Édouard Louis is prepared to move us off our seats. The 29-year-old French author of piercing autobiographies—The End of Eddy (2014), History of Violence (2016)—makes his American acting debut in the stage adaptation of his 2018 book, Who Killed My Father, later this month at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Louis calls his work “confrontational literature,” and because a book is easy to close and put aside, this literary provocateur is fascinated by the immediacy of theater as well as by its physical reality.
“I am interested in confronting the reader with what they already know but wish they did not,” Louis says over Zoom from his Paris apartment. “[The] stage is an interesting space, a beautiful suspension of freedom, because people are present, seated in front of me, so they cannot really escape from the content.”
