Chain Reaction

The Re-Imagining of French Gray by The Displaced Woman

Josef Bush was an avant guarde writer from the infamous Caffee Cino in Greenwich Village. Bush wrote French Gray in 1967 to express his outrage at the disparity between rich and poor in New York. In it he imagines Marie Antoinette, the former Queen of France, in a filthy, rat infested prison preparing for her execution within the hour. Marie re-examines her fall from grace, alternating between her sense of entitlement, a gallows humor and the loss of her family and home.

Chain Reaction re-envisions the play from today's perspective seen through a homeless refugee who comes across the play in an old battered book she picks up and to pass the time in her own squalid shelter, she enters into the play, identifying herself with the flawed queen of France, both victims of a vicious civil war.

(In englischer Sprache)