To See a Friend Cry (Voir un Ami Pleurer) was performed by Théâtre du Rêve (TdR) last night (4/4) before a sold-out house at the French Embassy. The play, delivered primarily in French and using subtitles, examines America through the eyes of five French-speaking Americans, in multiple roles, in their attempts to make their way - in European society and at home - in a post-9/11 world.  It examines both the way "language speaks man" and way you lug your baggage around in another tongue. 

The play's title is taken from a bittersweet song by Jacques Brel and the friend here is America.  If you are looking for delightful cultural confusions of a Dianne Johnson novel you won't find it in this play. The perception through European eyes is that we are racist, sexist, arrogant, and overweight people, suffering from our excesses and pride and, though it will please some, sounds like a stereotype, if not a cliché. The playwright, Olivier Coyette, has taken an exercises-in-style approach popularized by Raymond Queneau, and might be called 99 ways of looking at America, many of them bad, uses comedy, tragedy, burlesque, songs, poetry, and audiovisuals.  This assemblage leads to some confusion in the storyline as we move from one disparate scene to another.  The overt Anti-Americanism in the opening vignette, where the N-bomb is dropped repeatedly, sounded didactic and forced at times, if not offensive. Working better were the absurdist dentist waiting room and hilarious scientific presentation scenes (I never thought colorectal cancer could be rendered funny), where a search for love and a search for certainty, respectively, were LOL.  Interspersed were talking heads segments loosely translated "poor words" or "words of the poor," when the actors individually laid bare their characters motivations and desires.  The first ends with Sondheim's "Our Time" from "Merrily We Roll Along" and though tuneful and uplifting, placing it here seemed odd since it's the musical's finale and this show has a way to go.   The Abraham and Isaac close to an apocalyptic scene was poignant, with the biblical reading paired with a listing of the names and ages of many who had died in Iraq.