Ewald Palmetshofer

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 her autobiographical memoir «A Girl’s Story», published in 2016, the French writer Annie Ernaux attempts to understand a deeply formative experience in her own life. What happened to her, a young woman aged 18 at the time, in the summer of 1958? Between fragments of memories, diary entries, letters and decades-old photos, the author undertakes an almost forensic analysis of what happened, its effects and the social frameworks and sexual double standards that grant or refuse entirely different forms of «freedom» to men and women respectively. «A Girl’s Story» shows an almost 80-year-old woman painfully confronting sexual shame, impotence and self-empowerment and is – shortly before the #MeToo movement arose – a touching and highly political document of putting an end to silence.

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.   

With sharp-witted and pleasurable writing, Kevin Rittberger demonstrates why climate targets will never be achieved under the current economic regime, that work is self-defeating if it makes people ill and that the model of blood-based kinship is outmoded due to the current state of medicine and technology.

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.