Daniel Mezger

Dave Gahan, the lead singer in Depeche Mode, has an image problem. He solved it in the early nineties in the classic Rock Star way: tattoos, heroin and yes, death. He has been talking about his two minutes of death ever since and in ever new variants. The truth and the order of the events have long since escaped his mind: Is he still in the hotel room? Or in the middle of an argument with his band leader Gore? Or on the bear skin rug with Britney Spears, who is just about to busy herself with his crotch?

Three musicians are summoning the East.
Driven by a strange longing for failure and real problems, they arrive in the Balkans. And they are kidnapped by a rebel organization who wants them to write their revolution anthem.

The three musicians are young, politically committed and unsuccessful. They would gladly be rebels themselves, and they would like to sing their music against the system, and they would like to say something. Because as contemporaries of the western world, they have long since been caught up in the discourse of somehow: "Yeah, somehow you can’t talk in such black-and-white terms, but you have to be somehow allowed to be against something, don’t you?"

The "somehow allowed to be against something"-group suddenly face the real rebels. What they want comes to pass, if necessary, by force. This is tempting, but probably not correct. The band wants to abolish capitalism and globalization, but the band also wants to be tangible and concrete. They suddenly experience "real life" and do not really know what to do with it.

The percussionist Robert is the one most challenged by the situation, and the most radicalized. His sense of justice and his political correctness are suddenly questioned. He must learn to be for or against things. Suddenly, there are very real enemies, to whom one can ally oneself, or against which one can defend oneself. And then there is the daughter of the rebel leader...

Lea turns thirty. Of all things. No life plan and no child in sight. Does she want to keep going at all? Become a mother? Be like her mother? She is still not quite independent, although she now lives abroad. Micha tries to calm herself, but soon guests come, and before that her mother calls. The doctors have discovered something, it could be bad. "She always knows when to call." Lea goes back to the mother. And stays. Three weeks later, Micha follows her. "At last I get to meet you. Doris. Just call me Doris." Doris is nice, very nice, and takes good care of her child, takes good care of her guest, is glad that there are those who can be taken care of again. Isn’t she herself ill?
Even after three months, Micha can not persuade Lea to return to the city. Lea's concentration on the relationship with her dominant, overbearing, but also needy mother turns Micha into a marginal figure. "We are always only one thing: mother and daughter. The tasks are distributed. Uneven but fair." Lea is not doing so well. Lea wants to go home, but she does not know where that is. Lea has a stomach ache. Since she has arrived here, she has no longer felt like herself, she no longer even has her period.

DORIS: You're pregnant. A mother can see that. It's much too early.
LEA: I'm not. No. It’s just the scrambled eggs that don’t agree with me.

Lea does not come back. Micha can not cope with her. But her mother is finally a mother again and not just a woman. A woman like the daughter, who can be a child again. Back to the abdomen. Back to the mother's belly. (Daniel Mezger)

In his piece Bauchlage, tthe young author Daniel Mezger describes, in a pressing but also finely comical way, the fears of a young woman about the final stage of growing up, and her failure in the face of her relationship with her mother.

Linday Mills poses in front of sunsets scantily dressed, she does her stretching on the pole and has no problem at all to show herself off. Unfortunately, she is stuck in the exile of the house with her boyfriend. Who just can't leave Moscow at the moment. So, she has the choice between the domestic couple's exile or skyping via bad internet connections. Oh, and by the way: the boyfriend's name is Edward Snowden.

After Als ich einmal tot war und Martin L. Gore mich nicht besuchen kam, Daniel Mezger presents part two of the Trilogy of Freedom - and in a playful, but also radical manner poses the question: How does intimacy change in the age of global networking and constant surveillance?

"Horror films begin like this" - A small gas station somewhere in the north. Winter. The last bus has left the village before the long night begins. Only the elderly remain and defy the winter in front of their TVs. But now, a young woman does not want to take the last bus. Joana has taken care of the gas station during the summer, knows the place from before. She does not want to return to the city and to the life that she led there. She wants to stay here, wants to find herself. Luke, one of the old people, tries to dissuade her from her plan:
"You're too young for such a night. The night is too long. "

It will disturb the order of the place, will disturb their well-earned rest. But she is not the only one who doesn’t want to go, because there is someone else who does not want to take the last bus. A young man suddenly appears, a man whom no one knows and who does not speak to anyone. The bus leaves, the long night begins. The mysterious stranger comes forward. Joana is torn – is he disturbing her self-chosen solitude, or is he the man with whom she could be happy? And if so, how does happiness work? The frivolous old Josephine is enchanted by what she regards as a secret love story, Luke is jealous and worried about Joana, and Markus, the shopkeeper, has his own explanation for the presence of the stranger who makes him nervous. Things have reached the tipping point.

Daniel Mezger focuses on a young woman's search for herself and also creates wonderful roles for three old actors. A piece, laconic, dark, oblique, and at the same time, a sort of love story.

You have to imagine the scene: you grow up in poor conditions, get married early to get away from it all, are beaten by your husband and dragged into what is called show business. Under a foreign name, you travel around half the world to escape the man and the beatings and you finally arrive in Zurich. And you can not even work there. This is Transit-Zurich, do not confuse it with a home. Like every transit area, it also encourages us to reinvent ourselves. What story do I want to have? Who do I want to be? In Zurich, it’s better to be somebody. Somebody like Tina. For example.

Daniel Mezger writes a story about a story that cannot be told. And about a narrator who does not want to tell it. A nightmare. Tina und ich is a hymn of praise for failure, a play upon our stereotypes and expectations, full of drama and migration and the feeling that the neoliberal race for commodities is always better than the exhausted self. (Announcement Schauspielhaus Zürich)

The story is simple, it goes like this:
At the funeral of her boyfriend, she - we can call her Mira - notices another woman who seems to mourn, but nobody knows her. Mira follows her, pursues her for days, until she finds an opportunity to talk to her. Ann is the other woman. Mira also introduces herself: Nora.

Ann has had an affair with the deceased over the last few years. Mira had not known he was leading a double life. The story she has in mind is different. They seem to speak of two different people.

The story becomes more complicated:
A strange friendship develops between the two. Mira is working on her Nora camouflage. Mira asks for stories about this strange man she thought she knew. And the author also plays a secondary role. But he does not want to accept this.