Abyss

Kathrin tries to defy the lack of personnel. The lack of time. And the physical exertion. So she can give dignity to the old people. And closeness. But all this does not gain her any thanks in the nursing home. The boss urges her to hurry, the relatives feel misunderstood, her own daughter neglected. A patient becomes a danger to her life in his delusion. And she becomes too much for herself.
Following motives of Büchner’s Woyzeck, Maria Milisavljevic looks at his female counterpart in the chronically underpaid and understaffed care system. Who pays attention to those who give themselves over to this profession with unconditional commitment? Who at times even represent the only connection to the outside world? And at some point lose themselves in the confused fantasies of all those whom they have accompanied to the end?
Maria Milisavljevic merges in alte sorgen a tender declaration of love to old age with the sensitive yet bizarrely poetic observation of a nurse. Kathrin becomes the calculated victim of a chronically understaffed care system because she simply cannot escape her responsibility for people. Not even when her own life threatens to fall apart.

It's booming. So loud. Is that the crisis? Ready yourself? Oh yeah. Online experts in disaster relief. But what actually happens to old women who want to finish the roaring in analogue? To die. In the street. Does anyone take them away, at least? Civil courage, so what? And how awesome were the eighties? Ratatatata. "Hey, man, you have shot a child." Collateral damage. It can happen. The world is trembling. The mother of the dead child wants revenge? The man at the edge of Ulro laughs. Schadenfroh. And rules full of hatred. But then the mother extends her hand to the soldier. It is time. Hearts? We're not scared.

With her anti-terror play, Maria Milisavljevic wants to "identify with a society that has in the face of ever closer threats moved into non-committal virtual worlds ... With vehemence and pathos, she pleads for the principle of love as a means of social policy, and thus shows the courage of a utopia in contrast to the fatalism of the rational." (Excerpt from the jury statement of the Heidelberger Stückemarkt 2016 for the authors’ prize to Maria Milisavljevic)

A house at the river which marks the border. A door which is always closed, and people who always have been and always will be there. With her polyphonic play, Maria Milisvaljevic provokes the ghosts of a Bavarian family. Then as now the outside “world is on fire”. Inside, the voices of the past overlap with the fears of generations. Tales, letters and songs are layered on top of each other and those who, like the “little one”, try to learn the truth, keep getting different answers which in turn become new memories. (Announcement Residenztheater Munich)

It is the seemingly familiar story of the Nibelungs, filled with the old myth of the Song of the Nibelungs and the Norse Song Edda. But the old certainties and heroic tales have long since become shattered. It is not only Brynhild, the Valkyrie, who is forced to free herself from the old expectations and brutal intrigues. Likewise, Sigurd, the dragon slayer, no longer fits into the familiar hero cliché. Who decides who we are? Fate, the gods, the family - or ourselves? Together, Brynhild and Sigurd rewrite their story: as a great love story, a family drama, a tragedy, a thriller. And as an angry rebellion against others deciding who they should be. With all the bloody consequences. "Maria Milisavljevic's new theatre play actually allows for many interpretations. If you want, you can see it as a very intense confrontation with the devastating war in Ukraine - triggered by traditional delusions of masculinity, claims of ownership and the desire for revenge inscribed in the DNA of human history." (SWR)

Peer Gynt - narcissist, bon vivant, liar: in his "Nordic Faust" Henrik Ibsen tells the biography of an egomaniac in many stages, which could also have originated in our present-day society in its basic features more than 150 years later. For this reason, the Regensburg Theatre has commissioned its in-house playwright Maria Milisavljevic to write a version of the material from today's perspective.

Peer Gynt is human. And in the 21st century, Peer is also a woman. A woman who lies. Again and again. With the wildest stories, she dreams herself away from her bleak life, in which her father destroyed the family's livelihood in drunkenness and her mother abandoned Aase and her in misery. She longs for fame and recognition, yet everyone only smiles at her. There is no place for her in the village - because she refuses to be instrumentalised by society as a woman. The more rejection she feels, the more imaginative her lies become, with which she escapes all family and social obligations. After Aase's death, she is not only guided by the motto of her life, "Be sufficient unto yourself", but is literally driven through the world in a life-hungry and manic search for herself, constantly oscillating between essence and appearance. Those who are always true to themselves must inevitably disappoint others.

But what remains in the end, after a seemingly dazzling life as an outsider? Where to go with the fear of mediocrity, the addiction to self-dramatisation and the constant search for affirmation and love? (Announcement Theatre Regensburg)

"Seeing Peer Gynt, this egomaniac who takes everything for himself, interpreted as a woman's role has an effect, brings to light the still encrusted gender attributions." (Süddeutsche Zeitung)

In Staubfrau, Maria Milisavljevic interweaves personal, seemingly unspectacular and ordinary stories. Stories that have been silenced for far too long and are just waiting to be heard. Like the biography of the main character, inside of whom patriarchal violence accumulates like a seething mass. What happens when a woman decides to end her inner monologue and stand up for herself? The individual restless river becomes the raging torrent of several generations of women. Dust Woman is a call to queer-feminist struggle and collective uprising, but it also breathes the desire for calm. The water flows harmoniously and floods cruelly, displacing, seeping away, branching out, merging. The water never forgets. (Schauspielhaus Zürich)