Partner: Co-organized by La Mousson d’été and Théâtre Ouvert
Play: Sfumato
Playwright: Maya Lopez
Meetings: 8th-12th April 2025 at Théâtre Ouvert, Paris
Public presentation: Saturday April 12th at 4pm at Théâtre Ouvert
Director: Nathalie Fillion
Cast: Eric Berger, Flore Lefebvre des Noëttes et Damien Sobieraff
After going through the entirety of the text, the artistic team will focus on certain fragments in order to develop their theatrical qualities. Given that the playwright has used several modes of writing (monologues, dialogues, stage directions) in the play, she is particularly interested in hearing through the voices of the actors how the parts coexist and how organically they transition from one to the other. One of the goals is for her to develop a more precise idea of the coordination between those modes of telling and their general balance within the play.
Sfumato 5 characters: 1 woman, 4 men
Sfumato by Maya Lopez interweaves poetic motifs and images around the figure of Noah and a founding event: the Bible recounts that during a night of drunkenness, Noah was seen naked by his son Cham, giving rise to several possible interpretations, including that of a rape committed by the son on his father.
In a powerfully poetic language, the text intertwines points of view and hypotheses made by the characters about this event. By tackling questions of the body, sex and memory, as well as the great universal taboos of rape and incest, Sfumato revisits through dreams the founding myths of our civilisation.
The writing of the play began in May 2024 during a dream-themed workshop given by Nathalie Fillion as part of Fabulamundi New Voices. From this starting point, Maya Lopez crafted symbolic motifs, repetitive writing and developed the dramatical poem form that continues to give the text its strangeness and beauty.
Maya Lopez
Maya Lopez was born in Grenoble in 1999. She studied literature and attended for two years the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon where she wrote a thesis on Copi for the Dramaturgy Masters and directed Copi’s play EVA PERÓN at the Kantor Theatre. She also trained in theatre for a year at the Lyon Conservatory. She decided to specialized in theatre and joined the Eracm Acting School in 2022 in order to polish her acting and directing skills. She is an apprentice at National Drama Centre Les Tréteaux de France for the season 2024-2025.
She is currently writing her first play Sfumato, supported by the programme European Fabulamundi Playwriting Europe – New Voices co-funded by Creative Europe. She is also directing Ça Réchauffe, a variation on Heiner Müller’s Hamlet-Machine.
Also a guitarist and singer, she wrote and composed with Lucas Bustos Tapage, her first collection of songs.
– Coming soon –
