For Édouard Louis, art is a means of survival. This is not to say that there’s anything heroic about it. The novelist and playwright has endeavored for over a decade to transfigure—and make sharable—the electric shame of his childhood. Such transfiguration is not easy: some experiences resist being turned into art. As Louis reminds us in The Interrogation, speaking of the humiliations he endured as a gay kid born into rural poverty: “We didn’t call it violence. We called it life.”

The story of Louis’s flight from an abusive, homophobic milieu is one the author has told before, most famously in his 2014 bestseller, in En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (The End of Eddy). What The Interrogation makes clear is how central theater was to working-class Eddy Bellegueule’s metamorphosis into upwardly mobile Édouard Louis: before he became a writer, Louis was an actor. The practice of theatrical self-transformation was a crucial first means of escape.

In The Interrogation, Louis, in collaboration with playwright and director Milo Rau, experiments with genre, seeking a form to convey the raw vulnerability of his story. The play’s musical and poetic interludes are surprisingly eclectic. They include Purcell’s tragic opera Dido and Aeneas; Anne Carson’s scrapbook elegy, Nox; and Céline Dion’s swooning pop ballad, “My Heart will Go On.” These works have likely never been brought together on one stage before. The Interrogation draws on the energy of these diva’s laments, which infuse the play’s minimalist format with emotional lushness. (And a bit of camp: at one point, the actor playing Louis lip-syncs vigorously to the Titanic theme song, inviting the audience to momentarily envision him as the closeted child he once was, practicing his moves in the bathroom mirror.)

What’s striking here is the dissonance between such dramatic extravagance—such big feelings—and the unspectacular, everyday pain of the bullied, misfit child. The structure of The Interrogation underscores this sense of incongruity. This is no straight-forward confessional monologue: in lieu of Louis himself, the play offers up his double, a look-alike actor who simultaneously addresses the audience in the flesh and from an onstage screen. Occasionally the ersatz Louis is replaced on screen by the real Louis. The protagonist thus flickers uncannily in and out of presence. It’s a startling vanishing act—the artist declining to inhabit his own persona, refusing to become, simply and entirely, the hero of his own story.

Hannah Freed-Thall is Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYU.