Florian Felix Weyh

Triage
Szenen
3 D, 1 H, Chor
UA: 12.04.1996 · Saarländisches Staatstheater, Saarbrücken · Directed by: Kurt Josef Schildknecht
Paula, 50, has made it. The graphic designer is the head of a flourishing advertising agency. She is a hard woman, and her employees are afraid of her. Surrounded by monitors, she listens to her own words: every second slogan comes from her firm.
When she wants to get riled up, she goes to visit her son. Jakob, 22, is useless: he invents things that already exist or that no-one wants. Jakob is Paula’s Achilles heel. He is not worthy of being her offspring.
But adversity strikes from elsewhere. Paula’s mother, who Paula has made a star of advertising, breaks down in the photo studio. “Persistent Vegetative State” is the diagnosis – the mother will never wake up from the coma she is in, but time won’t stand still before she dies. And time is money. Paula’s life is ripping at the seams. It is obvious that the hospital is offering euthanasia. A simple flick of a switch, nothing more. Paula is torn and questions the very foundations of her world. But nothing is coming from the monitors but feeble aphorisms, and this language is no substitute for consolation or hope. And then Lisa shows up out of nowhere; her secret is her past and her past is a secret. She will no longer give in to Paula, a shadow of the past or another life that Paula left behind her years ago. At the end lies death – for the mother and for Lisa, who both die at Paula’s hand.
Triage is a formally strict choral drama that perceives and represents the world differently from the veristic visual media of our times. (Florian Felix Weyh)