City Garage presents

by Werner Schwab

Translated by Ivo Schneider and Sarah Morrissette

September 13 – October 18, 2000

Directed by Frederique Michel

Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe Jr.

Cast:

Erna Maureen Byrnes

Grete Veronica Valentine

Mariedl Cynthia Mance

The Original Soul Soothers Katharina Lejona, Eileen O’Connell, Erin Vincent

Assistant Director Jonathan Cobb

Costumes Lee C. Smith

Research Richard Grove

Stage Managers Ilana Gustafson, Eric Talon

One of the things we do at City Garage is introduce new European work to the Los Angeles audience. Clearly, we’re entering a time when notional and cultural borders are rapidly disappearing; if we are going to understand the emerging global community and our place in it, we have to listen closely to the voices coming out of other countries. We have to begin to interpret our own identity not just through our traditional, parochial American mindset, but in light of a cross-cultural struggle to grapple with sweeping new economic realities, emerging technologies of incredible power, disrupted societies, fractured traditions, decaying political systems, and value systems that after centuries of acceptance are increasingly called info question. Where are we going? If we listen closely enough we might find out.

We’re happy to have worked closely with the Goethe lnstitut and the Swiss and Austrian Consulates in bringing these two challenging new plays to you. Both of them make compelling comments on aspects of this global struggle to come to terms with the unsettling upheavals of our times; one in terms of economics, the other in terms of history.

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 dominating United States. The power of fantasy is deeply seductive; if can captivate whole peoples and cause untold suffering in the name of sentiment, piety, and moral posturing, barbarism’s most treasured costumes. What begins as a pleasant evening at home among three friends 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, 1 958, 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 dos 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."