The author had the opportunity to participate in a workshop at the Centre des auteurs dramatiques CEAD in Montreal in 2007. Nombre de personnages 25 Personnage(s), 3 Femme(s), 4 Homme(s), 7 Acteur(s) Particularités distribution 25 characters (11 W, 14 M) played by 3 W and 4 M | |
Original
- Original en français par Olivier Kemeid sous le titre de L'énéide [2007] (Lansman Éditeur, 2008)
Réédition: (Leméac Éditeur, Montréal, Québec: 2019) 14.95$
- Trois Tristes Tigres, 29 novembre 2007
Résumé
Civil war runs amuck in a city where people have kept on dancing instead of heeding the portents around them. A modern day Aeneas flees - with his past (his father Anchises) and his future (his son), his wife (Creusa) and his best friend (Achates) in tow. Their exile, gathering other lost ones but losing Creusa and Anchises in the fray, takes them to a land where plants leak blood, to a beach where well-off vacationers cannot face the horror they represent, to a refugee camp where all hope has disappeared, to a momentary halt in an unwelcoming city where Aeneas runs out of will power. Achates and Aeneas at last descend to a netherworld where a lascivious old crone admits them to Hades and the ghost of Anchises gives them the strength to conquer a new land. A highly physical and richly imagistic epic of violence, courage, doubt, and tenacity, Kemeid's Aeneid grapples with the most awful realities of the twenty-first century.
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- Décor: A discotheque
An apartment
A street
A nursing home
The port
A shore
A beach
The hotel
A luxurious cabin cruiser [They're going at top speed. Loud music. Champagne.]
Under a tarpaulin on a desert island
The bridge of a boat
A storm [Everyone is silent. Achaemenides, his eyes covered by a bandana, guides the ship. The winds roar.]
An office in a city
[A squat]
[An alley.] [Night. Sounds of the city. A man is covering a wall with graffiti. Achates watches him.]
[An apartment.]
[A window. Aeneas, alone.]
[Catacombs in the sewers. A row of skulls.]
[Sewers.]
[A brothel.]
[Hades.]
[A shack in a refugee camp.]
[Camp infirmary.]
[The camp.]
[A podium in the camp. A general at the lectern.]
[A tree in the camp.]
[Wire Fencing.]
- Caractéristiques des personnages: Original cast :
Oliver Aubin: Coroebus; Robert; Compatriot; Achaemenides; Graffiti artist; General; Elderly farmer
Marie-José Bastien: Beroë; Hotelkeeper; Sibyl; Allecto
Simon Boudreault: Hector; Anchises; Gatherer ; Head of clan
Eugénie Gaillard: Creusa; Lucy; Immigration officer; Old toothless woman; Lavinia
Geoffrey Gaquère: Achates
Johanne Haberlin: Pyrgo; Helen; Elissa
Emmanuel Schwartz: Aeneas
Extrait
« COMPATRIOT : Protect your son | Love him cherish him don't bring him up on hate or resentment | Don't name our enemies | Let him know what we've suffered that yes but keep him from coming back | Find him a land that will gather him in a welcoming land a safe land and we the barely alive we'll live in his memory like shades without haunting him no we will not haunt him like vulgar | vengeful ghosts | You know | The day when he'll have his land a wife from that land work a roof and a first-born child who'll be part of that new nation | Then we'll have won the war | And the gods themselves will have to bow down to it »