Review: Do You Want to Play a Game? "Les Enfants Terribles" Do

Les Enfants Terribles

Adapted from the novella by Jean Cocteau

Written and directed by Michael Gardner

Presented by Crawl Space Plays LLC at East Village Basement

321 E 9th St., Manhattan, NYC

September 10-October 4, 2026

(L to R) Rutger Scott, Caroline DeFazio, Victor Gao, Maysie Jane. Photo by Kent Meister.

Much like Georges Bataille's novella Story of the Eye (1928), fellow French artist Jean Cocteau's near-contemporaneous novella Les Enfants Terribles (1929)–which similarly features protagonists dedicated to gameplaying and taboo-breaking in equal measure–retains its transgressive force nearly a century after its first publication. Play- and filmmaker Michael Gardner's theatrical adaptation of Les Enfants Terribles, making its world premiere in the intimate East Village Basement, with Gardner directing, drops audiences into the midst of their adolescent characters' "Game," their term for "that state of semi-consciousness in which children float immersed" (p. 19), as Rosamond Lehmann's 1957 translation of the novella puts it. The Game plays out most often and most intensely in the Room belonging to the story's central pair of siblings (later, in the novella, replaced by "the gallery" in a different home, which just becomes the Room again) but encompasses their entire lives. The production from Gardner and his company Crawl Space Plays establishes the charged, unpredictable atmosphere of the Game as soon as one enters the performance space, unmooring us from the world outside alongside its characters for one hundred transfixing minutes of fevered fabulation and calamitous consequences.

(L to R) Maysie Jane, Rutger Scott. Photo by Kent Meister.

For Les Enfants Terribles, the inciting incident in terms of narrative is Paul (Rutger Scott) being struck by a snowball with a rock inside during a snowball fight at school (which can also be viewed as a game/Game of battle). Paul's schoolfellow Gerard (Victor Gao) escorts Paul home, delivering him into the care of Paul's sister Elisabeth (Maysie Jane) and thereafter becoming integrated into the siblings' household and private world. Paul and Elisabeth's father is gone, and their mother is bed-ridden, which increases their freedom to exist within their own constructed world–as does a baseline privilege that they are able to maintain throughout the play. Later, an orphaned shopgirl named Agatha (Caroline (Lina) DeFazio) will become the fourth inhabitant of the Room, opening yet another vector for the competing flows of desire and power that suffuse the quartet's relationships and imaginings. That snowball, for instance, came from the hand of a boy named Dargelos, who is an object of Paul's ardent veneration (a cross-dressed photograph of Dargelos is one of the objects committed to what is called the Treasure), a worship that must eventually find a displaced object. Elisabeth, who has a rather voracious appetite for being in control, would like that object to be her. Gerard is fascinated by Elisabeth, and Agatha's ardor turns to Paul. You can see how this all is headed in a bad direction, especially layered with the communal attempt to resist the encroachments of change, adulthood, and the "real world." It is significant that near the play's conclusion, the message, delivered with and as a dangerous piece of temptation, that Gerard relays to Paul from Dargelos is "I haven't changed at all." It's all a little Flowers in the Attic if the young people wanted to stay locked up.

(L to R) Victor Gao, Rutger Scott, Caroline DeFazio, Victor Gao, Maysie Jane. Photo by Kent Meister.

Before the snowball is introduced, the production's opening segment serves a stew of sexuality, religion, violence, and Shakespeare. The siblings weave literary, biblical, and historical material into their discourse throughout, perhaps making the transgressive bits feel more transgressive by contrast. Sometimes such contrast is made assertively explicitly, as when Paul, Agatha, and Gerard wrestle with and bite one another on the floor while Elisabeth delivers an educated disquisition. While the character's swearing or blasphemous twists on Christian rhetoric or rites could be viewed as childish, they are also inarguably carnivalesque. And an intriguing result of adapting the novella is that the shift to live theater makes it less clear what (if anything) is actually real and not merely part of their play in the Room: for instance, when the actors put up a large umbrella and put down a blue blanket to represent a seaside trip with Gerard's uncle, is this theater being its non-mimetic self in presenting something that 'actually' happens or another event that the characters collectively imagine? (And does it matter?) The siblings pulling Agatha from under a sheet in the corner as if she were a prop they had been waiting to use, or even the fact that the actors are already acting as their characters and interacting with the audience (who are designated as "pretend" by Paul early on), blurring the line of when the show 'actually' begins, are further examples of this fruitful ambiguity, as well as reminders that theater itself is after all a type of imaginative play.

Rutger Scott. Photo by Kent Meister.

Immersion in the Game is enhanced by the fact that the Room is, in fact a room, a single space with the door to the outside, carpeted with overlapping rugs, and with the audience seated along three of its walls. The biggest part of the sound design is a hand-cranked phonograph, and the actors often switch the lights on or off as part of the lighting design, all of which add to the sense that you have stepped into their actual home. The costumes, a mix of sleepwear–traditional striped two-piece pajames for Gerard, a long white nightdress for Agatha, shorts and smoking jacket for Paul, red lingerie and frilly bloomers for Elisabeth–each express something of the individual characters while also materializing the cross-currents of erotic energy that run among them. (One scene that plays with costuming is, memorably, a bit like the Mad Hatter's tea party with identities in place of seats.) The expressive DeFazio is fantastic as Agatha, masterfully capturing the terror, confusion, yearning, and vulnerability of the shopgirl's attempt to fit into Paul and Elisabeth's world. Gao's Gerard is overawed, though equally determined to have a place within the siblings' orbit, a blend of qualities that comes to the fore in a scene, which Gao plays with hilarious understatement, in which Gerard is forced to try to extract candy from audience members (or else!), much to his obvious discomfort. Scott and Jane make it easy to see how Paul and Elisabeth could have such a gravitational attraction for Agatha and Gerard; Jane gives real potency to the ways that Elisabeth wields her sensuality as a form of power and a powerful force, and Scott's tempestuous Paul, rather than the (consistently thwarted) attempts at aloofness of the novella's Paul, consistently matches Elisabeth's pitch, a powder keg always in the mid-explosion. Les Enfants Terribles is a wild ride well worth taking: all you have to do is give in to the Game.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards