Join us for an evening celebrating the work of the late Jean-Luc Lagrace, one of France’s most significant playwrights of the second half of the twentieth century.
It’s Only the End of the World (Juste la fin du monde) is a play by Jean-Luc Lagarce about a character named Louis who returns to his family to announce his terminal illness. Lagarce wrote the play in 1990, when he was considering his own death. In 2008, the Comedie-Francaise added the play to its repertoire, where it won the 2008 Moliere Award for Best Show in a National Theatre. In 2016, the play was adapted into a film of the same name by Xavier Dolan.
About the play: Louis returns to his home to announce his terminal illness and suddenly leaves after his family members respond negatively to his appearance. The characters struggle to communicate and they are brutally exposed to existential reflections about the meaning of life and death in our world. Stage directions state that the play is set on “a Sunday” but also that it covers almost an entire year.
Directed by Sylvaine Guyot.
Guyot is a Professor of French Literature, Thought, and Culture at NYU and the author of Racine ou l’alchimie du tragique (PUF, 2010) and Racine et le corps tragique (PUF, 2014). She has co-edited a special issue of Littératures classiques on L’Œil classique (2013, with T. Conley), a new edition of Racine’s Théâtre complet (Garnier, 2013, with A. Viala), and a forthcoming volume on The Eighteenth-Century French Stage Online (MIT Press, 2018, with J. Ravel). She has published numerous articles on Corneille, the intersections of drama and painting, Louis Marin, the figure of the king in 17th-century tragedy, as well as the development of aesthetics and the neoclassical sublime. Stationing herself at the cross-flow of scholarly research, digital humanities, and artistic creation, Guyot is a co-leader of the “Comédie-Française Registers Project” and was the director and founder of theatre company La Troupe at Harvard where she held the chair of the interdisciplinary TDM Theater, Dance & Media program.
