Grillenparz

Grillenparz is a hill, right outside the city, where every year the employees of the local corporation gather for – an archaic game? A nightly ritual? A drunken excess? In any case, it is a ribald attempt to return into nature’s arms – or at least let their own nature run wild. But first, they have to endure the annual company picnic where they provide a cozy backdrop for the business partners who have joined them from abroad, dreaming of lucrative investment schemes. Yet primarily, this summer party drifts towards the reenactment of its own crime. Whatever may have happened exactly one year ago is blended with this year’s debauchery into an inscrutable round dance – and yet it is so tangible that nobody wants to talk about it. And all the while, a choir of crickets keeps singing patriotic songs and songs about other, eternal things in life, but also songs of violence and, comfortingly, of forgiveness.

“Grillenparz is a play about home but it is not a folk play, even while the ‘choir of crickets’ always sounds folksy – a remarkable play”. (Süddeutsche Zeitung) “Arzt weaves corporate clichés and romantic archaisms into a poetic social study of a whodunit. Hardly ever has such applied brutality ventured so compellingly on a stage.” (Nachtkritik)