Moise and the World of Reason

“We have not long to love” is the title of a poem by Tennesse Williams, the author who once said of himself that all he ever wrote were pleas for the fragile. Moise and the World of Reason was published five years after Williams, as the first great American author, publicly outed himself on a television show. It is about love and paralysis, the loss of innocence and the reawakening of desire. The narrator, a thirty-year-old writer suffering from an inflamed libido, writes his homoerotic desires in his diaries during the intoxication of a night. He seeks out the community of fags and butches, queens and queers, and women who love women to celebrate together the departure from the world of reason.

Alexander Giesche draws on the novel, which has never before been staged on a major stage, for his own personal farewell party from the world of reason. Giesche juxtaposes loneliness, exclusion and alienation with outburst, poetry and tenderness. Farewell? Yes, but not without a party.