Roland Schimmelpfennig

A week and a day from now, I'll be going to see a play by Roland Schimmelpfennig at Vortex Theatre, here in Austin. The publicity from the theatre calls him "Germany's foremost contemporary playwright, and this interview on New York Theatre Wire concurs, calling him "one of the most prolific and heralded young dramatists in Europe." It also notes that he is relatively unknown in America, and indeed I had never heard of him.

The play, Start Up, seems to be at least partially about some venture to sell German culture to Americans, and the troupe performing the play is putting a metatheatrical spin on the work by performing it as part of an American tour through relative backwaters of American culture--i.e., they're not performing solely in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. So they (3 German actors and 2 American ones, an Austrian video artists, and a few assorted others) are bringing some German culture to uncultured Americans (hello, Austin). As they travel across the states, they are recording their trip and then working the recordings into the plays so that the performance is different each time.

The interview linked to above has an interesting discussion of another of Schimmelpfenig's plays, Die Frau von Frueher (The Woman Before), which was playing in New York at the time the interview was published. The interviewer calls the play very cinematic in its transitions between locations and times. Schimmelpfennig mentions that in its European productions voiceovers or signs signaled the changes in time, but that was not done in New York, making it more cinematic. There are also periodic blackouts of the stage, with single characters remaining in the foreground to narrate, an effect that Schimmelpfennig compares to a Greek chorus.

Well, we will see next week how Start Up is. This performance seems as if it will be a unique experience in any event.