Beszélgetések űrhajósokkal
Conversations with Astronauts

Summary/Abstract: Contemporary German playwright and media-artist Felicia Zeller’s Conversations with Astronauts, translated by Beáta Adorjáni, was nominated in 2011 for best new German play at the Mülheimer Theatertage. The location of Zeller’s text-event with nonlinear dramaturgy is Ditchland, the characters are Au-pairs who work there and the families who have taken them in. Playing with geographical identification, the language makes real references ambiguous, sketching the experience of foreignness, as well as the small, humiliating, ordinary situations of sub- and super-ordination. The tension of Zeller’s drama is constructed on the linguistic situation of the infantilized status of a foreign language-learner that is related to several other – cultural and economic – gestures of power. The ironic linguistic perspective, much like Elfriede Jelinek’s similar texts, also raises the problem of (self)-expression: struggling and developing, random speech opens the space for the minor characters of social discourse.

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