Unwritten Letters [2017]

“Most of the time, the only set pieces on stage are a table, a computer, and a printer that occasionally produces other people’s letters. And the contrast between the prosaic object and this precious content is beautiful. (…)
This requires precise work from the actors, which they carried out in record time this afternoon. The rules stipulate that after spending the day meeting people and writing, at 5 p.m. the writer must select the letters to be read that evening (some from previous workshops, others from that day), build a dramatic structure, and work with his colleague to identify the stakes of each text. Perverse jubilation and the panache of defeat in a break-up letter, joyful astonishment in another, addressed to a lost mother… (…)
He lets loose the pleasure he derives from these Unwritten Letters—“the pleasure in making a community,” he underlines.
That of making yourself vanish, of disappearing into other people’s voices, while sometimes allowing their letters to lost loves to quietly resonate with his own. In the letter he wrote for Charlotte—whose breathing, right next to us in the darkness of the theater, intensified the air—we hear these words that belong as much to the young woman as to the writer: «(..) In human beings, there exists this possibility to not want to destroy each other to survive. I will grant you that it has become very rare. But it exists.”

Eve Beauvallet, Libération

“All these letters are anonymous. David Geselson now has about forty of them, addressing love, loneliness, hatred, separation and reconciliation, sometimes even beyond death. To allow them to be heard on stage is to return in the simplest way possible to the equation of theater, which according to David Geselson is ‘the place that allows words to exist.’”

Brigitte Salino, Le Monde

 “Unwritten Letters is the director / actor extending his hand to the theater audience. One letter after another, a bridge is built between him, the artist, and us, the audience. This is intimate work (and work about what is intimate) that constantly reiterates the importance of the audience to those who set foot on stage. Through this anti-flashy gesture, the artists on stage masterfully thumb their noses at those who create egotistically, without thinking about those watching. The audience is king, and David Geselson is the one who crowns it.

Under its modest appearance bordering on abnegation, the patchwork woven before our eyes through the reading of some fifteen letters sketches a humanity that deeply moves us in sometimes unexpected ways. (…) The person sitting next to you may or may not have been the one who originally spoke this letter, but ultimately what does it matter. What is important, however, is what this project expresses, and what we feel as we exit the theater: tenderness for our fellow humans”

Audrey Santacroce, IO Gazette

“Rare are the spectators who will not be penetrated by one of these letters. It only takes a single sentence, an inflexion. Those little things that will remind them of their lives, their loves, their regrets, the things they left unsaid, their deaths. These are letters that soothe, comfort, and appease, including through the anger that some express.”

Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, Médiapart

“With a modest set design representing a hospital setting, your Unwritten Letters appeared like a breath of fresh air in this eleventh month of lockdown. A breath of humanity, a pure shot of connection.”

Agnès Dopff, Mouvement