"Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it" – Bertolt Brecht
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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 Great Depression in 1930s Chicago. Unemployment. Fear. Graft and corruption at City Hall. What do you need when society starts to fall apart? A strong man who steps in to take control. Arturo Ui, a small time gangster with an insatiable appetite for power, convinces a panicked population that no one has the answers but him. He and his cronies will provide the protection you’re looking for: even if you don’t know you’re looking for it. Brecht’s 1941 satirical masterpiece classic about Hitler’s rise to power in 1930s Germany demonstrates, with a savage blend of comedy and pastiche, how demagogues take power and how easily—and willingly—democracies become autocracies.
In Molière’s comic masterpiece Arnolphe, a rich merchant, is under the delusion that he can create the perfect marriage for himself by creating the perfect wife. He raises a young orphan, Agnes, from infancy, determined to keep her ignorant of everything except what he teaches her. As the play begins, he is about to marry her at last, or so he thinks, until the young woman skillfully turns the tables on him. In this award-winning translation by Frédérique Michel and Charles Duncombe City Garage remounts its acclaimed 2009 production with a contemporary twist that speaks to the issues of patriarchy, gender, and power in the “Time’s Up” headlines of today.
Irene awakes from a cryogenic chamber into a future where her terminal cancer has been cured but the world as she knew it no longer exists. She is welcomed by curious humans who command and are commanded by “Platform,” a vast computer network which appears to have replaced all known reality. Has the Singularity occurred? Is there still a recognizable planet where earth once was? In Wake Dahlquist examines society and sociability when lives are long, wants are met, and no need for cooperation beyond the response to solitude.
An opera singer lost in the city. A gorgeous male prostitute. A tough-talking taxi driver. A global trader. A teenage dreamer. Everyone’s looking for something they can’t find in this US premiere from acclaimed British playwright Simon Stephens (Heisenberg; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) whose strange and beautiful play re-imagines Bizet’s opera Carmen and explores the possibility of love in a fractured urban world.
How much do you earn? Who do you serve? The new world economics is built on inequality that threatens us all.
This remarkable new work from one of Sweden’s most celebrated novelists and playwrights takes on this issue in highly personal terms: a young man from an immigrant background trying to find his first job; a professor of economics desperately trying to hold onto the one he has; his wife, who nurses fantasies of an ecologically responsible life in the country; a homeless hustler who might be more than he seems; and a young woman who, in the cut-throat world of her office, may or may not be responsible for the death of a rival co-worker. Think economics is strictly for academics?
Much of our life is spent coupling, uncoupling, or recoupling. We’re obsessed by love and sex: how to get it, how to keep it, or how to get out of it and try again. In this new work, multiple-award-winning visionary playwright and poet Charles L. Mee looks at love from Adam and Eve to our own rapidly changing times where the possibilities of thwarting yourself in love expand with every new boundary we cross.
A pair of Christmas tree salesmen secretly wreak havoc in NYC. A pair of detectives are bent on catching a serial killer. A young woman finds herself drawn into a cat-and-mouse game and transformed in ways she could never have imagined. Well, maybe she could’ve. Meanwhile, wild animals have been sighted in the vacant lot across the street. Are they dogs? Raccoons? Or something more ferocious?
In 1974 Rainer Werner Fassbinder imagined a beautiful space alien on a mission to create a first-hand report on mankind. She landed in Nuremburg. Things didn’t go well. Now, in 2016, the alien research team has decided to try again, this time with an artificial intelligence in the same shapely guise.
right left with heels recounts the story of the Holocaust and post-war Poland from the ironic perspective of a pair of high heel shoes that once belonged to Magda Goebbels, wife of Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda. The shoes, who may have inherited her racist point of view, tell their own story: from their manufacture in Auschwitz to their tragic end on the feet of a transvestite murdered by contemporary Polish “patriots.”