“This Is Not My Beautiful City”: I review “Belleville”

for AmCon:

A young American expatriate in Paris comes home one afternoon to find her husband, a doctor working on pediatric AIDS for Doctors Without Borders, unexpectedly home in the middle of the day and watching porn. This setup, which could lead to a farce or a realistic domestic drama, instead gets the suspense-flick treatment in Amy Herzog’s tense and thought-provoking “Belleville” (at D.C.’s Studio Theatre through October 12).

I’ve seen three Herzog plays so far (and reviewed “4000 Miles” and “After the Revolution” for TAC) and “Belleville” is by far the best: character-driven, propulsive, and full of tough moral and cultural commentary. As we watch Abby (Gillian Williams) and Zack (Jacob H. Knoll) play out typical couples’ quarrels and reconciliations—all those jokes which teeter on the edge of real resentment—we start to intuit how much Zack is really hiding. The American couple’s lives intertwine with the lives of their landlords, the even younger Muslim married couple Alioune (Maduka Steady) and Amina (Joy Jones): four outsiders in France, two couples in which the husbands are keeping secrets. Four characters, three countries, two days… and one knife.

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