“The Big Sleep” was part of the Crossing the Line Festival 2025. (Courtesy: JaninaArendt)
The sound of Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money” opened “The Big Sleep” at Le Skyroom at L’Alliance New York, headquarters of the Crossing the Line festival. Soon, Helena de Laurens entered nonchalantly through the audience and began to dance. An adult woman dressed like a child in a red top, plaid skirt, red tights and sneakers, she spun and turned with a bag-in-hand, close to the audience. Sometimes, she seemed in control of the bag, menacing spectators as she swung it over heads. Other times, she seemed guided, if not dominated, by the centripetal motion of the bag, as if she were both the victim and the generative force behind a tornado.
As the music faded, she let the bag drop to the floor and came to a still, standing position center stage. Only then did she begin to speak the hour-long monologue that forms the substance of the piece. The gawky dance set up its stakes: How much authority does a child have over herself?
“My name is Jeanne, I’m 11 years old, and I’m not supposed to be here,” de Laurens said (in French, translated in English supertitles) and the actual child’s absence constitutes both the central story and the meta-narrative of the show. In fact, when the writer-director Marion Siéfert began to work on the piece several years ago, she planned for a particular girl, a cousin of Siéfert’s, to share the stage with de Laurens. But as the monologue recounts, psychologists advised Jeanne’s parents that the rehearsal schedule was too demanding and they pulled her out. Siéfert remade the piece—perhaps for the better—by putting the words of the adolescent into the mouth of a 37-year-old professional.
The result is a stream-of-consciousness exploration of a child’s life: her fears, dreams, relationship with her parents, a love-hate friendship with another girl. She even discusses her time rehearsing with de Laurens herself. In these moments, de Laurens acts as both Jeanne’s medium and as an external character: as herself, refracted through the absent child’s eyes.
This New York premiere of “The Big Sleep,” which opened in France in 2018, marked Siéfert’s second production at Crossing the Line. The 2022 edition of the festival presented her “_jeanne_dark,” a piece that happened both onstage and online, featuring an Instagram fictional profile, with regularly updated posts and livestreams. The show caused some stir since Meta paused the livestreams over what Siéfert believes was an image of fully clothed de Laurens, also the lead actress in “_jeanne_dark_” touching her breasts. The playwright ended up cutting this scene from the show. It, too, confronts the frustrations and hopes of a teenage girl.
In “The Big Sleep,” such feelings are layered with tensions that constantly twist and tighten in both Jeanne’s story and the metatheatrical frame. De Laurens masterfully emulates childish movements and lack of physical self-awareness: she twists her face into frowns, she drools and stares at the audience with electric intensity. Watching her mature body enact such behavior, the audience can imagine the normative constraints that will eventually contain Jeanne.
More distressing, the audience sees how the show explores the border between clumsiness and seductiveness as she rocks her hips, sucks on her fingers, and removes her skirt. Are these actions innocent or consciously sexual—or is the audience sexualizing her?
The performance is as enjoyable as it is tense, often funny in its loose-limbed way. The humor, though, does not take away Siéfert’s—or is it Jeanne’s?—frustration over the girl’s absence from the play. The show offers an intense and beautiful exploration of what defines self-sovereignty and invites the audience to consider how old a person (particularly a female person) has to be to acquire it. The audience never does find out whether Jeanne really wanted to be there or not.
About the author(s)
Barbara Blum is a Brazilian journalist pursuing an MA in Arts & Culture at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She reports both in English and Portuguese.