Les enfans sans abri

Over 30 years of laughter

Coming in 2024?

Returning to California, on October 14, 2023, we debuted The One-Minute Bigorne: The Medieval Monster of Comedy in Rap to an enthusiatic crowd at the 2023 Festival of Monsters hosted by the Center for Monster Studies at UC Santa Cruz, California.

On March 11, 2023, we performed The Saintly Mister Louse, an anonymous parodic sermon staged as a two-person play by translator and director, Sharon Diane King for the 2023 Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
We reprised it on April 29, 2023, for University of Arizona's 21st International Symposium 2023: Human and Natural Worlds in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time: From Ecocriticism to Pre-Modern Anthropology in Tucson, AZ.

On January 21, 2023, we performed A Reading from Montaigne's Essay: 'Of Physiognomy', directed and redacted by Sharon Diane King, for the UCLA symposium, Physiognomy at the Crossroads of Magic, Science, and the Arts, Los Angeles, CA

On Monday, 18 July 2022, we performed the comic monologue, Lady Mountebank, translated by Sharon Diane King as part of the 17th Triennial Colloquium of the Société Internationale pour l’étude du Théâtre Médiéval in Prague, Czechia. Also during the conference we screened videos of the sottie (fools' play) No Fooling With Justice (anonymous) and the sermon joyeux The Holy Life of the Blessed Saint Onion: How He Was Martyred by a Cruel Chef, and the Miracles He Works Each Day (anonymous), both translated by Dr. Sharon Diane King, on Wednesday, 20 July 2022.

On April 23, 2021 at 9:00 am PDT and again on April 24, 2021 at 9:30 am PDT we debuted a Les Enfans first. The sottie (fools' play) No Fooling With Justice (anonymous), translated by Sharon Diane King, was streamed as a short video at the "Law and Disorder: Fools, Outlaws, and Justice in the Middle Ages and Renaissance" conference (Day 2 is here.), sponsored by the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

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preacher Since 1989, the ad hoc medieval / Renaissance troupe Les enfans sans abri (LESA) has been performing comedies all over southern California, in Arizona and New York, even in Europe. We focus on short French and Spanish plays in translation that haven't gotten as much press as Shakespeare, but that are a LOT easier to take on the road.

We perform much as traveling troupes in 16th-century Europe would have done-with nothing more than a few important props, costumes that are authentic re-creations of medieval clothes, no backdrops and little furniture, and a limited play space. The performers are drawn from a pool of people who act when they can and who know how ribald, edgy, and often timely the comedy of 500+ years ago can be..

Asshole! Yes? With no physical base to call our home, we are "les enfans sans abri": wandering waifs unafraid of making sport of human foibles. We inhabit the characters and comical situations of 15th-17th-century Europe: sparring husbands and wives, bumbling servants, gossipy neighbors, licentious priests, conniving lawyers, and assorted other rogues of the middle and lower classes. With every performance, we are reminded that what made people laugh back then still does now.

Les enfans sans abri: Past mirth hath present laughter!