Compagnie Carmina plays Yasmina Reza in San Francisco

At D-10 of the first, by a beautiful end of Sunday, the Carmina Company refines the final settings of its first play, "The God of Carnage" Yasmina Reza, she will play from October 10 to November 2 at Shelton Theater from San Francisco.

Created only a few months ago by Pascale Couderc, a well-known director in the Bay Area for many of the plays played by Platypus, Generation Theater, or Le Théâtre du Coin, Compagnie Carmina focuses on contemporary French-language theater. "The theatrical landscape in French is quite limited in San Francisco. I had already created two troupes in fifteen years spent here, but Carmina really has a specific objective: to play unpublished pieces, which we discover by browsing the festivals in France", Explains its founder. "In early 2018, I staged in this spirit "Farewell Mr Haffmann", presented off Avignon in the previous summer. It was before she went to Paris and she won 4 Molières."

The troupe Carmina brings together actors who have all played in "Farewell Mr Haffmann", and who have not hesitated to follow Pascale Couderc in his new adventure: "Pascale can offer us anything, I am!"Says Marion Lovinger, whose third collaboration with the director. Emmanuelle Lambert, she is in her twelfth play under the direction of Pascale Couderc, who admits with humility that it is not always easy to do theater in French in San Francisco: "We have to find actors: I am neither a coach nor a theater teacher, and the French-speaking population here is rather technocrat! It takes a grain of madness to get on stage and training is hard …"

The four actors learned the text of the "God of Carnage" this summer, before starting six weeks of rehearsal. "This comedy, very cruel, features two couples, who meet to discuss love, marriage, quarrels of children … Gathered to fill the boredom of the god of carnage, these characters lose all control of their humanity, until becoming beasts"Says Pascale Couderc.

Raised at the Antoine theater in 2008 with Isabelle Huppert, the piece was adapted by Roman Polanski to the cinema in 2011. For the actors of Carmina, it remains furiously up to date: "The play is reminiscent of what is happening here, in England, or in Brazil: it is completely out of the propriety of conventions, one wonders if an adult can do all that, or dare to say what is heard on scene."The troupe is eager to meet its audience, whom it hopes as wide as possible through the use of surtitles in English. "If we do our job well, we hope that the play will bring the audience to ask a lot of questions."