Roland Schimmelpfennig

"A party or a vernissage, maybe the opening of a pub - or is it just a party at somebody's house? Maybe it's someone's birthday or someone has passed an exam? It's cramped in here, too crowded, way too crowded, you can hardly get through the hallway, you can hardly get into the kitchen, someone has a cough, someone says I haven't gotten rid of this cold for weeks, someone gives a speech, someone smiles at someone secretly, two kiss for the last time, two kiss for the first time, someone waits for a call, someone cries, someone laughs, someone sings a song, everyone sings a song. It will be light soon. Already? Indeed, the sun is rising. Yes? No? And suddenly everything is different. It's as if a shadow has slid in front of the sun." Roland Schimmelpfennig

Roland Schimmelpfennig, one of the most renowned German-speaking contemporary playwrights, describes loose encounters, casual gestures and fragments of conversation of his panorama of figures in precise, poetically condensed miniatures and snapshots and sketches the kaleidoscopic image of a society that suddenly comes to a standstill due to a pandemic. Through clever leaps in time, striking breaks and cleverly constructed transitions, we follow the most diverse figures after this shock into a disparate and dissonant time of social isolation, helplessness, fear and despair. We accompany them in their desperate attempt to create a cartography of the crisis, despite the fact that there are still a lack of interpretation routines and inevitable misjudgements.