ICH ERWARTE DIE ANKUNFT DES TEUFELS

“Still, if the world at large is to know me as I desire it to know me – me of the flesh, me of the peculiar philosophy and the unhappy spirit – I shall have to bring myself into closer personal range with it. This book of mine contains but one character – myself. There is also the Devil – as a possibility.”

Brilliant, charming, devastatingly beautiful: Mary MacLane is unlike anyone else. Yet it seems no one but she herself has quite grasped it. In 1902, Mary MacLane holds nothing back, pouring her world-weariness onto the page – the frustration of having no prospects in that stifling provincial life, and of the indifferent, unimaginative people who inhabit it. With razor-sharp clarity, she reflects on art and literature, on steak and spring onions, on the meaning of life, and on the beauty of the natural world. In the bleak emptiness of Montana, the nineteen-year-old composes a dazzling psychological self-portrait, shifting between everyday observation and morbid fantasies, between euphoria and sadness, while unapologetically putting herself centre stage. “Surely there must be in a world of manifold beautiful things something among them for me.” Years later, Mary MacLane continues this search for subjectivity and desire in a second text: “I, Mary MacLane” – written from the perspective of the now mid-thirties literary star returning to Montana after a prolonged absence. Marie Rosa Tietjen merges the two texts in her own adaptation, and develops a solo piece together with her team and an actress from the ensemble.