KASPAR & THE SEA OF HOUSES (Kaspar Häuser Meer)

by Felicia Zeller

translated by Birgit Schreyer Duarte

directed by birgit Schreyer Duarte + David Jansen

SUmmerWOrks Performance Festival 2011, Toronto

Lower Ossington Theatre, August 4-14, 2013

English Language premiere

Winner of the 2011 Summerworks Prize for Outstanding production

CAST + CREATIVE TEAM

Performed by Ese Atawo, Miranda Calderon and Jacklyn Francis Set & Costumes Ashley Corley Sound Lyon Smith Lighting Roberto Pires Stage-Manager Marie-Claude Valiquet Producer Birgit Schreyer Duarte (Storm &nd Stress) Poster Design Louis Schreyer Duarte.

ABOUT THE PLAY
Three exhausted Children’s Aid workers fight against an ever-growing pile of cases: babies must be removed from garbage-filled apartments, a feuding immigrant family reined in, the return of seven kids to their abusive parents prevented and single mothers taught how to run their households. To catch up, they speak a truncated language, piling new thoughts upon unfinished ones, only to get stuck even deeper in the pitfalls of paragraphs, moral obligation, failed judgment and hidden self-interests. Helpers are bound to turn into culprits. It becomes increasingly challenging for the social workers to keep the voices of others out of their own, fragmented speeches. Times and places collapse into each other, cause and effect become one, borders between clients and caretakers begin to blur.

TRANSLATOR’S / CO-DIRECTOR’S NOTES
We are thrilled to be the first ones to offer this unique voice of a playwright who has long made her mark in the German theatre landscape, to the English-speaking world and a Canadian theatre audience. What unites Felicia Zeller with the voices of other cutting-edge, contemporary German writers is an extraordinary skill to discuss serious, even tragic events with subtle irony and a liberating sense of humour that makes the tragic content at once accessible, complicated and seductive. My initial interest in this play was in its celebration of language. For most German audiences, the first two words of the original title Kaspar Häuser Meer may invoke the name of the legendary Kaspar Hauser, the 17-year old youth who turned up in 19th century Nuremberg and claimed to have grown up in the total isolation of a darkened cell. What looked like the set-up of a cruel experiment then fueled once again the debate about the interplay between nature and nurture in human development, as it evoked possible answers regarding the language skills a child owns after having been depraved entirely of external stimuli and human contact. Furthermore, the phenomenon polarized opinions over another issue: is communicating through language an innate urge and therefore an innate skill? --But even for viewers without such cultural-specific references, the play’s most irresistible challenge seems to lie in its discourse about language. Through the play’s three social workers, language as a tool for mastering their life as socialized beings turns into a pitfall they stumble into and an involuntary sign of capitulation. In fact, German reviewers have called Kaspar Häuser Meer a “capitulation in words” and “an (in)articulate linguistic game.” As a translator, too, I faced the challenge of having to “win the game” before I can recreate it in the foreign language. Together with the team, I had to think through the interrupted thoughts of the characters and finish their sentences first. As translating is always an act of dramaturgy, of interpretation first, any translation of a text like this is particularly subjective and entirely based on our individual perception or, quite literally, “reading” of the play. This is what makes translation thoroughly creative, risky, and exhilarating. Felicia Zeller wrote Kaspar Häuser Meer as a commission for Freiburg Theatre in 2008, as a response to Germany’s so-called “Kevin case”: the discovery of a two-year old boy’s body in his stepfather’s fridge. The public had been particularly appalled by this case when it became known that Child Welfare had been monitoring the family for a while and was aware of the child’s situation. Zeller tackled this sensitive subject not by putting the victims or the offenders in the centre of the action but by zooming in on the many social workers that struggle day by day to prevent such disasters. Birgit Schreyer Duarte