Azur oder die Farbe von Wasser

Josefstädter Strasse 26

1080 Wien

 

Dear God
make me pious
that I'm in the
Heaven come

But mom
I don't want to yet
to the sky
I want to be with you
remain

Austria, 1988: Cases of abuse at a Catholic boys' boarding school cast a shadow over Johannes and Geri's young love. Johannes retreats to the haystack to paint. Geri would rather escape: to Vienna, to a freer world. Silenced by society and family, the abuse inexorably leaves its mark on Lisa Wentz’s cross-generational play.

"I'll paint us a world," Johannes says to Geri as they lie in their boarding school beds. "I'll paint us a world far away from here. And we can escape there whenever we want." Decades later, Johannes' daughter Anna still looks for him in these paintings of Azure, in this world that he created and shared with her as best he could. She tries to understand her father's disappearance, the arrival of his childhood friend Geri, her mother's calm grief and her grandmother's rigid faith. Azure is my homage to Johannes and to the world in the color of water in which we met.
Lisa Wentz

For her play Adern, the Tyrolean playwright Lisa Wentz won both the Retzhofer Drama Prize (2021) and the Nestroy Prize for the best play (2022). Azur is a work commissioned for the Theater in der Josefstadt and her second collaboration with director David Bösch.


(Source: josefstadt.org)