCALE

Viewing Mnouchkine's Les Ephemeres after her big themes of greek tragedy, the shakepearean history plays and the journeys of Odysseus, is a surprise.  It requires relearning what to look for in Mnouchkine.  The epic scale of a performance in seven hours is packed with the details of modern dispersal.  War, history and forgetting are some of the mechanisms through which the narrative fragmentation takes place in Les Ephermers.  One is in the world of a young woman and her dead mother, whose poignant story is the Ariadne thread to multiple lives and periods.  Mnouchkine's Les Ephemeres investigates loss and melancholia as virtuosic vignettes in epic time.  The little details of a look or a piece of cake becomes a hook into the past.  History is ephemeral but memory lives to haunt.  Unlike the Mnouchkine of big gestures drawn from Yakshagana, Flamenco, Kabuki, Kathakali and Sufi movement that one was immersed in Les Atrides, this feast of detail is an introspectic Mnouchkine, looking melancholia in its depths and searching for its meanings.  Death is at the door of this piece, and fear is not far behind.  Rotating discs carrying half a dozen actors at a time float into the dream worlds of the daily.  In Ephemeres, one is in the field of the cinematic Mnouchkine: seamless gliding mise en scenes, theatricality of a slice of life, fade ins and fade outs of reality and memory.  Jean Jacques Lemaitres' haunting music calibrates the pacing and development of the piece, grounding the openings scenes in his distinctive bass cello invocations.  One is left desiring the punch that always distinguishes Mnouchkine's storytelling from other great directors of our time.