Trailer: Allerwelt

Applause and goodbye! Back to Tucson!

Delightful reviews again!
“Packend, berührend, mit Witz und grüblerischem Nachspiel: ein rares Theaterglück.” (Wiener Zeitung)
“Toll gemacht. Eine Kakophonie des Grauens” (Die Presse)

Down the rabbit hole

The final premiere tomorrow! “Ein schöner Hase ist meistens der Einzellne”. It’s my favourite play. And a radical experiment. The two actors on stage stay silent for almost one hour before they say a word. It’s the sourrounding voices, that talk, and in so doing create, invent and discard them.
Susanne Lietzow is an amazing director. It’s an honor to work with her. I am really looking forward to that night. I would be very relaxed, if there wasn’t this panel discussion after the show. On stage: Susanne, me, the Art-brut-Museum-Gugging’s manager and a well-known moderator from the public radio. Gugging once was a famous Austrian psychiatric clinic. Now it’s a museum and a colony of outsider artists. It is the place, where August Walla and Ernst Herbeck, the schizophrenic characters of my play, lived before they died. A discussion with the museum’s manager will be a challenge. In some way, my play is an attack on his work and world view. He transformed the inapprehensible life and art of these artists into well wraped madness-packages, into products to be traded and sold in the worldwide art market. (And insanity is a rewarding attribute in terms of branding his products: It’s just a black hole, everyone can project his longings or fears into.) He deleted their biographies, claiming that there would be no difference between the art of “normal” or “psychotic” artists (This indeed could be a good point! But not in the way he put it: “The piece of art is just a product without a relevant history.”), and in the same time, he organized guided tours around the artist’s living quarters, as if their home was a freak show. So: He joins our theater night. He comes to turn it into his marketing event. I’ll hopefully be able to prevent that. On the basis of thoughtful and calm arguments.

Find an interview about “Ein schöner Hase ist meistens der Einzellne” here.

There’s a dividing gap between most actors and me:

They are afraid of silence.
I am afraid of noise. 

Today’s gift

A great review in the very important “Süddeutsche Zeitung”!

Read it HERE

Allerwelt Pictures

Sleepless

Poppycock fiddlesticks tommyrot balderdash! Sleeping is for beginners! Allerwelt’s opening night party directly faded to a one-hell-of-a-headache-day of Tartaglia rehearsals! But never mind, Philipp. You had the whole stage at your command. And it was good magic. Me, transforming from the author into Tartaglia. Anna, mutating from Tartaglia into the author. From face into mask, from word into silence, from voice into music. I think the audience liked it! Here’s a list of the most used words in emails I received after that night: suprising / rare / touching / awe-inspiring / melancholic / shrewd / bewitching / wow 

Opening night: Allerwelt!

Find some impressions here:

TV: Austrian Television: “Allerwelt” and young playwrights
Radio: FM4 about “Allerwelt”
Magazine: Profil: “Ein überbordendes Stück”
Newspaper: “Poetische Flüchtlings-Collage”

And, finally, an interview with me about my play: Die pathetische Genealogie!

Burning the midnight oil

Making theater, this is coffee and cigaretts, long nights, booze, burning the midnight oil, hierachies and arguments, stress and vanity. Doesn’t appear to be a healthy, harmonious scene. Not at all. Do all actors die young? It is a struggle for a certain aim. And it’s a beautiful one. A group of people is bound together and roped up to achieve it. Trembling. In excitement and fear of this moment moving closer and closer: the opening night.

Rehearsals, rehearsals, rehearsals. Who is afraid of Philipp Weiss? I am! The role of the playwright is special. I still don’t know how to play it. Lucky me. I do not have to be on stage. But of course I do! In another way. Giving interviews, showing up at rehearsals, sharing my views. The author is the authority! No. What a mistake! I write a play and I want to have it performed, so to say: transformed. I want to get suprised by that process. I don’t want to control it. I don’t want to comment it. My part is done. Keep me out. Go! Let it be a metamorphosis. Get drunk, smoke, argue, struggle. And enjoy the applause at the end.

word trove

My City welcomed me very warmly. I found some of my own words sticking on road signs and lamp poles. Some clandestine friend of words must have left them.