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Join us for an evening celebrating the life and work of the late playwright and director René Pollesch who died unexpectedly at age 61. New York theatre artist Matt Gasda and his ensemble from the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research will be joined by David Levine for a reading of two Pollesch plays: Heidi Hoh, translated by Rose Riggs; and Insourcing ..., translated by David Tushingham.
Readings in English followed by a panel with Matt Gasda, David Levine, and others. Moderated by Frank Hentschker.
"René Pollesch, a prolific playwright and stage director whose work—intellectually serious yet irreverent, chatty, goofy and riddled with pop-culture references—made him one of the most significant forces in German theater of the past three decades, died on Monday in Berlin. He studied under Andrzej Wirth and Hans-Thies Lehmann at the legendary Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen, Germany. He was 61. His sudden death was announced by the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz theater, where he had been artistic director since 2021. Pollesch wrote roughly 200 plays and directed virtually all of them himself, often at leading theaters in the German-speaking world. But while his plays lit up stages in places like Stuttgart, Hamburg, Vienna and Zurich, he was most closely associated with the Volksbühne, a publicly funded playhouse in what once was East Berlin that had a reputation for making daring and provocative theater." (A.J. Goldmann, New York Times)
Special thanks to Nils Tabert, head of Rowohlt Theater Verlag, Germany. With the support and in cooperation with the Goethe-Institute New York, Jörg Schumacher.
Matthew Gasda is a playwright and director and the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research (BCTR). His first collection, Dimes Square and Other Plays, is available from Applause and his next collection Zoomers and Other Plays will be released in 2025. His newest play, Morning Journal, has just begun its run at the BCTR.
David Levine is an OBIE and Guggenheim-award winning director and visual artist. His work has been covered by Frieze, Artforum, and The New York Times, and his writing has appeared in n+1, Theater, and Parkett. He is Professor of the Practice of Performance, Theater and Media at Harvard University, and the author, with Shonni Enelow, of A Discourse on Method, published by 53rd State Press. His holographic film, Dissolution, premiered at the Museum of the Moving Image last October.
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