From midsummer to near winter, a score of New York’s premier stages will present a festival of ambitious theater and related events under the provocative moniker, ACT FRENCH. In recent years and months, the city’s downtown theater elite fanned out across the French avant-garde theater landscape on expeditions to identify contemporary works that would engage and entertain American audiences while embracing, in gallant French tradition, political, social and psychological issues all at once.

The splendid array of performances and theater-related events are emblematic of the growing number of ethnic voices and global concerns in contemporary French culture. Most works will be performed in English for the first time; the rest will be accompanied by titles. Perhaps not surprisingly, the recurrent themes that have emerged are relevant to people everywhere: matters of cultural identity, dislocation, even exile; concerns about violence and manipulation in and by the media, existential questions of the self and others; the fragility of private, everyday worlds.

Related festival events will include staged readings, public forums and interviews, presentations and exhibitions from radio and television archives, films, lectures and workshops. Many of France’s most exceptional theater artists will participate, among them the playwrights Olivier Cadiot, Marie Ndiaye, Valère Novarina, José Pliya and Koffi Kwahulé; the directors Ariane Mnouchkine, Claude Régy, Arthur Nauzyciel, Ludovic Lagarde and Patrice Chéreau; and the actors Isabelle Huppert, Marie-France Pisier, Laurent Poitrenaux and many others.

ACT FRENCH is also the first large-scale acknowledgement of the reciprocity of contemporary French and American theater. Since the 1960s the French vanguard has been greatly influenced by the innovations of American companies like the Living Theater and, later, the Wooster Group, as well as extraordinary directors like Bob Wilson, Richard Foreman, Peter Sellars and, today, Richard Maxwell and Caden Manson. Over the same period, the classical French theater of Molière and Marivaux, and post-WWII existential and absurdist plays of Camus, Sartre, Ionesco and Beckett (the Irish playwright lived most of his life in France) have seen countless American productions. In the 1980s, New York City’s UBU Repertory was an important promoter of living French theater artists; Etant Donnés, the French-American Fund for the Performing Arts played a similar role in the 1990s. In that spirit, Act French includes a month-long downtown series partly curated by Mark Russell, former director of P.S. 122 and Artistic Advisor to the festival.

ACT FRENCH expands on the success of France Moves (contemporary dance, 2001) and Sounds French (contemporary music, 2003), projects facilitated by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York and AFAA (Association Française d’Action Artistique) to promote French performing arts and generate cultural exchange. It is hoped that this theatrical infusion will provide illuminating perspectives on French culture and spark passionate conversations among and between the countries’ leading theater artists, patrons and professionals.