Scandal and intimacy: ‘Europe’s most influential theatre maker’ is coming to the US!
Following the acclaimed premiere of Hate Radio, Milo Rau will complete his North American “micro-syllabus in hard realism” in the coming weeks, including two premieres as well as a series of lectures and film screenings in New York and at Harvard University.
“The US theatre scene certainly has no public intellectual like Rau,” wrote the New York Times a few weeks ago on the occasion of Rau’s classic Hate Radio, while Rau’s latest collaboration with Elfriede Jelinek – The Second Coming – is published in TDR.
Now the Swiss director – who has just shaken the German-speaking world with his controversial Trial Against Germany and is preparing a megalomaniac Republic of Gods – is coming to the US for a whole series of events!
Together with writer Édouard Louis, he brings his “simplest and best performance” The Interrogation to the Skirball Center. And with an exquisite New York cast, Rau and Servane Dècle restage their internationally acclaimed The Pelicot Trial at the Judson Memorial Church.
Lectures and debates at the Segal Center (New York) and at Harvard University (Boston) will examine the unique blend of scandal and aesthetics, public intervention and highly private confession, horror and utopia that characterises „Europe’s most controversial director’s” work.
On Wednesday, Rau – whose “horrific” Medea’s Children has just been awarded the Catalan Critics’ Prize – will screen his multi-awarded film The New Gospel, followed by a round table with performance icon Richard Schechner, Micah Bucey (Judson Memorial Church) and film producer and activist Tanya Selvaratnam.
Shortly afterwards, two of Rau’s North American premieres will take place: The Interrogation at the Skirball Center and The Pelicot Trial at the iconic Judson Memorial Church in New York.
Among others, Ellen Barkin, V (formerly known as Eve Ensler), Joan Juliet Buck, Neal Kumar Katial (former United States Solicitor General), and Laila Robins (Homeland) will perform live on stage!
Milo Rau’s visit to the US concludes with a series of lectures at Harvard University. Rau takes his audience on a journey through his aesthetic of the real – including the lecture The End of Democracy.