Madame Melville (2001 Off-Broadway, Macaulay Culkin)

Richard Nelson’s 'Madame Melville' arrived Off-Broadway at the Promenade Theatre in 2001, running for a highly successful commercial residency and capturing massive national media profile. The intimate, textually rich coming-of-age drama unfolds inside a bohemian apartment in Paris, France in 1966, tracking Carl, an insecure, pathologically shy fifteen-year-old American student whose academic life enters an existential crisis when he is introduced to a slow-burning, sensuous romantic awakening by Claudie, his sophisticated, literature-loving adult schoolteacher. Directed by Nelson himself, it starred Macaulay Culkin and Joely Richardson.