LÉA MILLET / C^ie ORAN FANTÔME

Mémé’s children and grandchildren have received a lot from her: values, knowledge ahead of its time, superstitions, the weight of one’s heritage, and the light-hearted pleasure of boisterous monthly family gatherings around a karaoke table. This time, however, the family matriarch is absent, and the table is split by a grief that seeps through every crack and ultimately gives meaning to the gathering. Sustained by a number of performers with contrasting stage presences, the piece moves between celebration and dizzying abandon. In this palace of pop music turned into an intimate hideaway, bodies strain to remain in their assigned place and distinct voices meld to create a harmony born of their singularity. From Céline Dion’s choruses to Julio Iglesias’ melodies, alliances shift and roles become reshuffled within the orphaned tribe, between those who speak the loudest and those who invoke the most thunderous silence. Certains pleurent leurs morts, nous on les chante [“Some cry for their dead, we sing for them”] is the debut play by Léa Millet, a well-known stage and film actor, especially for her leading role in Joël Pommerat’s play Cinderella. Millet treats the stage as an ambiguous space, at once familiar and ghostly, incisive and overflowing.