ABSTRACT
Valere Novarina’s theater is the sort of place that upends the opening order by means of the comic. Via this upheaval, in the course of which one of the elements denies the other, we do not return to the starting point but end up in a third state. Novarina’s oeuvre, in which the drama is realized in the text itself and not in the relationships between people, continues the text-based theater of Genet and Jarry. This speech, however, which sounds in the true, that is to say liturgical, space of the theater, extends beyond death. Novarina gives the simplest explication of this phenomenon in his Ash Wednesday. In Novarina’s work, however, this type of drama takes place in the language itself, when it recalls its own origin, etymology, and past—as if it were merely self-propelled, while the actor offers himself up to the drama taking place in the language, as a story of redemption.
