Outdoor cafe terraces are part and parcel of the Parisian way of life — ready meeting points for socializing and people-watching, across ages and social classes. Yet the word for them in French also means to floor, or bring down, someone.
On Nov. 13, 2015, the worst Islamist terrorist attack in French history did just that to Parisians, bringing horror to cafes and entertainment venues in a string of coordinated shootings and bombings. Now Laurent Gaudé, a prominent French author and playwright, has channeled the collective trauma of that night into a stunning play, “Terraces,” which had its world premiere at the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris on Wednesday.
If you were in the city that night in 2015, fielding panicked calls from relatives and friends as news alerts pinged, the prospect of a show summoning those memories may be cause for trepidation. And “Terraces” does bring it all back — the gut punch, the nausea. Yet Gaudé and the director, Denis Marleau, manage just the right amount of distance and emotional finesse to haunt rather than reopen wounds.
It isn’t the first attempt to dramatize the attack. In 2017, a book by Antoine Leiris, whose wife was among the victims, was adapted for the stage, and several short plays have focused on the stories of survivors.
With “Terraces,” however, Gaudé works on a much more ambitious scale. Its structure is choral: The text weaves together not just the experience of victims, but the voices of people whose lives changed in other ways that night. Passers-by, spouses, parents, emergency medical workers, special forces and a janitor all make appearances, with stories that overlap and build up to a collective remembrance of the attack.
Extensive research evidently went into the production, but “Terraces” doesn’t fit neatly into the genre of documentary theater. Its characters are composite creations rather than real people: Many introduce themselves under several names and stress that theirs are collective stories. While some characters pop up time and again over the course of the play, they often occupy a liminal space between dream and reality, reappearing at the scenes of other shootings or speaking from beyond the grave.
The sets, created by Stéphanie Jasmin, also make no attempt to recreate the various locations that the terrorists targeted. The 17 actors move like shadows on an empty stage, often speaking directly to the audience, with hazy, black-and-white close-ups of Paris streets projected onto a screen behind them. When attacks begin — in cafes and the Bataclan, the concert hall where 90 people were killed — portions of the floor tilt slowly, a restrained and effective visual for the worlds being turned upside down.
In lieu of verisimilitude, “Terraces” has the hallmarks of a classic tragedy. Fate is a recurring theme: From the first scene, characters going about their normal days foreshadow the disaster to come. Gaudé, whose writing radiates lyrical empathy, describes the haphazard nature of the killing as “the song of chance,” with a line that keeps returning: “You die, you don’t.” Like an ancient chorus, the actors often join voices, speaking as one or echoing each other; in one harrowing scene, the silhouettes of victims attempt to grab the attention of the first doctor to enter the Bataclan.
Marleau, the show’s French Canadian director, does an outstanding job of not getting in the way. In some scenes, as characters are killed, the actors simply turn their back on us, quietly. When an emergency dispatcher gets on the line with a woman who is hiding inside the Bataclan, he simply holds the hand of her shadow onstage — until she goes silent, and her hand drops.
Moments like this are enough to make you tear up, even after the show has ended, and yet they never feel gratuitous. Neither does the plight of the recurring characters: the twin sisters who had reunited in Paris to celebrate their birthday, or a mother who left her infant child and partner after a fight to head to the Bataclan.
“Terraces” opens and closes with a young lesbian couple, played with vital force by Marilou Aussilloux and Alice Rahimi. At the start, they long feverishly for their first kiss that evening. Then, when they are caught in gunfire on a cafe terrace, in a narrative bait-and-switch, Gaudé revises their story and brings them a different cafe under attack, then to the Bataclan, then to the crowded hallways of a Paris hospital.
Through them, life seems to be bargaining with fate, over and over. Death may be their destiny in “Terraces,” but they seal it at the very end with their long-delayed kiss, as the chorus watches on. As 21st-century tragedies go, this one comes close to the lofty goal of catharsis.
Terrasses
Through June 9 at the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris; colline.fr.
