RICHARD GILMAN
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is a place for suffering in any well-rounded bourgeois education.
In a prefatory note to his shon play
Heimarbeit (Homeworker)
Kroetz has composed a terse manifesto for all his work, a statement
that reveals the panicular basis of his mistrust of the conventional
theater at the same time as it sets out the ground on which his dis–
tinctive imaginative sympathies rest and from which they seek their
objectifications.
I wanted to break through an unrealistic theatrical convention:
garrulity. The most important "action" of my characters is their
silence; and this is because their speech doesn't function proper–
ly. They have no good will. Their problems lie so far back and
are so advanced that they are no longer able to express them in
words.
A drama built on silences. A theater of the inarticulate. Such is
the ironic achievement of this playwright who is scarcely thirty and
has already established himself as a wholly unexpected and astonish–
ing force in his native theater and is likely to do so soon in theatrical
consciousness everywhere.
Set until very recently (the change is greatly significant and I
shall take it up later) in the urban lower-class and poor farming
milieus of his Bavarian childhood and youth, Kroetz's plays offer
what would seem to be a chamber of horrors of violence and scatol–
ogy. A spinster returns from her factory job one evening, goes through
her precise rituals of lonely domesticity, and then calmly, gravely,
kills herself. A script calls for a man to masturbate and defecate on
stage (in production of course the actions are simulated or shown
indirectly) and for a girl to foul her pants from fear: There are abor–
tions or attempted ones in several plays. A dog is shot
in
another; a
man and a woman use each other as targets in a deadly game with a
rifle; an infant is murdered; illegitimacy, adultery, perverse sexual
acts run through all the texts. Everything is dumb, animal-like,
without any dimension of "mind."
Knowing only this much, one might properly conclude that
Kroetz represents a retrogression, a movement back to a grim and
fatally circumscribed realistic mode. Or, on a coarser level of response,
such as that which greeted the opening of
Homeworker
in Munich
in 1971, when Catholic organizations among others picketed the
