About the work
“Kill Baby” is a play for three actresses by the dramatist Ivana Sokola, born in Hamburg in 1995. The text won the Kleist Förderpreis for young playwrights in 2021 and had previously received a special prize of the German Children’s and Youth Theatre Award. It premiered on 17 September 2021 at the Nationaltheater Mannheim, in a co-production with the Kleist-Festtage in Frankfurt (Oder), directed by Sapir Heller.
Plot
Three women from three generations live together in a high-rise housing estate. Seventeen-year-old Kitti is pregnant by Maik, the boy from the neighbourhood, and has to decide whether to have the child. Her mother Viki was herself pregnant very young and left on her own, while grandmother Sugar has survived many crises and bakes a cake. As the three argue, the family history comes to light, with childhoods in abandoned countries, early motherhood and absent fathers.
Cultural significance
The play addresses the question of an abortion from the perspective of a teenager and her family. The jury of the Kleist Förderpreis praised the poetic, precise and unsparing language of the text.