“Two by Fassbinder: ‘Pre-Paradise Sorry Now’ and Katzelmacher”
Tonight and tomorrow at 8 p.m.
Sunday at 2 p.m.
At the Arthur Miller Theatre
$9 w/ student ID/$24
Upon entering the Arthur Miller Theatre this weekend for the University’s latest fall drama, audiences will be brought into the midst of post-WWII Germany. Student actors in full costume will engage the audience in conversation in the lobby, perhaps bringing them a little closer to what it might have been like to see famed revolutionary avant-garde screenplay writer and director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s action theater in the 1960s.
Director and Theater Prof. Malcolm Tulip carefully chose two of Fassbinder’s works he believed to be the most engaging and resonant: “Pre-Paradise Sorry Now” and “Katzelmacher.” Both pieces speak to alienation and discontent in the post-war era. “Pre-Paradise Now” is the story of the infamous Moor Murders in Great Britain in the mid-1960s. “Katzelmacher” relates the tension that arises and the discrimination that comes into play when a Greek migrant worker moves into a German town and disrupts the peace. Tulip actually added violence into the piece in carefully choreographed moments, with an innocuous caress of a gun on the cheek or a lit cigarette coming towards the face. Both pieces display a darker side of the human condition.