Me Likee Mnouchkine

...but, alas, not enough this year to shell out the $150 and 7 hours for Les Ephemes (Ephemera) , the latest rare American appearance of her company, Theatre de Soleil.

But that's only because I made my pilgrimmage last time with Le Dernier Caravansereil, and frankly this more domestic epic sounds less interesting to me.

Still, if you've never seen her work (and never seen it live) you owe it to yourself to go to at least one part, if you can manage to get in and still afford to eat over the weekend.

Especially if you are interested in looking to models of theatre collectives that really commune and practially live together, (even if they are ruled by a dominant personality) Theatre de Soleil is a wonderful case study--as can be gleamed from Helen Shaw's nice profile of the queen of collaborative epic theatre. (Mnouchkine on Brook: “I admire Peter Brook immensely...[but] I am not one who can abandon pleasure. Theater has to be nourishing for your flesh: Voilà! I think Peter has become monastic, but I am still too childish.”)

Leave it to the Lincoln Center Festival, of course, to import revolutionary theatre collectives from Europe and price them for only disposable-income Manhattanites to see.

(Time Out also links to some nifty slide shows of Mnouchkine's work.)