Eden

1974, the month of tornadoes. Two teenagers, Sonora, an African-American girl, and her best friend Clayton, a white boy, both from the working class, break into houses in the affluent neighbourhoods. Domino, another teenager, joins them.

The trio invents lives they do not have and projects themselves into the American dream. One day, they enter the house of Rufus, an African-American from a wealthier family.

The place gradually becomes their refuge and their Eden: they meet there, have fun there, and explore their sexuality there. But this youthful intoxication is abruptly interrupted when Sonora reveals the truth about her brother Hiram, who disappeared.

A rift then opens in the lives of these young people, bringing an end to their dreams.

After Breach and Who Needs Heaven, Eden is the third part of the trilogy by the American playwright Naomi Wallace, which portrays the ravages of neoliberalism at the end of the 20th century in Kentucky.

Tommy Milliot, the director, comes from northern France, a working-class region fallen into disgrace after the collapse of the textile and fossil-fuel industries. Enough to forge a connection.

In Eden, he entrusts five young performers with the task of carrying this writing, as poetic as it is political. The stage is inhabited by their adolescent presence, fluid, drifting, almost dreamlike.

This coming-of-age story of the passage into adulthood strikes with its truthfulness and unsettles the myth of the American dream.