SMALL TOWN BOY
PREMIERE 11/01/2014
Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin
»No one here appeals for understanding. Here, someone makes their position clear. Rarely has Richter been more unironical, direct, and relevant.«
»No one here appeals for understanding. Here, someone makes their position clear. Rarely has Richter been more unironical, direct, and relevant.«
»No one here appeals for understanding. Here, someone makes their position clear. Rarely has Richter been more unironical, direct, and relevant.«
“You leave in the morning with everything you own… Run away, turn away, run away, turn away, run away.”
That’s how Bronski Beat described a young man’s escape from a narrow-minded world of repression and lack of recognition to the big city, far away and free: London, New York,Berlin… These metropolises were and are the place where people can rediscover and reinvent themselves, reject and question traditional roles and paths, and redefine families and relationships. They can re-negotiate their attachments, experiment with everything that their families prevented them from living out at home. Is it possible to be a different kind of man? A different kind of woman? Can you ever stop being a son or daughter? Is it possible to reject authority, and live and love in a different way? Love, in theory and in practice, appears to still be the discursive battlefield on which our many contemporary conflicts about gender, sexual and cultural identities in everyday life are carried out. What can and should a “man”, a “woman” be today? How will we define family, nation and belonging in the future?
In this research project, Falk Richter and the Gorki ensemble explore the question of what happens when young men also leave the patriarchy behind.
Stage design and costumes // Katrin Hoffmann
Music // Matthias Grübel
Lighting // Carsten Sander
Dramaturgy // Jens Hillje, Daniel Richter
With // Mehmet Atesçí, Niels Bormann, Lea Draeger, Aleksandar Radenkovic, Thomas Wodianka
Tour Performances
- Théâtre National de Strasbourg, 2016