About the work
“Einige Nachrichten an das All” (literally “Some Messages to the Universe”) is one of the two plays with which Wolfram Lotz, a playwright and poet born in Hamburg in 1981, made his name in 2011. He wrote it as a commission for the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar, which he had won in 2010 as the commission prize of the Stückemarkt at the Berlin Theatertreffen. Annette Pullen directed the world premiere in Weimar on 24 February 2011. In 2016 the text was published by S. Fischer in the collection “Drei Stücke”, together with “Der große Marsch” and “Die lächerliche Finsternis”.
Plot
Lum and Purl Schweitzke, two physically impaired characters, puzzle over what the plot of the play they appear in is actually supposed to be, and hope for a child together that would give their lives meaning. But what happens to them is fixed in the script, and it has no child in store for them. Meanwhile a “Director of Progress” lets figures from history and the media radio messages into space through an apparatus; among them are a father mourning his dead daughter, the botanist Rafinesque, the politician Pofalla and a resurrected Heinrich von Kleist. All of them founder on death and transience, and in the end Purl dies by suicide, leaving Lum alone.
Cultural significance
The play is a prime example of Lotz’s programme of an “impossible theatre”: 64 footnotes, narrative stage directions and demands that can hardly be carried out literally force every production to find its own solutions; for the Weimar premiere the text was cut by about half. In the critics’ poll of “Theater heute”, Lotz was named young playwright of the year for it in 2011. Since then the play has been staged at many theatres in the German-speaking world and across Europe, and it has been translated into English, Norwegian and Serbian, among other languages.