World Voices: JEAN-LUC LAGARCE (1957-1995)

Join us for a World Voices evening celebrating the work of the late Jean-Luc Lagarce, one of France's most significant playwrights of the second half of the 20th century. The evening will include a reading of Just the End of the World (Juste la fin du monde). Directed by SYLVAINE GUYOT in a new translation by J.A. COHEN with Chloe Claudel, Maša Dakić, Linda Mancini, Scott Shepherd, and Arne de Tremerie—followed by a talk with Guyot and Frank Hentschker and a reception.

About the Play:

Just the End of the World (Juste la fin du monde) is a play about Louis, a writer who returns to the working-class family he left behind in order to announce that he is terminally ill. Lagarce wrote the play in 1990 while confronting the prospect of his own death after being diagnosed with AIDS. In 2008, the Comédie-Française added the play to its repertoire, where it received the 2008 Moliere Award for Best Show in a National Theatre. In 2016, the play was adapted into a film of the same title by Xavier Dolan.

Jean-Luc Lagarce (1957–1995) was a French actor, theatre director and playwright. Although he achieved only modest recognition during his lifetime, since his death he has become one of the most widely produced contemporary French playwrights. Born in Héricourt, Haute-Saône, Lagarce studied at the Université de Besançon. In 1978, he co-founded the Théâtre de La Roulotte, directing works by playwrights such as Molière, Pierre de Marivaux, Eugène Labiche and Eugène Ionesco before turning increasingly to staging his own plays. 

Lagarce wrote 25 plays before dying of AIDS in 1995. Some of his early works reflected the influence of Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. In addition to drama, he published short stories, created an opera libretto and a film screenplay, and co-founded the publishing house Les Solitaires Intempestifs. Although several of his plays were published by Théâtre Ouvert or adapted as radio dramas, only a small number were staged during his lifetime. Rediscovered by critics after his death, he came to be regarded as one of the most important voices in modern French theater. His plays subsequently gained international recognition overseas, including the Brazilian production of Music-Hall directed by Luiz Päetow, which won the Theatre Shell Award in 2010.

In 2016, film director Xavier Dolan adapted Lagarce's Juste la fin du monde, and the film, released internationally as It's Only the End of the World, won both the Grand Prix and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. Another of Lagarce’s play, Le Pays lointain, was produced at the Odéon Theatre in Paris in 2019.

Sylvaine Guyot is Professor of French Literature, Thought & Culture at NYU, New York, since 2021. At Harvard University, Guyot founded La Troupe and acted as the Chair for TDM Theater, Dance & Media next to her tenure at the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures. She is currently developing a lecture-performance on understudied early modern female writing. Her research interests focus on seventeenth-century tragedy and spectacle culture, the history of the body and emotions, the politics of performing arts, and the formation of cultural institutions. Publications include Racine et le corps tragique (PUF, 2014), Databases, Revenues, and Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793 (MIT Press, 2021), Decentering Molière (2022), and Feminisms and Early Modern France (2025). She is a co-leader of the Comédie-Française Registers Project. Her research further extends to contemporary docu-plays that tell the stories of the underrepresented.

J.A. Cohen is a writer, translator, and religious studies scholar, currently a visiting assistant professor at Haverford College.