Waiting for the Wolf: Florian Wacker's New Play

Everyone loves a good play. One of my first cultural experiences in Germany was a survey course on contemporary German theater, and we attended six productions in Marburg and Frankfurt. Since then I’ve made it a priority to see at least on play every season (not very much, I know, but life gets busy). The last time around was a first for me. Accompanying Anna, whose work takes her Munich regularly, last year I saw a powerful German production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. Although I’d been to various venues in Frankfurt, Berlin and elsewhere, I’d never seen a show at the storied Residenztheater in Munich. And it didn’t disappoint. The small cast, including the brilliant Sibylle Canonica, was utterly devastating.

The theater landscape in Leipzig is slightly different than the aforementioned metropolises'. During the ten plus years I’ve lived here, there have been a couple course corrections, the rebranding undertaken by Sebastian Hartmann, artistic director from 2008-2013, pulled most of the productions in a rather experimental direction. Hartmann’s strategy decidedly veered away from telling a coherent story, drawing the audience into a kind of endless rehearsal loop. Unsurprisingly, the theater’s bourgeois base stayed away in droves. The general aesthetic has resumed being somewhat more predictable under the direction of Enrico Lübbe, but there are still some off spaces for slightly more experimental fare.

One such location is called the “Discothek” and that’s where I saw the premiere of Florian Wacker’s Wolfserwartungsland. I first met Florian when he was a student at DLL, Leipzig’s creative writing center, and (full disclosure) he designed this very website. By now he lives in Frankfurt and has a short story collection, a YA novel, and a historic novel to his name. However, I was to be reminded that theater is a completely different terrain.

The title of the piece is actually a technical term used to describe land designated for the reintroduction of wolves. Germans may think of Brandenburg or other relatively unpopulated regions, but it’s not so specific. Here it’s proxy for the provincial. To be perfectly honest, I had some difficulty following the narrative, but as best as I could tell, it revolved around Roman, who runs a rural bar and inn, Juliette, his waitress and lover, and Victor, a hunter who’s come to town because he’s heard there’s a wolf prowling around. The circular, repetitive dialogues are frequently interrupted by the chorus of the Stones’ classic Dead Flowers, which moves the actors on stage to engage in a little line dance with somersaults thrown in for fun. The stage design contains a contrast between sloped stage covered with dirt and mulch, on the one hand, and the dark wooden siding enclosing the stage, on the other. This creates the impression of the provincial setting as a chamber drama, a laboratory experimenting with the margins of society. The fact that the program notes has quotes from Didier Eribon, Thomas Bernhard, and Seneca should have been fair warning. The question isn’t whether the wolf would come, but rather in which form. How the roles will be divvied up when someone gets shot. And it never really ends. You should see it for yourself if you can.