STAGE REVIEW : A Rigorous Trintignant in Pavlovsky’s ‘Potestad’

One of France’s most familiar film personas, that of Jean-Louis Trintignant, is at the Las Palmas Theatre this week in a role one would hardly have thought likely for the man who once played Anouk Aimee’s racing-car heartthrob in “A Man and a Woman.”

This is an older, more rigorous Trintignant, and the play--”Potestad” (“Paternity”) by Argentine playwright-psychiatrist Eduardo Pavlovsky--is a harrowing indictment of the seizures, “disappearances” and other political horrors that rocked Argentina during its recent totalitarian regimes.

It is a minimalist concert of words and action told by a doctor close to losing his mind. He surreptitiously had rescued and brought home to his wife the small child of murdered parents to rear as their own. But, years later, the child is as relentlessly and mysteriously taken away from them by “authorities” who knock at the door.

The place and particulars of the circumstance are left deliberately vague. What Pavlovsky wants to convey (as he does brilliantly) are the anonymous consequences of all terror and repression: mental torment that can be as devastating as physical torture, and the harshest agony of all, that of having a loved one removed without recourse or preamble and simply vanish.

Pavlovsky’s unassuming piece has all of the cataclysmic majesty that was so absent from Ariel Dorfman’s self-important “Widows,” written about much the same thing. Anne-Marie Hoepfner plays the almost silent role of a friend, who is made to listen to this tale of anguish, but the piece belongs to the actor playing the doctor.

The opening segment is a discourse on physical position in time and space: how we sit, how we move, where we are. It’s an obsessive focus on minutiae that shields the mind from madness. As staged by Paul Verdier (who also did the adaptation), Trintignant’s intensity takes its cue from a similar kind of careful calibration. His timing never flags, though the monologue, largely done in hushed tones, is occasionally too softly spoken for the size of the theater.

That, however, is a minor hurdle in light of another one. Trintignant performs in French, and while he is electric to watch, understanding the language is significant in as verbal and narrowly focused a play as this one. French-English copies of the text are available at the theater ($5), but if you plan to read it--it’s a fast read--do it ahead of time. It will be much more useful.

Unlike Trintignant, who is new to Los Angeles, “Potestad” was done at Stages Theatre, the producer of this event, in 1987. At that time the author, Pavlovsky, appeared in the role. Pavlovsky, we are now told, will be coming to Los Angeles for Trintignant’s closing weekend and will perform the play again just once, in Spanish, at a previously unscheduled 5 p.m. show Sunday.

As for Trintignant, having relished doing “Potestad” at last summer’s Avignon Festival, he’s now getting ready to take on Paris.

* “Potestad,” Las Palmas Theatre, 1642 N. Las Palmas Ave., Hollywood. Tonight-Sunday, 8 p.m. Ends Sunday. $25; (213) 465-1010. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.

Jean-Louis Trintignant L’Homme (The Man)

Marie-Anne Hoepfner Tita

Presented in French by Stages Theatre Center, in cooperation with the Association Francaise d’Action Artistique. Playwright Eduardo Pavlovsky. Translation and adaptation Paul Verdier. Director Paul Verdier. Lights Dietrich Juengling. Music/sound Ned Judy. Stage manager Sindy Slater.