How Theatre in a Car Works?
Rolling theatre in a beautiful old “Citroën Déesse”: two actors act in the front seats, three spectators fit on the back seat – and a city is a stage. Tom Stromberg and Stefan Pucher tour Germany with this mini-performance – we sat in the rear.
The city as a stage, that’s so easy to say. And if it really were? Not wooden gables in front of the firewall, but the real, rainy, night-black streets of Berlin? The city as a stage is the most important idea in Stefan Pucher’s production of the one-hour miniature “What are you afraid of?” by Richard Dresser.
Theater in the car: View from the inside stage to the outside stage: It’s a highly intimate viewing experience in this back seat, and the fact that you can’t just get up and walk almost escalates the whole thing to the claustrophobic. This concept is somewhat similar to car boot sales (check out carbootdirectory.co.uk for a car boot sales directory) where people sell stuff at the back of their cars, so anywhere is their shop.
Pucher sends a car, a 25-year-old Citroën Déesse, with two actors in the front seats and three spectators in the back seat, on a tour through Berlin – an expedition to the edges of the theater landscape. It is a little-known Berlin through which the journey goes, not the city of trash glamour, but that of the prefabricated building and shopping mall gigantism, the single-family house dreariness, which eventually turns into the countryside, where the streets only have numbers.
A man (Sebastian Schwab) drives through this city, alone and in a bad mood until he sees a woman on the street, a hitchhiker (Lisa-Marie Janke). She rises, an exchange of words – and suddenly everything is possible. “I could be your worst nightmare,” he says. “And I yours,” she replies. It goes back and forth a bit, they get closer, he stops on a dirt road, and at some point, the windows fog up. But you already know: The real, David-Lynch-like nightmare is the city itself, where a man in women’s clothes stands on the side of the road and another beats his dog, where crowds of people stare at this huge blue car and the spectators stare back in it and the boundaries between play and reality, between actors, extras and spectators blur.
ALSO READ: Tow Services: Driving To The Theatre
Inside and outside, relative terms become as you glide through this city. It’s a highly intimate viewing experience in that back seat, and the fact that you can’t just get up and walk makes it almost claustrophobic.
“What are you afraid of?”, this question is not only asked by the young woman to the lonely driver, who says after the fast number on the dirt road that it has “caught” him, but does not want to talk about love. Also in the second scene in front of a drive-in, a woman shows a man this question: When the heavily annoyed family man stalls the car and she gets the engine running again in two simple steps. That man has just as much difficulty showing small weaknesses – or big feelings – is not entirely new in theatre. But this evening is.
After Berlin, Pucher’s production will be shown in seven other German cities. It is the first own production of the former artistic director of the Hamburg Schauspielhaus, Tom Stromberg, who is now sending the play on tour with the help of a sponsor after years as a Hamburg insider tip. And it is part of the logic of exclusivity that the tickets can only be obtained through the sponsor, a French cigarette brand, or through the daily press.
