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Cry Baby: Pollesch’s debut at the Deutsches Theater

It would be easier to say nice things about René Pollesch and Cry Baby, his first work at the DT since the dissolution of the Castorf clan at the Volksbühne, if German critics didn’t always sound like they had written their reviews in orgasm...

Image for Cry Baby: Pollesch’s debut at the Deutsches Theater

Photo by Arno Declair

It would be easier to say nice things about René Pollesch and Cry Baby, his first work at the DT since the dissolution of the Castorf clan at the Volksbühne, if certain German critics didn’t always sound like they had written their reviews in orgasmic ecstasy, with thoughts of Pollesch actress Sophie Rois bringing forth the second coming. There’s nothing terribly wrong with Pollesch’s plotless texts consisting of mini-platonic dialogues spiced with Abbot & Costello-style shtick; but their punchlines faintly aspire to become 21st century reconfigurations of Romantic-era philosophical fragments. Infuse that with the German intellectual knack for disguising sanctimony as a smirking world-weariness that occasionally erupts into fits of indignation, then recruit Rois to recite it all with her renowned vocal cords, so frayed by cigarettes and whiskey that one wonders how they work at all, and you have a Berlin theatregoer’s dream—and only 70 minutes long, to boot!

Oct 5, 11, 17, 25, 20:00 (with English surtitles)