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Musical ensemble piece about mothers and daughters
Adapted from the Novel by Sasha Marianna Salzmann
What happens when political systems disintegrate? — A stirring musical theater journey with our ensemble as a live band.
Sasha Marianna Salzmann writes about mothers, daughters and grandmothers during times of upheaval. Sometimes we are only able to grasp such events in hindsight – like the collapse of the Soviet Union and the hope-filled 1990s which many Eastern Europeans now call the “meat grinder days”.
The play takes us to the heart of the period of upheaval and beyond to ask whether we are experiencing another such turning point today. In Salzmann’s work, mothers and daughters are yoked together yet desperately avoid looking each other in the eye. They are unable to understand one another, they live in different worlds: in the Soviet empire, then in a system which is brutally falling apart and ultimately in the West. Lena’s spartan childhood takes place in the 1970s; in the 1990s, she becomes a doctor to try and save her chronically ill mother’s life. But by then, her mother has already died. Tatjana becomes a cashier in a liquor store, the only chance of survival in the uncertainty of the 1990s. Both women end up in Germany where their lives are supposed to start anew; inevitably, they become friends. By now, the two have given birth to daughters who grow up without knowing where they come from or what scars they bear.
Rich in empathy but without a hint of romanticising, Sasha Marianna Salzmann weaves together the stories of people whose biographies are shaped by periods of upheaval and tells of nostalgic lies and the struggle for new beginnings. Following Effingers, this is another epic production by Jan Bosse: a musical journey through time in the theatre with the ensemble playing as a live band.
„Ein Saisonstart mit großem Stoff und großem Ensemble.“