Theater Play “Ita L. born Goldfeld”

Avignon et Moi” trophy for best Seul en Scène at the Festival Off d'Avignon 2024.

Synopsis:

France, the land of human rights, where Jews have nothing to fear. Or so Ita thinks. Until that day in December 1942.

Three men knocked on her door. Two French policemen, and a tall, thin man in a long black leather coat. “You have one hour to gather a few things. We'll be back for you”, he said in an authoritarian tone.

Minimalist décor - a desk, a pedestal table, two chairs on a carpet, a suitcase covered with an astrakhan coat stamped with the yellow star. Ita evolves in this small, familiar universe, that of her apartment on rue du Petit Musc, in the center of the capital. She recalls and recounts with passion and emotion the stages of her long life, her meeting and marriage to Salomon, their tiny apartment on Rue des Juifs in Odessa, the sale of sewing needles on the markets, the Russian pogroms, then flight, exile, the sadness of no longer seeing her two sisters, who had settled in America and Argentina, and the birth of her three children. A long life, punctuated by joys and sorrows, but also filled with hopes for the future... But what future?

Ita has an hour. Probably the longest hour of her life. One hour to choose whether to stay and follow the police, or to flee. Again. One hour is precisely how long the play lasts, as if to plunge the spectators into the reality of time, where each minute falls like a thunderbolt.