SYNOPSIS: You’re going to read a Swedish play. Heavy. You’re thinking Ingmar Bergman, deep symbolism, whispers and cries, anguish, suicide, maybe some blonde sex in the sauna. Think again. The world of Sofia Fredén is more closely related to Larry David’s. Bergman’s characters are silent and closed. Sofia’s are open and naïve. They wear their psychology on the outside. They say what they feel. They are refreshingly selfish when you consider their context: a chilly, grey, and silent country where the motto, until quite recently, was “Duty above all else.” White Baby is a political comedy about a group of people who can’t seem to make place in their lives for a child. Most of it you’ll understand. But you probably won’t recognize similarities between the character Eva and Mona Sahlin, the present leader of Sweden’s social democratic party. You’ll listen to the scene in the postal service centre unaware that Post Offices have been completely phased out in Sweden and you’ll think it more absurd than we would when a character at the social service office asks to have his welfare check forwarded to Africa. Sweden and the U.S. are a bit different. We can’t help that. I am a great fan of Ms. Fredén and her work. White Baby is the fourth play of hers that I’ve translated. The earliest of rough drafts was workshopped at a theatre I ran about eight years ago. Three years ago Sofia and I took a version to a playwright’s colony in a nunnery in Winnipeg where she worked on it some more. Sofia has written about a dozen other plays while White Baby was in progress, so it had to wait until less than a year ago to get finished. It opened February 2007 at Göteborg Stadsteater. (Edward Buffalo Bromberg)

SYNOPSIS: I first encountered Bernard Da Costa's Boomerang when I played the role of the Teacher in a staged reading for New Jersey Repertory Company. I had serious problems with the translation, the wording of which felt awkward and unnatural to an English-speaking actor. Even in that form, however, the response was most gratifying—lots of laughter—and the entire audience stayed afterward for the post-show discussion, and seemed genuinely fascinated by these two troubled, passionate people.

When Bernard wrote to me, asking for my impressions of the play, I told him that I would love to attempt a new translation, and he gave me his blessing. As I worked on it, I found that both Isabelle and Pierre were wonderfully articulate, smart, fiercely defiant people—both among the Walking Wounded of the world—yet both refusing (against all reason) to surrender their dreams. What the audience had responded to, I felt, was this phoenix-like quality in both. Whatever their faults (and they are capable of terrible cruelty, and probably incapable of any intimate relationship with another human being), they cannot or will not abandon their unattainable goals. They certainly lack Don Quixote's nobility of mind, yet they are, in their own ways, akin to him. Their hopeless, blindered optimism makes them unsuited to the Real World, but they and their kind are part of what makes our world so endlessly fascinating. (Kathleen Huber)

SYNOPSIS: Playwright José Pliya, born in Benin, now running the National Theatre of Guadeloupe, bases his play loosely on the biography of Elisabeth Nietzsche, sister of the eminent German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Given a State funeral by Chancellor Adolf Hitler, Elisabeth Nietzsche embodied, while perverting their sense, the superman qualities Nietzsche extolled in his famous essay, Thus Spake Zarathustra. Her heightened narcissism and incestuous love allowed her to spurn the world, refusing to acknowledge the worth of all those defined as “other.” By sketching in a flashback Elisabeth Nietzsche's astounding trajectory, José Pilya suggests the connections between colonization, racism, anti-Semitism, and fascist ideology.

It is 1935. Elisabeth Nietzsche is 87 years old and Hitler has already begun his project to “purify” Germany by eliminating the Jewish population.

Flashback to 1886: We are in Paraguay. Elisabeth Nietzsche and her inept and self-pitying husband Bernard Föster have established, with the blessings of the German Empire and several German investors, the colony of New Germany (Nueva Germania). In this first part of the play, comprised of six scenes, German capitalists enthusiastically celebrate the philosophical and commercial rationale for the colonization effort, while more intimate encounters develop the tension between the ambitious and hard-driving Elisabeth, her husband, and the men they must deal with: the wealthy converted German Jewish banker Fritz Klingbeil, who opposes colonization as exploitative of German settlers; Cirilio Solindade, the Paraguayan landholder who seeks full payment for the lands that the Fösters cannot manage to cultivate; and, Friedrich Nietzsche, who is never seen yet always present. The object of Elisabeth's thwarted love, Nietzsche, at least as she dreams him, fuels her desire for power as well as her monstrous ability to create false truths by acts of will.

Part II (eight scenes): It is the last decade of the 19th century. The widowed Elisabeth has returned to Germany , abandoning her commitment to New Germany to care for her now deranged brother. She drives away the chief rivals for his attention, her mother and the writer Lou Andréas Salomé, and subverts the work of his best friends, Peter Gast and Franz Overbeck, by re-orienting their studies of Nietzsche's thought. Klingbeil, ironically in thrall to Elisabeth, aids her by lending his money and talent to the construction of the Nietzsche myth that Elisabeth has imagined. Slipping into madness herself, Elisabeth can no longer distinguish between her banker fiancé, her adored brother, and the exalted Zarathustra whose words she echoes. (Judith G. Miller)

SYNOPSIS: Since 2005, when I finished writing Amelia Breathes Deeply (for a wonderful actress and close friend), the play has not ceased to surprise me. It has had a life of its own, from the very beginning. At first, lots of people of my age—and older—took it very personally. That, I could understand, especially in Romania. But it also happened in other countries, like Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, and then it began to happen with younger people, who had been little children in the late ‘80s, therefore too small to remember communism and dictatorship.

Amelia... has been produced four times in Romania, and the latest production of the play, in Bucharest at the ACT Theatre, has been seen by people of an average age of 25, and the actress who performs it is 23.

Having been read at the Lark Play Development Center in May 2007, for an audience of artists and people who had known or been to Romania, some of them being Romanian immigrates, Amelia... was very well received. I was very happy and excited to participate in a second reading at hotINK. It was just another big test for the play, but also for the actress and director who have chosen to share the story of a woman from a world so obsolete, that they couldn’t have ever met with her, except by means of theatre. (Alina Nelega, playwright and translator)

SYNOPSIS: On many nights while Pascual dreamt he completed this which he was now doing, pressing the button of the doorbell of the old Millán house. He always woke up rancorous and annoyed with himself because of that weakness of the subconscious, ready to return as soon as possible to the hatred of twenty-five years, to the anger with which, without being able to avoid it, he usually muttered his brother's name. It's true that he had avoided an explanation—what good is it in a case like that?—so as not to cloud his mother's memory with so much sordidness. Perhaps someone believed he had made up figures for the probable value of the sparkling ring, the genuine pearl necklace, the topaz earrings. Not true. Pascual only cared that they had once belonged to his mother and that they had indeed accompanied her during her finest hour when her father was alive and she still had color in her cheeks. In exchange, he would have offered the small farm on Thirty-third which he had received in the bequest and which he didn't even visit.

SYNOPSIS: If I had had a mother and father, everything would have been different. But my only family was a maternal grandmother, and a maternal grandmother isn’t adequate for anything. Furthermore, she was missing almost all of her teeth and every time she spoke you thought she was going to spit out her remaining tooth. That probably signaled the beginning of her hatred toward me. She realized how terribly repulsed I was by her exposed and babbling gums. But I couldn’t avoid it, any more than she could avoid her hatred.

SYNOPSIS: Anne Garréta's La Décomposition, written over a four-year period and published in 1999, is the story of a serial killer. However, given that the author is a member of Oulipo, and the killer well versed in literature, we shouldn't be surprised to discover that victims are chosen from among the characters in Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Their flesh-and-blood counterparts are hunted in a contemporary Paris of video arcades, bars, and shadowy corners by the Seine. As the murderer dispatches the victims, their fictional counterparts are eliminated from a digitized version of Proust's magnum opus. Every reference to the “murdered” character is expunged from the book, reducing the novel's length with each fresh kill. To complicate matters, the philosophical and ruminative killer, who is, disturbingly, also the book's narrator, chooses these victims on the basis of a grammatical rule: they must agree in gender and number with the character in the novel. Otherwise, they are chosen randomly.

As should be obvious in a book with such a literary plot device, albeit a quirky one, La Décomposition is not simply the story of a serial killer, even a well-read one. For along with the victims, the narrator is also murdering Proust's novel, lopping off body parts bit by bit, cutting it down to manageable size. At one point in the beginning of the book, the narrator even comments, “For life is too short, and Proust is too long.”

In the novel two ideas widely found in twentieth-century literature are merged: the perfect crime and the gratuitous act. Through their amalgam the murderer hopes to raise murder to a fine art, to blend fiction and reality. And what better way to do so than to use a literary masterpiece as the scaffolding for one's crimes? For, in doing so, murder will wrap itself in the aesthetic mantle of the fine arts. But ethics is lost in aesthetics.

Filled with dark humor and with its dense, classically tinged prose, La Décomposition is ultimately not about serial killers but the role of the reader. For Garréta not only cuts Proust down to size, she questions literature's complicity with violence. In allowing us to identify with a murder, even a fictive one, literature provides a way for us to identify with evil, to absorb it through our sympathy with a character. In what is ultimately a profoundly ethical book, La Décomposition questions the mechanisms used by fiction to enable us to experience violence from within, vicariously, safely.

Robert Bononno

SYNOPSIS: It is heating up in a small village in the flat hinterlands. The villagers spend their weekends bathing at the gravel pit and when a new villager, the beautiful Miranda, appears from the water, a group of friends find their relationships changing. Both Victor, recently jilted by his girlfriend, and his friend, the older, married artist Rudolf, woo her desperately. Their friend Asta is a life-coach who lectures to businessmen around the country and yet is falling apart inside as she loses all contact with her children who live with their father in Berlin. She cannot understand the men's fascination for this pretty normal looking woman. Nor can Rudolf's wife Emma, who after a whole life with Rudolf is starting to realize she has sacrificed her own life for his, all for nothing it seems. Miranda herself is married, but no one has met her husband. As passions and tensions flare, a spate of animal killings begins, and Mr Allyours, a hare, and Fledgling McFeather, a heron, decide to solve the mystery. McFeather has the laudable motives of making their community safe again, and he is not impressed with Mr Allyours' motives: he is besotted by a young doe, Lady Why, and wants to capture the killer to prove his love to her.

SYNOPSIS: A Mother and Father, a Man and a Woman, a Doctor and a Nurse, and an unfortunate victim all cross paths in a hospital and become intertwined in ways that push all boundaries of the appropriate and expected. Exploring the deeper comic underbellies of violence, sexuality, and caretaking, the playwright seeks to unburden the audience, to help them diminish their fear about moral issues, illness, and death.

One evening in November 1918, Odemar Müller lurked near an advertising column in Potsdamer Platz, darting back and forth behind it as if he was playing hide-and-seek with someone, or looking in agitation for a particular theater announcement. In fact he was simply trying to dodge the hail of bullets directed by a detachment of machine-gunners at the railway station, where some Spartakists were holed up. ...

At the little station of M***, on the provincial railroad founded in 1883 with the materials of Kraus & Co. and championed by progressive citizens of the day, clusters of travelers were gathered waiting for the departure of the train to Finale. The prevailing, unrelenting color of their clothing was grayish-green, and the smell was that of the barracks. None of the men were in civilian dress, except for the one wandering from one door of the station to the other, wearing a tricolor armband and issuing orders, all the while doing his utmost to escape military attention. ...