Florian Jahr

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.

PART I: MILLENNIUM APPROACHES

PART II: PERESTROIKA

The mid-1980s: the outbreak of the disease AIDS alarms New York. Louis, son of a wealthy Jewish family, abandons his sick boyfriend Prior and starts a relationship with conservative Mormon lawyer Joe. When Joe’s drug-dependent wife Harper retreats into dreams of everlasting ice, his strictly religious mother flies in outraged from Salt Lake City. The Republican Roy Cohn, a cynical and power-obsessed lawyer, insists until his last breath that he is not gay and does not have AIDS. Even on his deathbed, he refuses to stop arguing about this with his black nurse Belize. And then an angel breaks through Prior’s bedroom ceiling.

No other play by Heinrich von Kleist inspires quite so many superlatives as «Käthchen of Heilbronn». It is not only the most successful, but also the most romantic, the most fairy tale-like and at the same time the most mysterious play that he wrote.

After fifteen years in exile, Orestes returns incognito to his home city of Argos – the same city in which his father Agamemnon was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus on his victorious return from Troy. However, desire for revenge is not the reason for his spontaneous homecoming – it is the rumour of a mysterious plague of flies. When his sister Electra persuades him to stay, it gradually dawns on him that Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are not only cruelly oppressing the people, they have also implicated him in Agamemnon’s murder. Only then does Orestes decide to take action.

Maria Stuart, the deposed queen of Scotland, seeks asylum in England but soon finds herself imprisoned in a fortress as her aunt, the English queen Elisabeth Tudor, begins to investigate her. When she was seventeen, Maria was allegedly involved in the murder of her husband – that is the official charge, but there are also rumours of a plot to seize the crown right now. Schiller portrays neither of his female protagonists in a particularly flattering light: Maria is an impulsive seductress, Elisabeth is a jealous and indecisive monarch.

You are how you speak. Professor of Phonetics Higgins makes a bet with his friend Pickering that he can turn the energetic Eliza Doolittle, who sells flowers in the street to make ends meet and speaks the broadest dialect, into an upper-class lady with immaculate articulation. Eliza proves to be a disciplined and talented pupil who manages to pass the test of entering high society. Higgins attributes this success to his own genius and automatically lays claim to her. He fails to notice that his teaching has helped Eliza to become a self-aware and thoughtful woman who is not only capable of making her own decisions but of acting on them too.

After many years, Gregers returns to his home country. His father, a successful entrepreneur, offers him the opportunity to join the company management, from which he has to retire for health reasons. Gregers refuses and at the same time learns that his father is secretly financially supporting the family of his old friend Hjalmar Ekdal, who lives in the most modest of circumstances, and becomes suspicious. Why is the capitalist suddenly showing himself to be a philanthropist? In his tragedy, Henrik Ibsen shows how the capitalist system has a direct impact on the private sphere and undermines social cohesion. The Norwegian Johannes Holmen Dahl, one of the most sought-after directors in Scandinavia, is now staging his German debut with a major work by his famous compatriot.