“The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma is calling you!”
To close out the season, the grand old Hebbel Theater will be given a new name loosely based on Franz Kafka and turned into the “Nature Theater or Oklahoma.” The New York company by the same name is returning to Berlin and will occupy and perform throughout the entire theater.
To start off, the troupe is inviting everyone to Kreuzberg for a barbecue at the newly opened “Nature Theater of Oklahoma.” The sixth episode of “Life and Times,” a work in progress, will then be created together with all Berliners who heed the call. Participants will be invited to an interview, where they will be acquainted with what they will be asked to do over the following weeks – but don’t worry, anyone who just wants to meet the group will still get a burger anyway. Then for three weeks, HAU1 will become the group’s place of residence. Alongside the evening performances, there will also be interviews, podcasts and animated films.
For the first time, audiences will also have the chance to see all the large-scale productions of recent years in combination, some of which themselves take up more than a single evening. Following performances of “Romeo and Juliet” and single episodes from the series about life in an American suburb, “Life and Times,” which in total runs over 24 hours, the temporary squatting of HAU1 will flow into a 15-hour marathon performance of episodes 1–6.
Life and Times
Everything started with a simple question: Can you tell me the story of your life? Directors Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska asked company member Kristin Worrall to tell them her life story over the telephone. It lasted sixteen hours. Without editing or corrections, these telephone calls became the libretto for “Life and Times,” an epic and biographical saga in ten parts. Word for word, memory for memory, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma narrates, over successive evenings or in a several-hour marathon, the life of a middle-class woman in her mid-thirties from an American suburb. A life that is interesting because it is everything but unusual, and is therefore like your own. Poetic, witty and as sophisticated as it is obvious, “Life and Times” gives us the chance to observe our own lives from another point of view. The formats and genres are also constantly changing, just like in real life. Here it is a mixture of musical, dance, thriller-melodrama, animated film, book, and radio show.
