Found in Translation Festival to Host Reading of Samuel Gallet's COMMUNIQUE #10, May 26

The Playwrights Foundation's Des Voix...Found in Translation Festival is thrilled to present a staged reading of Communique #10 by Samuel Gallet for the first time ever in English, on Saturday, May 26th 4:00pm at Z Space, translated and directed by Rob Melrose. Communique #10 is the recipient of the Lyon's Theatre Days in 2010, and will be staged by Jean-Philippe Albizzati in France.

Samuel Gallet is a member of the "Cooperative d'ecriture", a group founded by thirteen playwrights under the impulsion of Fabrice Melquiot. His plays have been staged by top French directors, and Oswald by night, his rock poem, has become a concert animated by Baptiste Tanne and Melissa Acchiardi.

Communique #10 provides a glimpse into a heightened world where the characters seek to find their place amidst the riots and police raids in the outskirts of a metropolitan city. Samuel divulges in a recent interview on our Festival blog, "My pieces often evoke characters or destinies that don't fit into the world as it is. They are socially isolated and marginal characters. The idea for the play came from the situation in France with its housing projects and social deprivation, from the various riots that have erupted in France since 1980s. And [from a desire] to make heard this vital energy of those seeking to find their place to participate in the world and to exist with greater dignity."

"What makes Samuel's play so challenging is that he not only writes in a wide variety of urban slangs, but he also writes in a heightened poetic language that is surprising and strange even in the original French. The characters speak in ways that would sound artfully unnatural to a modern French audience." notes Rob Melrose.

This isn't Les Miserables, ya'll. But in today's America, highly charged with bold political oppositions and Occupy Wallstreet, we can find universal truth and parallels in this French perspective.

Samuel confesses, "I hope that audience members will be able to hear the differences in the points of view that drive the play, [to see] that things are many-sided and that what is at stake in my theater, more than a denunciation of a global political system, is the attempt to have meeting and understanding between people from different backgrounds. That despite the tragic dimensions of play, horizons and hopes open. That the characters carry within themselves the possibility of not letting the forces of death destroy them."

Tickets are $15 in advance from https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/233842