Einsame Menschen

Marie, a renowned architect expecting her first child, wants to realize her vision of country living with urban sophistication in the Berlin suburbs. A villa in need of renovation on the lake, only 40 minutes by train to the city center, is to be transformed into an international, sustainable co-working and co-gardening space. Her husband Gerhart wants to finally devote himself to his doctoral thesis on applied animal sociology in complete peace and quiet, and his mother Erika moves in to support the small family with her special healing method of "Rugeln." But despite the proximity to nature, the longed-for peace and quiet does not materialize: The newborn cries incessantly when suddenly an old college friend of Gerhart's, the climate activist Bölsche, seeks shelter with the family because he apparently fell out of a tree house during an activist forest camp. And then Margarete, a young digital nomad who feels at home anywhere there is Wi-Fi and is a staunch advocate of the sharing principle, finally settles in as a co-worker. And as it turns out, this principle can be interpreted in very different ways... Felicia Zeller's play, inspired by Gerhart Hauptmann's "Einsame Menschen" (Lonely People, 1890), comically tells of the loneliness of a decadent society that wants to reconcile its megalomania with sustainability and responds to man-made destruction of nature with blind nature worship. People revolving around themselves, monologuing past each other—because something speaks through them incessantly: an inner restlessness, a narcissistically charged longing that no landscape in the world can satisfy.In his book "Being Ecological" (2019) – an excerpt follows – philosopher Timothy Morton, on the other hand, sketches a more enjoyable vision of an ecologically attuned community, while Felicia Zeller depicts a doomed "community wasteland" in which an apocalyptic worldview is flirted with in an eloquent and action-free manner. by Amely Joana Haag