A Woman Alone
John Malkovich: "Dario Fo and Franca Rame were never in better hands than Meyer's, and Lee is a star."
Winner of 2007 ‘Best Actress’ and ‘Audience Choice’ Awards, MESS International Theatre Festival, Sarajevo (BHG)
Winner of 2009 ‘Mravac’ Award, Poetic Author’s Festival, Mostar (BiG)
A Woman Alone
Our woman alone is a simple, naïve character. She dresses herself in revealing clothes like those worn by the women she admires on television. She tells the story of her life to a new tenant who just moved into the building across the street from her. She’s thrilled that she’s finally found someone to talk to, to confide in—even if the person is across the street. She tells her life story in a comic, grotesque way. We laugh, we laugh a lot at this piece, but in the end, we have a bitter taste in our mouths.
The piece is comic, grotesque, on purpose. First of all, because we women have been crying for two thousand years. So let’s laugh now, even at ourselves.
Franca Rame
A Word About A Woman Alone
The musicality and the efficiency of text as a primal entity are accented in this production. The piece is expressed through an unbroken rhythm of words in a sober setting. There is nothing to distract the public—even the lighting is simple and direct.
An intimate relationship is created with the public so that they become an active part of the theater. As the disturbing, humorous character reveals her interior landscape, the stage disappears and the spectator becomes part of the intense, desolate world.
This performance was first presented at Le Theatre du Chaudron, La Cartoucherie, Paris, France in December 2003 under the direction of Bob Meyer of the Gare St. Lazare Players.
Bob Meyer
PRESS COVERAGE
REVELATION OF AN ACTRESS
Le Figaro, 10.12.2003
by Armelle Héliot
….At the Théâtre du Chaudron, the version that Meyer and Delong offer us of this heartbreaking text, which is A Woman Alone, by Dario Fo and France Rame - here in the translation of Valeria Tasca - is remarkable.
….And Lee Delong, firmly held by Bob Meyer, in an audacious play that never becomes expressionistic but is fascinatingly mobile. What strength, what precision, in this musical interpretation which never hammers the psychological or political foundation - in the sense that Dario Fo and France Rame speak to us about violence against women. An energy controlled to the very regard, to the very gestures - those hands that say so much - without ever being demonstrative, Lee Delong moves, overwhelms and gives her "character" a radiant human depth, despite unhappiness and adversity. It is very beautiful.
STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHTS HOUSEWIFE
OSLOBODENJE 02/11/07
by Dragan Komadina
French actress Lee DeLong succeeded for an hour to turn Obala Stage into a real volcano of acting energy. Using exclusively her face and her speech, she made us participants of a daily prison ritual of an everyday housewife who is condemned to serving her husband, her child and her brother-in-law….
All that Maria, which is the name of the protagonist, offers us without large movements and gestures, but only with an extremely suggestive face, that powerful acting instrument with which she so skillfully mirrors her interior states and subtle mimicry…. Lee DeLong achieved great control and balance over the emotions she compresses, pushing them down all the time, as this sweet housewife, Maria. Even though from time to time, she whistles like a teapot, she continues to boil in an atmosphere of complete apathy, hypocrisy and violence….
Stand up for your rights housewife, behind the bars of her own home, through which the sun’s rays and the pervert neighbor’s curious peeping penetrate tells her unfortunate destiny.
