A French Star Brings Her Career-Saving Play to New York

In 2003, three decades into her career, Dominique Blanc experienced every actor’s worst nightmare: The phone stopped ringing.

Approaching 50, she was one of France’s most celebrated performers, fresh off an acclaimed stage run in a classic tragedy, Jean Racine’s “Phèdre.” But the subsequent, yearslong lack of offers “deeply unsettled me,” Blanc said in a recent interview. “I found myself in extreme solitude. I really believed I would never be able to set foot on a stage again.”

“La Douleur,” a searing, award-winning one-woman show that will have its American premiere at the FIAF Florence Gould Hall in New York on March 13, became a way to process the hurt and take charge. Blanc’s character, lifted from a book by the French author Marguerite Duras, awaits her husband’s return from a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, uncertain whether he is even alive.

The show grew out of a series of readings she did from the book with the director Patrice Chéreau, a longtime collaborator. In 2008, Blanc pitched him a light stage version, requiring only a table, chairs and old costumes from Blanc’s closet. While Duras’s book was translated into English as “The War: A Memoir,” its original title simply means “Pain,” and in her show, Blanc starkly recreates women’s anguish as their partners return from untold horrors.

“It was the first time I was completely alone onstage, with this extraordinary yet difficult text. I had so much fear,” Blanc said. “But it saved me.”

For several years, Blanc reclaimed her artistic agency by performing “La Douleur” in theaters, school gymnasiums and prisons, both in France and abroad. In 2022, as the theater world prepared to mark the 10th anniversary of Chéreau’s death, the production was revived.