About the work
„I shot a Pop Star, oder wie ich versuchte, das Manifest der Gesellschaft zur Vernichtung der Männer umzusetzen“ (I shot a Pop Star, or how I tried to put the Manifesto of the Society for Cutting Up Men into practice) is a stage version by Monique Séjourné and Sophie Scherer after Valerie Solanas, who wrote her SCUM Manifesto in 1967 and shot the artist Andy Warhol the following year. This version premiered on 6 September 2026 at Staatsschauspiel Dresden, directed by Séjourné.
Plot
The piece combines Solanas's biography — a youth marked by abuse, poverty and separation from her son — with her radical artistic response, the SCUM Manifesto, which in 1967 called for abolishing the money system, governments and the male sex. It centres on how much anger art can bear and when unambiguous politics tips over into violence, leading up to Solanas's shooting of Andy Warhol in 1968.
Cultural significance
After its 1967 self-publication, Solanas's SCUM Manifesto initially remained a fringe document of the New York underground; only after the widely publicised shooting of Andy Warhol in 1968 did it become widely read among radical feminists, and it is now regarded as an early, radical document of second-wave feminism. The Dresden version was the opening premiere of the Staatsschauspiel's 2026/27 season in the Kleines Haus 3.