Sadly, still a reality
Absurdist theater based on Donald Trump’s presidency presents a problem for the Hamburg State Opera (Associated Press):
Tobias Kratzer spoke in disbelief ahead of the world premiere of “Monster’s Paradise” by Olga Neuwirth and Elfriede Jelinek, which features a gluttonous, ravenous, insatiable President-King, lampooning U.S. President Donald Trump.
“The metaphor has become a reality,” the Hamburg State Opera artistic director said in his office Sunday morning. “I’m really hoping in — what is it, eight hours? — the piece is not completely outdated because up until now it has always gone closer and closer to not being a satire but being reality.”
When I was posting spoof flyers around town for New Age workshops and therapies in the 1990s, there came a time when reality began overtaking satire. I once invented a men’s movement workshop where particpants would reconnect with their lost godhead by sharing stories of their “wounding” by circumcision. My psychologist brother-in-law later wrote that he’d run across one.
So Kratzer gets it.
Jelinek, 79, won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature. Neuwirth, 57, won the 2022 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, and was the first woman composer to present a work at the Vienna State Opera:
Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play “Ubu Roi” was the inspiration, a profane, scatological work that had a one-performance run in Paris, cut short by an angry audience response.
Aspects of Jarry’s King Wenceslas and Ubu characters were adapted into The President-King for what Neuwirth and Jelinek call a Grand Guignol opera, which has a six-performance run through Feb. 19. It moves to the Zurich Opera from March 8 to April 12 and next season to Austria’s Oper Graz. An audio recording is planned.
The President-King entered in a gilded Oval Office with a Coca-Cola filled refrigerator. A golden crown sat on his desk along with a red button that jettisoned visitors such as an Elvis Presley impersonator in the manner of a TV game show as a trio of red X-shaped lights flashed. A woman resembling Melania Trump lurked in the background.
They’re laughing at you, Donald. Here in the U.S. we’re almost passed finding the humor.