The Cold Child
by Marius von Mayenburg
British-English Translation by Maja Zade
American Localization  
Publisher: henschel schausspiel, Berlin

Marius von Mayenburg
was born in Munich in 1972 and studied Medieval German Studies in Berlin, transferring to the Berlin University of Arts in 1994. From 1998 to 1999 he worked in the dramaturgy department of the Baracke of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and was appointed dramaturg at the Schaubühne Berlin in 1999. He works as a director, playwright and translator. In 1997 he received the Kleistförderpreis for Young Dramatists as well as the Award of the Frankfurter Autorenstiftung (Authors' Foundation) for his play Feuergesicht (Fireface), which premiered at the Munich Kammerspiele in 1998. The play has since been translated into more than 30 languages and produced all over the world, as have many of his subsequent plays. Marius von Mayenburg lives in Berlin.

Plays (Selected): Eldorado; Feuergesicht; Haarmann; Parasiten; Turista.

The Play
Henning, a small-town exhibitionist, is climbing the social ladder: after years in highway service areas, he's finally made it to the big time, the ladies' room of the hip café Polygamous. The paths of several people's lives are about to cross tonight: Lena, a student of Egyptology, is being plagued by her family. Her father is annoying her with the practical questions of life and threatening her with disinheritance. At the next table a young couple with a strangely silent baby, Silke and Werner, are waiting for their friend Johann, whose girlfriend has just left him. When Lena flees to the bathroom to get away from her family she becomes the chance victim of Henning. His routinely staged but miserable failure of an attempt at flashing lets poor Johann rise to the occasion as he saves Lena's life. Henning accidentally becomes a match-maker and wins the affection of Lena's little sister, Tine.
The four libertine couples, Silke and Werner, Johann and Lena, Tine and Henning and Mommy and Daddy, meet again for Johann and Lena's wedding, a celebration of perverse passions, and again at Daddy's funeral, where they all prepare for a final knife fight of malice.

"Just like the Social Utopist Charles Fourirer once distinguished three kinds of love - érotisme, familisme, amitié – 30 year old Mayenburg declines in his farce three cases of hatred including their gradual transitions. ... von Mayenburg skillfully intertwines several, almost simultaneously held disputes, intersperses them with cold analytical inner monologues, in addition to this adds bloody visions and dark dreams of angst, which never let you be quite certain whether it might not be real terrors and abominations after all." (Eva Behrend, Theaterheute)