(click for more images)

The Presidents is a frightening play in the guise of a cartoon. Three blue collar women try to outdo each other with their fantasies but as we watch, we feel a growing discomfort. We recognize this struggle for domination, this insistence that one's fantasy vision of the world must replace and annihilate all others. Schwab playfully, and with deadpan innocence, invites us into the world of these three, seemingly harmless eccentrics but we rapidly become aware that we've seen this play before in the realities of twentieth century history: the mid-century fascist bloodbath, the seventy year agony of Soviet communism, the chest-beating, self-righteous monomania of a domoniating United States. The power of fantasy is deeply seductive; it can captivate whole peoples and cause untold suffering in the name of sentiment, piety, and moral posturing, barabarism's most treasured costumes. What begins as a pleasant evening at home among three freinds devolves into horrifying and ludicrous chaos, a devolution that mirrors the process by which, in easy steps, rosy ideals become the justification for genocide.

Schwab calls his play The Presidents, We need not think very deeply to see why, or to understand this disturbing cartoon as an embittered struggle to absorb the appalling lessons of the twentieth century and to move forward (hopefully) in some way less bloody and more humane.

Werner Schwab was born on February 4, 1958, in Graz. Schwab studied for four years at the Vienna Akadamie der Bildenden Künste, met with violent disapproval of his sculptures from perishable material however, and hired himself out as a building worker and woodcutter until, within the shortest possible time, he became the most-produced young dramatist in the German-speaking world. In 1992, Schwab was elected playwright of the year by German-speaking theatre critics. He also wrote two novels: Abfall; Bergland; Cäsar (1993), and Der Dreck und das Gute(1995).

Schwab described his mother as a simple, religious woman from Graz, made pregnant and later abandoned by a Nazi and good-for-nothing. He died in his native Graz on January 1, 1994. His publishers commented on his death with the following words: "He burnt at both ends."