Patrick Bimazubute

New York City in the final months of the Obama Presidency. While the writer Toby Darling feverishly awaits the premiere of his play, his partner Eric Glass spends time with his acquaintance Walter. His conversations with the 55-year-old take Eric back to a past which as a gay man in his early thirties he only knows from hearsay: the devastating AIDS epidemic that rocked the LGBTQ community at the beginning of the 1980s. 

New York City in the final months of the Obama Presidency. While the writer Toby Darling feverishly awaits the premiere of his play, his partner Eric Glass spends time with his acquaintance Walter. His conversations with the 55-year-old take Eric back to a past which as a gay man in his early thirties he only knows from hearsay: the devastating AIDS epidemic that rocked the LGBTQ community at the beginning of the 1980s.

Hamsun’s trilogy tells the story of a man who feels he has been overlooked by the elites that set the tone and cheated of social recognition. The philosopher Ivar Kareno evolves from a 30-year-old radical and anti-liberal writer on the fringes of poverty into a 40-year-old private tutor to the two sons of a businessman in a distant coastal region. Here Kareno sits brooding in his writing tower, while an infectious fever descends on people, arriving from the North, the businessman Otermann is driven mad by his wealth and a strange man wanders between the houses, rumoured to be justice. Ten years later, the 50-year-old Kareno is still hoping for a major turning point in his life. And he will indeed reach a milestone where he must decide whether he will remain true to the radical ideas of his youth or to pursue a career that is more measured politically.   

In the two volumes of poetry that were published before her early death, May Ayim finds a concise, poetic language with which she processes her experiences of racism and lack of understanding alongside her childhood and her desire for love, her joy and her sadness. She plays with sounds, methods of writing and letters, and yet always finds very clear words for what needs to change in Germany.

Following Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, in the second half of the season another we hear from another master storyteller. A narrator who tells us to call him Ismael walks onto the Residenztheater stage in seaman’s garb. What follows is a genuine monster of a story: Ismael is hired on the «Pequod», an old whaling ship, and goes to sea on board this floating blubber factory.

«Let’s say someone comes up to you and tells you you’re such and such a person, tells you the worst, says the most appalling things, things that could kill someone, absolutely destroy them, leave them speechless and lifeless. And then you say: Yes, that’s what I’m like, it’s true, but … But so what?» – With these words Prince Philip attempts to break down the reserve of his new fiancée Yvonne, but they also describe the essential plot of this first play by the Polish author Witold Gombrowicz.