Peter Oswald´s short plays represent a re-discovery of the complexity of the human spirit in all its manifestations of comedy, tragedy, farce, surrealism, the grotesque and the very real.
Attention Seekers (UK) invite audiences on a spell-binding journey into ‘marriage’ and the ancient relationship between the masculine and the feminine.
(Lights up on a man.)The highlight of The Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2009 and the Adelaide Festival 2010: Adelaide Fringe Award Best Performer 2010 for David Calvitto (also Edinburgh Fringe Festival Stage Best Actor 2002 for Horse Country and Audience Favorite Award for 12 Angry Men at the 2003 Edinburgh Festival)
What if everything we believe and experience is an illusion-a fantasy designed to make us forget all that’s important and create a kind of collective amnesia? Are we all alone on our own private stages? Is there anything out there in the darkness? Are we who we say we are, or are we just pretending?
A deceptively simple piece of theatre, which playfully but profoundly leads us to question, not only the nature of reality, but the very nature of existence itself. A man standing in a pool of light wittily deconstructs the theatrical experience while offering parallel insight into modern life.
“An intelligent and exhilarating monologue, performed with a conjurer’s elan by David Calvitto …. he stands on stage and deconstructs everything he is doing – the entire theatre-going experience. It’s funny and cute, but just when you think you’ve got the joke, the monologue lurches into darker, more invigorating territory, and you start to realise that the show is deadly serious. … The Event is a wake-up call to anyone who has ever wondered why it is that we know all the details of Jordan and Pete’s marriage breakup, but can’t say how many Iraqis have died in the Iraq war. It deliberately and cruelly destroys illusion: it makes us see how the trick is done, and challenges us to rise from our safe seats in the comforting dark and protest.” The Guardian
“American David Calvitto performs John Clancy’s monologue with aplomb. He’s a mix of droll Woody Allen and charming Steve Martin in a nice suit. The play probably won’t send us protesting into the streets but its beautifully written and does make you think. How do we know what’s real and what’s not? It’s great fun and, in the hands of Calvitto, highly entertaining.” Adelaide Advertiser
A story of journeys, of how a boy who grew up on a farm in Galicia, Poland, came to be a tailor in Inverness. His life spanned most of the 20th century. His story is not straightforward.He was taken prisoner by the Soviets in 1939 and forced to work east of the Urals, then freed in an amnesty after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. He then joined the thousands of Poles who travelled to Tehran, then Egypt, to be integrated into the British Army, fighting in North Africa and Italy. He was then resettled in Britain in 1948, joining his brother in Glasgow. This is the story he told.
But there is another story, and perhaps a third and fourth one, for in order to survive, he had to adopt different identities. Like all immigrants, the tailor had to adapt and he did that very successfully, integrating himself into the fabric of Highland life. And fabric was perhaps the most important medium through which he achieved this. He made a variety of clothes for thousands of people, including himself, constructing the outward trappings which play a part in defining hwo we are. Fabric. Fabrication.
Crossing the borders from Poland to Russia to Iran to Egypt to Italy to Germany to Scotland, the fable reflects on the Second World War but is personal, intimate and rooted in two cultures: Galicia and the Scottish Highlands. The play uses the central metaphor of the tailor and his fabric. Layers of ghostly clothes are projected on to with a series of still and moving images from the tailor’s past and present-day Ukraine. The performance combines storytelling, songs, poetry and physicality with a rich soundscape of live fiddle music and effects.
The Tailor of Inverness previewed at the Arches Theatre, Glasgow on July 29, 2008 and opened at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh on July 31, 2008. In the meantime the production toured the globe. Most of the production’s numerous performances to date have been sold out.
Make your own blockbuster, or come and watch Kevin and Amber make one right in front of you.Based on Save the Cat, a famous guide to Hollywood screen writing, Kevin Gillese (of RAPID FIRE fame) and Amber Nash developed a new Improv format that works with – and goofs on – the Hollywood movie formulas that you find in every other film.
International theatre company Axis Mundi takes a darkly comic look at the mass hysteria that swept America and the world in the wake of the September 11th attacks, with asides on the geopolitical ramifications of bad sex, the art of tactical bed-making and the occult significance of sharing a hairbrush.
Six people in a big city. All of them are in search of a home, a niche or a relationship.No catastrophes take place, and no one is evil, yet they all fail in their quest and eventually end up alone. That´s just how it is – shit happens. A chain of wasted chances – a comedy of failures.
For example: the first meeting of an internet date starts out embarrassingly – and ends in desaster. The longer the evening, the more alcohol gets drunk, and the sadder and more touching the meeting becomes. The very next day Dan, flowers in hand, goes to meet her again in a café. His former girl friend happens to be sitting in the same café and as they greet each other, his date misconstrues their tête-à-tête and walks away, disillusioned.
“Any idiot can face a crisis. It’s the day-to-day living that wears you out.” Anton Chekhov
In fifty-four scenes – some of them just short clips – Alan Ayckbourn masterfully creates an atmosphere of exquisite melancholy and grotesque failure. His sympathetic view of the characters keeps schadenfreude and black humour at bay and instead makes us grin at the all-too-familiar situations from our own lives. With a keen humane eye, Ayckbourn finds a universal language for the impossible dream of fulfilled desires.
For his cinematic adaptation of the play, French director Alain Resnais transferred the story to Paris and through the title Coeurs offers a very simple idea of what the play is all about: the hearts are beating but the rhythm isn´t quite right….
We present the play in its English-language original and set it in Berlin as the new international metropolis – whose neuroses, however, remain global.privatefearsgruppefarbe
“In all this, nothing is ever wholly tragic or totally comical. The comedy, like the intelligent directing, remains unflustered, unagitated. The characters’ loneliness and their lamentable failure in matters of love require no dramatic embellishment. It’s no more than is to be expected in the life of a typical big-city single. Yet the acting is so close to life itself that one develops a real affection for this sextet and feels sad to have to leave them after 100 minutes in their company.” Berliner Morgenpost
(Girl) I want hold himEveryone knows it. Everyone’s been there.
The trouble is, everyone has a different set of rules.
But what’s it all about anyway? Aren’t all modern day relationships a dysfunctional battlefield? A series of mind games? A struggle for status?
Oh, I know yours isn’t – but I bet you know of someone’s who’s is!
If so then come and chuckle contentedly at eight people who aren’t you make a mess of their lives in love
Love.
Or more precisely, the Game of Love: ‘Making the move’, ‘Elation’, ‘Sex’, ‘Argument’ then ‘Depression’. Sound familiar? Of course it does.
You can hardly overestimate the influence the English language has in German life today: in public spaces, on the street, over the internet and on TV.
But – what influence does English have on the way we live our daily lives? How can Grandma Erna possibly understand what she see in shop windows? Does Coffee To Go really come from Togo? And what about the confusion native English speakers experience when they see words used that apparently are English but which make absolutely no sense to them?
The winners:
In Other Words by Joshua Crone
The Exam by Joshua S. Horowitz
Ten Minutes with Günther by Sonny Hayes
Bombay an der Spree by Kevin McAleer
Hooray for Hollywood by Rich Rubin
“Walk round the corner and see yourself you could get a heart attack. Because if that´s me over there who am I?”A man uses his money to commission a clone: his contractors seize their chance to create twenty more. The talk is of paternal love, and of science, and of good intentions. But who will have to live with the consequences? And who will have to die?
“A taut, chilling two-man work about a desperate father who seeks to duplicate his lost son” – “enormously powerful” – “outstandingly well acted and staged” – “real and truthful in every moment” – “a maelstrom of deep, dark emotions laced with subtle sarcasm and ending with a hint of hope” – “an absolute must-see” – “Science&Theatre, a successful coproduction” (from the reviews in ExBerliner, Die Zeit Online, Neues Deutschland)
Caryl Churchill’s compelling thought-experiment has a single, simple premise: humans have been cloned. In one hour of ferociously intense tragicomedy, she digs down to the roots of personal identity, exposing the hard but brittle bond between fathers and sons and the ultimate cost of evasion. The past can be buried, but it won’t stay down.
A Number was the first production in English Theatre Berlin´s Science & Theatre program.
Supported by
A quirky, often frightening family of antagonists in a claustrophobic farmhouse somewhere in the American MidwestBuried Child is a macabre look at an American Midwestern family with a dark, terrible secret. The father stopped planting crops in his fields and took to smoking, drinking and watching TV. His wife, apparently seeking salvation, turned to religion. Her son went insane with guilt and grief, spent time in jail and only recently returned to the farm, perhaps to set everything right. With the arrival of the estranged grandson and his girlfriend, Shelly, the secret is drawn out into the light of day, and the family curse apparently lifted…
With its lower-class, sometimes humorous, recognizable characters and dialogue, Buried Child resembles the mid-century American realism and grotesquerie of Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams. However, its roots in ritual and its approach to monumental, timeless themes of human suffering – incest, murder, deceit and rebirth – resemble the destruction wreaked by the heroes of Greek tragedy. The play contains many of Shepard’s favorite motifs: a quirky, often frightening family of antagonists in a claustrophobic farmhouse somewhere in the American Midwest.
“We don´t know each other in America. It starts on the family level, and there are certain areas in the country like in the west and in the south where `family´ is very strong, and there are other areas where it doesn´t even exist! People don´t have any connection whatsoever to each other, to their siblings, or know who their father is or their mother, they´re just wild.
I´m haunted by that character. The American character is more about that than anything else, more than success, more than power and strength and all the other things that we present ourselves to be. It´s more about the strange, strange lack of identity. We don´t really know who we are, we never have known who we are. We’ve invented it! We don´t have a clue! We´re like wandering vagabonds!” Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard is one of America’s most prolific playwrights and actors of our time. Famous for his acting roles in such movies as The Right Stuff, Homo Faber, Black Hawk Down and The Assassination of Jesse James, he made a name for himself very early as a writer of plays such as True West and Fool for Love. For Buried Child he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Best Drama in 1979. He also wrote numerous movie scripts, two of them for German director Wim Wenders (Paris Texas and Don´t Come Knocking). In his plays Shepard dissects the rituals, the vernacular and the moral codes of the American lower class with a crude mixture of action, sarcastic humour and bone-dry realism.
Veronika Nowag-Jones has directed numerous plays by Brecht, Tabori, Shepard, Euripides and others for theatres in Berlin, New York City (NY), Louisville (KY), Philadelphia (PA), and Atlanta (GA).
English Theatre Berlin presents Buried Child as a Germany premiere in collaboration wth 7 Stages Theatre Atlanta.