THAT SUMMER (TO LÉTO)
Flexible casting
“I think nobody was going out with anybody. The only thing was, we all slept with each other,” says one of the voices commenting on the character of a young man called “Mengele”, dispatching monologues and posing as a “cursed rock poet”. Using suggestive images and Hrabal-like text style, Mengele tells the story of the summer during which he experienced a “romance” with a girl called “n”. He describes the course of their affair – the moment he accepted her first invitation to sex, followed by the usual mutual attraction and summer time erotic and alcoholic rush, all the way to the boredom and inability to deal with it that set in later and the total disintegration of both the relationship and mutual communication.
The text is a succession of variously composed monologues, lines, verse, quotes, everyday reflections etc. The individual sequences/images are introduced by letters in alphabetic order and a range of swearwords starting with that letter. Love, sex, inebriation, life on the fringe of society are the main themes of the play; vulgarisms throw more light on the individual shades of the soliloquies. All of these combine together to create an image of a world as seen by the characters “M as Mengele”, “n” and so on. The result is an original vision of the darker, hidden sides of the world around us on the periphery of our perception.
This winning entry in the new Brno-based Konstantin Treplev Awards playwriting competition will be given a staged reading at the Goose on a String Theatre in Brno on April 23, 2011.