Vincent Glander

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.

In June 1816 the «Medusa», the fastest frigate of its time, sets to sea. Its destination is Saint-Louis in Senegal. There are two hundred and forty people on board – besides the sailors, most of them are soldiers, but they also include the colony’s Governor and his family together with priests, teachers, doctors and engineers. Two days’ journey from their destination the ship runs aground on a sandbank and splits. As there is not enough room for everyone in the lifeboats, a raft is cobbled together for the lifeboats to tow on shore. But as soon as they set off, the rudderless and heavily overloaded raft is left behind by the boats on which the dignitaries are rescuing themselves. Of one hundred and seventeen men only fifteen will survive. Many of them will fall victim to their own comrades because the few goods they were able to save – barrels of wine, sodden biscuits, a few weapons and valuables – are as heavily fought over as the power the make decisions about possible rescue measures.

When Goethe set «Götz von Berlichingen» down on paper in 1771 in a true writing frenzy, the 22-year-old writer was still a complete unknown. This came to an abrupt end with the publication of «Götz», as suddenly the young poet was being talked about everywhere. Goethe’s early work is a powerful stage epic with over fifty locations, several plots running in parallel and a huge cast of characters. What is more: Goethe dispensed with all the customary conventions that 18^th century drama had been using up to that point.

Imagine that you haven’t been born yet. And imagine too that your whole life so far is unimportant. Just like all the opportunities you might have missed or bad decisions you might have made. Leave it all behind you. In «Now or Never» we are going to make a completely fresh start!

A prince of fashion and a fairy-tale king. A bird of paradise and a cult figure. A Munich original and a philanthropist. During the course of his lifetime, Rudolph Moshammer was given countless of these nicknames and soubriquets. Everyone recognized him as an eccentric with his dog Daisy on his arm, a talk show guest and man of society. Like his role model, Bavaria’s fairy-tale king Ludwig II, he loved glamour, opulence, and excess. In his appearances as an actor and in advertisements, as a singer in the preliminary round for the Eurovision Song Contest and with books like «Mama und ich» (Mama and Me), he became a cult figure and his fashion boutique «Carnaval de Venise» in Maximilianstraße became a cult address and place of pilgrimage for Mosi fans.

«Peer, you’re lying!»: Henrik Ibsen immediately highlights the key theme of his dramatic poem  in its opening line – the blurred boundary between illusion and reality. Because Peer, whose youth is shaped by the poverty of his farming background, continually reinvents himself with the aid of stories, lies and the arts of fabulation – as a cosmopolitan, a colonial master and even an Emperor.

In his historical miniatures, Stefan Zweig brings together brilliant achievements in European history that tell of unbreakable vitality as well as human weaknesses. In Thom Luz' poetic and musical production, they become archive material that is explored, sung about, brought to life in brief moments and also set in relation to Stefan Zweig's own biography and his journey into exile in Brazil.