GRETCHEN

Biography of the author

Lutz Huebner (1964), German playwright, actor and director. The most performed contemporary writer on the German stage. The most famous plays: The Boxer’s Heart, The Banker’s Play, Mrs. Miller Must Go, The Company Gives Thanks, The Evening Over Potsdam and others. He is the winner of numerous awards. Some of his plays have been made into movies. He lives and works in Berlin.

Huebner’s play Gretchen, page 89 premiered in 1997 in Berlin. Since then, it has had numerous performances around the world. The duo drama in which two people, the director and the actress, try to find a solution for a scene from Goethe’s Faust, served Huebner for a fine dissection and exposure of various theatrical clichés and mechanisms. Goethe himself certainly could not have guessed that the scene on page 89 of his play, in which his protagonist Gretchen is alone on the stage with a jewelry box, would serve many years later as a segue to an excellent and noble comedy about the search for the meaning of theater and art as such. In a few short scenes, all the archetypes of the theater world are revealed and the audience has the opportunity to do what they love most – to peek behind the scenes and see what exactly is happening there.

Biography of the director

Nevena Dimitrijević was born on January 31, 2001 in Nis. For almost ten years, she attended the acting school of Vesna Stanković, actress of the National Theater in Niš. Later, she became a member of the Academic Theater of SCC Niš. Graduated from “Svetozar Marković” high school in Niš. She entered the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade in 2020, majoring in theater and radio directing, in the class of professor Dušan Petrović and assistant professor Ana Tomović. Greta is her graduating play and first directing at the National Theater in Niš.

A word from the director

The theater has always intrigued both those who make up its world and those who are just observers of a piece of magic called a show, on the boards that mean life. Why do they really mean life, how does that magic happen, do the actors really kiss, how is all that text learned, these are just some of the questions that people have been asking for centuries in order to figure out the secret of the theater. The list of such questions could go on and on. With this play, we tried to answer at least some of them, giving the audience the opportunity to peek into the world of the birth of a play, leaving them the space to decide for themselves whether the final product or the process of its creation is more fascinating. Whether the creation process or the performance itself is more fascinating is the question whose answer we were looking for while making this piece. Will we ever be able to be sure which is which of the two? Probably not.