When I ask how he thinks the piece - with its J’Accuse …! vibe - will be received by the kind of expensively bespectacled cosmopolitan New Yorkers who attend experimental theater in Dumbo, he tells me he wants to do here what he thinks he does back home, which is to shake up the brownstone bourgeois: “I, of course, had the impression that most Americans don’t care about class at all. He begins and punctuates most sentences with a soft little “ oui,” though he still speaks with self-righteous moral indignation. Blah, blah, blah,” Louis tells me, sitting on a lumpy couch in his dressing room. “I was born this gay boy in the north of France, in a very masculine, very homophobic context. So now he’s onstage, where, with his big, unblinking eyes, he exudes a certain eager, boyish charm recognizable by any gay who spent their childhood seeking and rarely finding familial or social affirmation - and suspecting that your very existence embarrassed your family. “I love the idea of being … an experimental fighter.”
I think it has such a cheesy aspect to it - old-fashioned,” he tells me. “Sometimes I don’t even want to label myself as a novelist.
It’s poetic, heady stuff, but Louis is not a natural stage performer: As this magazine’s theater critic, Helen Shaw, put it in her review, “He is not an actor, so he has few tools to either access or imitate his emotion in performance.” But since Louis is that most French of things, a public intellectual (the Times once referred to his philosopher-heavy friend group as “a kind of glamorous 21st-century update of the Paris engagée of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus”), he likes to get his message out cross-platform. To keep it lively and emphasize his own gay intellectual path out of the working class, he occasionally breaks out into lip-synced song-and-dance to numbers he would perform as a kid - much to the horror of his father- including “Barbie Girl” and “My Heart Will Go On.” It’s a stage adaptation of his 2018 autofictional novel of the same name, in which Louis, lithe and pale in a Pokémon T-shirt and dark-blue jeans, melancholically recites passages, mostly in French, about his troubled relationship with his homophobic working-class father, capitalism, dead-end masculinity, and the neoliberal French elite. In a way, as a gay boy, I was born a performer,” the celebrated young French writer Édouard Louis tells me late last week when I meet up with him after a performance of his one-man show Who Killed My Father at St.