From
Christine Dossel
The new play by Yasmina Reza is about a young man who thinks he is the singer Celine Dion and his white friend who wants to be black. It’s not a satirically pointed society comedy with wickedly comical battles of dialogue like the stage hits “Art” or “The God of Carnage”; it almost defies such expectations. Rather, it revolves around its theme like the hula hoop that appears in the piece, about which it is said at the end that it “crosses the room with a slight arabesque”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/.”James Brown wore hair curlers” is a fragile piece, swaying between comedy and melancholy, certainty and uncertainty, identity and difference, culture and nature. It can’t be pinned down. It tries to get off the ground and literally rocks into its subject matter: beginning with a man on a swing in the park who, according to the scene directions, is “struggling to get going”.