Theater: “Who Killed My Father?” at St. Ann’s Warehouse

Edouard Louis (fka Eddy Belleguelle) is the last person you’d suspect of being a revolutionary. Slight of build, mild-mannered, he quietly took the world by storm with his 2014 autobiographical novel “The End of Eddy,” in which he told the story of growing up gay in small-town working-class France.

A subsequent novel, “Who Killed My Father?” (2018) has been made into a powerful one-man show at St. Ann’s Warehouse, now through June 5. Louis addresses his estranged father, represented by an empty chair on stage. The father, a hyper-masculine homophobe, dropped out of school at age 14 because staying in school was “for sissies.” Over time, he became an obese alcoholic, permanently disabled by a factory accident that has left him unable to breathe or move without assistance.

Black-and-white film of the French countryside is projected behind Louis as he quietly recounts incidents from his childhood when he was tormented as a “faggot” by both his father and the townspeople. Suddenly Louis shifts gears and focuses on his father’s accident. The play becomes sharply political, as Louis details the series of “tough love” laws instituted  by French politicians, both on the left and the right, that penalized Frenchmen for remaining on the dole.

So what really killed his father? The accident? Elite politicians’ benign neglect of the white working class? Louis covers the last subject in his 2017 editorial “Why My Father Votes for Marine Le Pen.” Sound like anything America’s gone through?

Note that while Eddy is uttering his “j’accuse” at the elite, he is now living the life of the mind among them in Paris. This distance from his grim upbringing, however, has helped him better understand his father, if not agree with him. An intriguing play that not only reveals the typical fissure between straight father and gay son, but also the power of forgiveness. In French, with English subtitles. Bravo.