ABSTRACT
The play preceded the place. In 1932, architect and theater director Edouard Autant, with his wife actress Louise Lara and their troupe Art et Action, presented three performances at the Sorbonne University in Paris intended to frame moral issues for debate among students and professors. They chose topics and devised scenes based on well-known essays, such as “On the Virtue of Moderation” by Michel de Montaigne, from which they developed characters as extreme examples of a type, such as those who always act virtuously and those who always act without virtue. The characters dramatized a dilemma posed by the essay: does virtue lead to its opposite, violence? Following a short enactment, the actors ceded the stage to professors and advanced students who took up the topic in debate, talking back and forth in a public dialogue observed by an audience of younger students. In these events, the play was merely a prologue to the real performance: a discussion of moral issues among scholars in the highest academy in France. Autant and Lara staged the Sorbonne performances at an historic moment when angry voices were rising in Europe, fueling fears of new conflicts. The League of Nations responded by convening the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva, where representatives discussed shared moral principles that might lead nations to renounce violence. Autant and Lara were dedicated pacifists and socialists to the extent that they had been obliged to leave France during the First World War because of their beliefs. 1 Their presentation of “University Theater” as a distinct type of participatory and discursive performance can be read as a poignant proposal for a theater of discussion, which might stand parallel to civic discourse at the heart of a free, peaceful, and collective society.
