‘Returning to Reims’ Ponders Europe's Working-Class Blues

NEW YORK — “It’s not theater.”

So says the director to the actress. Spoken with jokey reassurance, this disclaimer is delivered in the opening moments of “Returning to Reims,” an all-too timely rumination on working-class disaffection and nationalist politics from German director Thomas Ostermeier, which opened Sunday at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.

What Paul (Bush Moukarzel), the director, means is that the performer, Katy (Nina Hoss), needn’t worry about fluffing lines. After all, they’re in a studio where she’ll be recording the voice-over for a film by Paul, and mistakes can be erased with the flick of a dial.

But audiences familiar with the work of Ostermeier, and his Schaubühne Berlin company, may hear a different, more confrontational meaning in Paul’s words. Ostermeier, whose productions of classics like “Richard III” (seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last fall) seemed not so much to push envelopes as to rip them apart, is celebrated for redefining how theater should behave.

But even his longtime fans are unlikely to be prepared for the seeming noneventfulness of the first half of “Returning to Reims,” adapted from a 2009 memoir by French philosopher Didier Eribon. Most of what happens during that hour seems to be willfully, even numbingly anti-dramatic.

The spectacle, such as it is, consists almost entirely of Hoss reading the words of Eribon, while annotative video footage (some featuring Eribon himself) is projected onto a large screen behind her. It’s true that a lot of what is said — about the disavowal of progressive politics by the blue-collar provincial society from which Eribon emerged (and escaped) — provides rich food for thought.

It is also true that Hoss, best known to U.S. audiences for playing Astrid the German spy on the Showtime series “Homeland,” is an attention-worthy narrator. She reads in a low-pitched, deceptively neutral voice that inflects ostensible objectivity with the slightest whisper of lamentation.

The charisma of its central interpreter aside, what distinguishes “Returning” from a presentation at an academic conference or perhaps, given its European glamour quotient, Davos?

The answer to that question emerges by furtive degrees, in ways that remind us that what is being discussed here is by no means just academic. The show is definitely worth seeing, but you may not think so until after it’s over.

This production, which is performed in English, was conceived by Hoss in response to the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Like many members of the urban intelligentsia, Hoss was surprised and alarmed by the sharp rightward turn among American voters, which reflected a similar political drift in her native Germany and throughout Europe.

She found that Eribon’s memoir expanded thoughtfully on similar questions. Like Eduoard Louis’ best-selling French novel “The End of Eddy” (2014), “Returning to Reims” portrays a gay, bookish youth growing up in a provincial, blue-collar town where homosexuality and intellectualism are anathema.

The adult Eribon, now living in Paris, revisits that world after the death of his father. It is a journey that prompts its own, outward-reaching odyssey of self-examination.

How, he wonders, did the sort of people who religiously voted Communist when he was growing up among them come to support the populist National Front of Marine Le Pen? Eribon further considers how the intellectual left, his adopted tribe, has contributed to such alienation, even to the point of waging “an implacable war” against blue-collar interests.

Eribon’s language may be academic, but it is infused with anguished passion. And it soon becomes clear that those involved with the stage version of “Returning” — and by that I mean both its characters and their creators — take this material very personally.

As she reads into the microphone, Katy reveals intermittent flickers of uneasiness — not with Eribon’s words but with how Paul has edited them, and with the accompanying footage.

She interrupts, tentatively at first, with her objections. Paul and Toni (Ali Gadema), who runs the studio, point out that they have deadlines to meet.

“That’s insane,” she says to the men. “We’re doing a political movie here and you can’t have a political discussion?”

Those of us watching from our seats may extrapolate that since Hoss and associates are doing a political play, shouldn’t we too be part of the political discussion? Of course, we should. And we are.

From that point, the fourth wall between stage and audience becomes increasingly porous. Comments and asides are now occasionally and casually pitched directly to the house. Toni turns out to have a side line as a rapper, and he performs for us with support from Paul.

In other words, the line between us and them becomes blurrier, making us think about the bigger, class-oriented division between another Us and Them at the heart of this production. Speaking of which, is Paul’s interpretation of Eribon’s book itself guilty of intellectual dishonesty?

We find ourselves newly contextualizing earlier encounters among Katy, Paul and Toni, which had a whiff of sexual and professional condescension. It is Katy, as a woman and actress, who is mostly the recipient of such attitudes.

But it is also she who prevails. By the end, she is presenting what amounts to her own film, an account of the life of a German political activist idealist of optimistically expanding vistas and pursuits. His name is Willi Hoss, and he is the father of the actress Nina Hoss. As I said, “Returning” takes its politics personally.

In the viewing, this production is rarely exciting in the terms of conventional drama. Nor is its portrayal of the creation of a film entirely credible. But it’s smart in expressly theatrical ways, and its effectiveness is subliminal. Even the seeming somnolence of Hoss’s voice-over narration has its purpose.

Ideas have been planted in your head without your even being aware of it, as if while you were sleeping.

The conversation conducted on such different levels on the stage is likely to keep talking, and talking, in your head the next morning.

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PRODUCTION NOTES

“Returning to Reims” runs through Feb. 25 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; 718-254-8779, stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 2 hours.

Credits: Based on “Retour à Reims” by Didier Eribon; directed by Thomas Ostermeier; sets and costumes by Nina Wetzel; music by Nils Ostendorf; sound by Jochen Jezussek; dramaturgy by Florian Borchmeyer and Maja Zade; lighting by Erich Schneider; stage manager, Roman Balko; assistant director, Christoph Buchegger; film direction by Sébastian Dupouey and Thomas Ostermeier; camerawork by Marcus Lenz, Sébastian Dupouey and Marie Sanchez; editing by Sébastian Dupouey; sound by Peter Carstens and Robert Nabholz; production management by Stefan Nagel and Annette Poehlmann. Presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse.

Cast: Nina Hoss, Bush Moukarzel and Ali Gadema.