In 2003, three decades into her career, Dominique Blanc experienced every actor’s worst nightmare: The phone stopped ringing. Blanc’s character, lifted from a book by the French author Marguerite Duras, awaits her husband’s return from a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, uncertain whether he is even alive. The show grew out of a series of readings she did from the book with the director Patrice Chéreau, a longtime collaborator. In 2008, Blanc pitched him a light stage version, requiring only a table, chairs and old costumes from Blanc’s closet. While Duras’s book was translated into English as “The War: A Memoir,” its original title simply means “Pain,” and in her show, Blanc starkly recreates women’s anguish as their partners return from untold horrors.

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Persons: Dominique Blanc, Jean Racine’s “, ” Blanc, “, ”, Florence, Marguerite Duras, Patrice Chéreau, Blanc Organizations: Florence Gould Hall Locations: New York, French