Love Me Tender

About the performance

“I see no reason why love between a mother and a son should be any different from any other kind of love. Why should it be impossible to stop loving? To break it off completely.”

After 20 years of marriage, C. leaves her husband, begins dating women, and gives up her prestigious career as a lawyer to focus on writing books. This radical rejection of the normative family, reinforced by her renunciation of bourgeois privilege, becomes a story of resistance to the patriarchal-capitalist order. And, as in a Greek tragedy, the heroine brings its wrath upon herself – the wrath of her husband and of the system, both of whom attempt to strip her of her parental rights to her son.

Based on Love Me Tender by Constance Debré, one of France’s most important practitioners of autofiction, the performance tells the story of a struggle for one’s own desires, an exploration of discovering and experiencing queer sexuality, and an attempt to define oneself on one’s own terms. It is also a provocative question about the limits of freedom and the price one must pay for it, about the right to self-determination, social roles, as well as femininity, motherhood, and love – in all its many forms.

The novel, translated into Polish by Jakub Polaszczyk, will be published in Poland later this year by Ha!art Publishing.