Save 30% by ordering tickets online and using the code “winteriscoming” before October 20th!

translated by David Tushingham

Oct. 19 — Nov. 25, 2018

For a long time the far right hid in the shadows. Now it no longer needs to. This witty, incisive and ultimately chilling new new play looks at the seductive re-emergence of fascism from the German perspective — a perspective few can share with such dread.

Five people gather on Christmas Eve in a bourgeois, intellectual household. Albert, a writer, is engaged in a ferocious spat with his wife Bettina, a film-maker, over the arrival of her mother, Corinna. But it is Corinna who sparks the dramatic crisis by inviting a man she met on the train, Rudolph, to stay with the family. Rudolph is urbane, civilized, and polite—the essence of cosmopolitan charm. He entertains everyone by playing Chopin and Bach on the piano, but when he reveals that he is a doctor with Paraguayan connections, we realize that he is the silken embodiment of a Nazi past Germany has long thought buried.

The West Coast premiere of this transfixing, razor-sharp new comedy from acclaimed German playwright Roland Schimmelpfenig powerfully demonstrates the unnerving logic of the new right and the seeming impotence of liberalism to combat it. Highly cinematic in style, naturalistic and surrealistic by turns, the play exerts the same hypnotic spell as its menacing visitor—an insidiousness that makes him, in Schimmelpfennig’s eyes, a lethal threat.

“The timing is perfect…. The idea that we show hospitality to our destroyers is as old as drama itself…. Schimmelpfennig, in portraying the failure of liberal intellectuals to confront the hideous legacy of the past, has written a potent play for today.” —The Guardian

“A rare and delightful play… the family drama, richly comic, accurately skewers a wide spectrum of human behavior… Schimmelpfennig’s ominous underlying message [is] Who – or what – has taken up residence in our lives without our really noticing?” —The Evening Standard

Join us for a special preview with complimentary champagne, Friday October 19, or for the opening night gala, Saturday, October 20 with buffet.

Buy your tickets for any night of the run before October 20 and get 30% off!