Monday, April 8
Segal Theatre
6:30pm Reading + Panel

FREE + Open to public. First come, first served.

Join us in celebrating in Heiner Müller’s 90th birthday with a reading of Heiner 1-4, by German playwright Fritz Kater. Kater arranged Müller Material on what echoes in play: the love story between the late Heiner Müller and his wife Brigitte Maria Mayer, using interview excerpts on art, theatre, and society from the post-revolutionary years, as well as “a play in the play with a monologue about life, the end and all the rest.”

Photo by Jack Zipes

Heiner Müller (9 January 1929 – 30 December 1995) was a German (formerly East German) dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. His enigmatic, fragmentary pieces are a significant contribution to postmodern drama and postdramatic theatre. He is considered by many to be the most significant German writer for the theatre since  Bertolt Brecht.

Photo courtesy of the artist

Brigitte Maria Mayer, born 1965 in Regensburg, is a German photographer, filmmaker, and producer. Her work engages with mythological and historic material and re-contextualizes aspects of modernity, religion, trauma and sexual identities. Mayer works and lives in Berlin.

Photo by Matthias David

Anna Müller completed Cultural Studies in Frankfurt (Oder), worked at a photo agency and is the co-founder of the small independent Berlin Publishing House Herzstückverlag (Heart Piece Publishing).

Photo courtesy of the artist

Jonathan Kalb has taught at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center since the early 1990s. He is the Resident Dramaturg of Theatre for a New Audience and the creator and moderator of the public event series TheaterMatters: An Artists and Critics Review Panel at The Invisible Dog Art Center. He served for six years as Chair of Hunter’s Theatre Department, founded HotReview.org [hotreview.org] (The Hunter On-Line Theater Review) and edited it for 13 years, and has twice received the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism as well as the George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association. He has been a regular critic for The New York Times, The Village Voice and New York Press. He currently writes about theater on his TheaterMatters blog, which may be found at www.jonathankalb.com [jonathankalb.com]

Photo courtesy of the artist

Bonnie Marranca is founding publisher and editor of the Obie-Award winning PAJ Publications/PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. A recent recipient of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Excellence in Editing Award for Sustained Achievement, she has written or edited eighteen books. She is the author  Performance Histories, Ecologies of Theatre, and Theatrewritings, and editor of several drama, interview and essay collections, including Conversations with Meredith Monk, New Europe: plays from the continent, Interculturalism and Performance, and Plays for the End of the Century. Her essays have been translated into twenty languages. A Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Senior Scholar, Bonnie Marranca is Professor of Theatre at The New School for Liberal Arts/Eugene Lang College.

German stage director Armin Petras is the artistic director of Staatsschauspiel Stuttgart. He studied stage direction at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin from 1985 to 1987. In 1987, he co-founded the independent theatre company Medea Ost and staged Heiner Müller’s Wolokolamsker Chaussee 1-3 at Nordhausen Theatre. In 1988, he emigrated to the West Germany and started working as assistant director at Theater am Turm in Frankfurt and Münchner Kammerspiele. Petras is the most important director of plays written by playwright Fritz Kater, his Alter Ego. Petras staged Fritz Kater‘s Zeit zu lieben zeit zu sterben, a play for which the playwright received the Drama Award of Mülheim and was elected “Dramatist of the year“ in an annual survey carried out by the theatre journal “Theater Heute”.

Co-curated with Antje Oegel, Berlin.