Kathleen Chalfant and More to Join Lineup for Marguerite Duras Festival, 2/17-3/18

Kathleen Chalfant will join a host of other attendees at this year's Marguerite Duras Festival, taking place from February 17th through March 18th. The works of Marguerite Duras, France's well-known author, playwright and film director, will be celebrated during a month-long multidisciplinary festival in New York City. The festival will also feature French actor William Nadylam and a presentation of Duras' Diptych: The Lover and La Musica Deuxième directed by Astrid Bas.

The festival will have a distinctly feminine touch, with four female directors presenting performances based on Duras's writings. At the Baryshnikov Arts Center, director Razerka Ben Sadia-Lavant will present the U.S. premiere of L'homme assis dans le couloir , a play about love's erotic powers and inevitable pain, based on a 1980 novella by Duras (Feb 19-21). The Center will also stage Christine Letailleur's theatrical version of Hiroshima mon amour , the celebrated New Wave movie by Alain Resnais, whose screenplay was written by Duras (March 4-6, performance contains nudity). The French Institute Alliance Française will present two performances: Diptych: The Lover and La Musica Deuxième , directed by Astrid Bas (Feb 26-27), and La Vie matérielle by Irina Brook (March 5-6). The former is a unique theatrical event pairing a staged and set-to-music adaptation of Duras's prize-winning autobiographical novel The Lover (1984) with her play La Musica Deuxième (1985). The latter is inspired by Duras's collection of free-ranging essays La Vie matérielle and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Taken together, they shed light on femininity and women's roles in society.

A month-long photography exhibit at the French Cultural Services' Payne Whitney Mansion will reveal a more intimate side of Marguerite Duras (Feb 18-March 18). Photographer Hélène Bamberger, who works for such well-known publications as Time, Elle, Le Figaro, and Der Spiegel, chronicled her summers with Marguerite Duras in Trouville, Normandy, from 1980 to 1994. The pictures, depicting the author's haunts, her worktable, her room, her lover Yann Andréa, and Marguerite Duras herself, offer a poignant glimpse into her private life.

Naturally, a festival celebrating an author would not be complete without readings and lectures. On February 17, Tony-nominated actress Kathleen Chalfant (Angels in America) and French actor William Nadylam (White Material) will come together for an exclusive reading of excerpts from Marguerite Duras's works at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. In the same venue on March 2, French professor and Marguerite Duras specialist Sophie Bogaert will introduce and discuss unique footage of Duras unveiling her conception of experimental cinema as she evokes her vision of a film adaptation of her novel The Lover to Claude Berri. The French Institute Alliance Française will host two lectures by Duras biographer (and former FIAF director) Jean Vallier on February 18. In Meet the Writer... en français !, he will speak, in French, about her life and legacy and about his own experiences as her biographer. In Bringing Duras's Words to the Stage, he will focus on her work as a playwright and director, and explore how Duras's words can best be brought to life for today's audiences (in English).

The month-long festival will conclude with a series at Anthology Film Archives, Marguerite Duras on Film (March 12-18). As well as having her work repeatedly adapted for the screen by others, Duras wrote original scripts for various filmmakers (most notably Alain Resnais and Georges Franju), before embarking on her own directorial career in 1967. Over the next seventeen years, she directed 14 feature films of her own (as well as numerous shorts), including masterpieces such as Nathalie Granger and India Song. Exploring the nature and limits of the medium with the same fiercely intelligent, radically experimental approach that made her writings so singular and important, Duras's cinema is a crucial component of her life's work.

Kathleen Chalfant created roles in Angels in America, for which she was nominated for the Tony Award, and Wit. She won numerous awards for Wit, including the first of her two Obie Awards, as well as the Drama Desk Award.

For more information, visit www.frenchculture.org.