Burgtheater (Vienna, Austria)

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    At the Ruhrtrienniale, Industrial Ruins Become Stages

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    The best productions at the Ruhrtriennale festival created a sense of unity with their unique, often vast, settings.For six weeks each year, the Ruhrtriennale festival transforms the economically depressed Ruhr region of northwest of Germany into ground zero for cutting edge art and performance.Since 2002, this lavishly funded event, which puts on roughly 30 productions each summer, has lured artists and audiences to Germany’s rust belt with its robust and unexpected programming. And whereas many of Europe’s summer arts festivals can feel interchangeable, the Ruhrtriennale is devoted to works that can’t be experienced the same way anywhere else. Many have been created specifically for the postindustrial sites that dot the region.Earlier this month, the Ruhrtriennale’s artistic director Barbara Frey inaugurated her third and final festival program with her own staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” presented in the Kraftzentrale, the cavernous former power station of a disused steel and coal plant. It was the opening salvo in an interdisciplinary program, running through Sept. 23, that includes an immersive production of a Janacek opera and an art installation in a Brutalist church.The desolate set for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” designed by Martin Zehetgruber, features rusting cars half-sunken in the earth and sparse trees that suggest Shakespeare’s enchanted forest is on the verge of collapse. This is a gloomy “Midsummer,” both visually (thanks to Rainer Küng’s lighting) and atmospherically, and while it is enlivened by fine acting by a troupe of 10 performers, the production itself is oddly sterile and detached. Dorothee Hartinger’s wry and insouciant Puck and Oliver Nägele’s gruff and bittersweet Bottom are standouts. However, most of the time, the actors, drawn largely from the permanent ensemble at the Burgtheater, in Vienna, recite Shakespeare’s text with fine, crisp diction, but without truly inhabiting their characters.Cast members from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from left: Meike Droste, Marie-Luise Stockinger, Sabine Haupt, Markus Scheumann, Sylvie Rohrer, Gunther Eckes, Oliver Nägele and Langston Uibe.Matthias Horn/Ruhrtriennale 2023For a play that dances on the threshold between dream and waking, and art and reality, Frey’s production feels like a slow waltz. (The frequent music box-like tinkering by an onstage musician quickly grew tiring.) There is much to admire, but little to quicken the pulse.I missed the site specificity of the festival’s most memorable productions. When Florentina Holzinger staged “A Divine Comedy” at the Kraftzentrale, in 2021, she made fuller use of the space to create an infernal cabaret-variety show. Although I was not a fan of that production, I must admit that Holzinger’s spectacularly overstuffed staging, featuring joyriding motorcycles and cars, and even a grand piano suspended from the ceiling, was visually stunning. By contrast, Frey’s production, which will transfer to the Burgtheater in September, seems designed for any theater with a rotating stage.There was greater sense of unity between the production and the venue at the world premiere of Gisèle Vienne’s “Extra Life,” at the Salzlager, in the city of Essen.Two years ago Vienne, a distinctive French choreographer and director, was at the Ruhr with her clammy and hallucinatory chamber piece “L’Étang” (“The Pond”). While that previous work was insistently small-scale, with two actors playing 10 roles on a mostly bare set, “Extra Life” embraces the vastness of a former salt storage facility.From left: Theo Livesey, Katia Petrowick and Adele Haenel in “Extra Life,” at the Ruhrtriennale in Essen, Germany.Katrin Ribbe/Ruhrtriennale 2023Like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Vienne’s latest creation is a nocturnal piece. In the vast, often fog-shrouded confines of the Salzlager, she unspools a simple yet enigmatic tale about two estranged siblings (Adèle Haenel and Theo Livesey), who reunite at a party and rekindle their relationship, sifting through a painful family history. A third character (Katia Petrowick), who emerges during their long night of the soul, might be a kindred spirit who follows them from the party into the woods. Or perhaps she is a composite of figures from the siblings’ past, or of unconscious wishes.This is a demanding and elliptical production, in which much is implied, but little is ever settled. Vienne and her fellow artists achieve uncanny and cathartic effects through pared-down dialogue, controlled slow-motion choreography and dazzling laser stage lighting (by Yves Godin) that suggests both being at a club and inside a video game. Immersed in the swirl of fog, lasers and a synthesizer score by Caterina Barbieri, the audience seems bathed in postindustrial electricity.With its disquieting blend of surreal and blandly quotidian elements, “Extra Life” can be an exasperating puzzle. It’s best to just surrender to its visual and sonic rhythms over the course of its unhurried 140 minutes. Over the coming months, the production will travel to Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and France.This is Frey’s last summer leading the Ruhrtriennale. Her time at the festival has widely been judged a success, especially next to the troubled reign of her predecessor, Stefanie Carp. But the creators Frey championed were often extreme, or obscure.From next year, the Belgian director Ivo van Hove will be in charge. Like his predecessors, he is sure to put his stamp on the festival, and there is no doubting that van Hove has a questing and disruptive bent. The Ruhrtriennale will give him his biggest canvas yet. I’m curious to see how he chooses to fill the Ruhr region’s majestic cathedrals of industry.RuhrtriennaleThrough Sept. 23 at various venues in northwestern Germany; ruhrtrienniale.de. More

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      Peter Simonischek, Beloved Austrian Actor, Is Dead at 76

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      He played a prankster and adoring father in “Toni Erdmann,” the Oscar-nominated 2016 comedy that made him an international star, but he had long been a celebrity at home.Peter Simonischek, an eminent Austrian theater actor who found international fame as the shambolic prankster and adoring father in Maren Ade’s Oscar-nominated 2016 German film “Toni Erdmann,” died on May 29 at his home in Vienna. He was 76.The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Brigitte Karner, said.Mr. Simonischek was a member of the Burgtheater, the venerable Viennese institution otherwise known as the Burg, one of the oldest and largest ensemble theaters in the world.“He was one of the last great stars of Austria,” said Simon Stone, the Australian director who is based in Vienna and cast Mr. Simonischek in his 2021 play, “Komplizen,” at the Burg. Mr. Simonischek, he said, was a beloved public figure, recognized by taxi drivers and passers-by in the streets of Vienna, where he was more of a celebrity than most film stars.He was certainly easy to spot: a handsome, shaggy-haired bear of a man who used his physical heft to marvelous effect.His size “lent his performances a hulking grandeur,” said A.J. Goldmann, who covers German theater for The New York Times, “that could be tragic or give them a Falstaffian absurdity.”In the comedy “Toni Erdmann,” the story of a workaholic management consultant named Ines (played with brittle humor by Sandra Hüller), Mr. Simonischek is Winifried, Ines’s mortifying father, a retired music teacher who sets out to liberate Ines from her soul-squashing profession by camouflaging himself as Toni Erdmann, a loutish, lumbering corporate consultant to her boss, and upending all she holds dear.The film, written and directed by Ms. Ade, enthralled critics at Cannes and the New York Film Festival and was nominated for a 2016 Academy Award for best foreign language film (losing to “The Salesman,” from Iran). A.O. Scott, writing in The New York Times, called it “a study in the radical power of embarrassment” and described Mr. Simonischek’s character as “a slapstick superhero.”Mr. Simonischek in a scene from the 2016 film “Toni Erdmann,” which brought him international fame.Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo“Sometimes he’s a clown,” Mr. Stone said of Mr. Simonischek. “And sometimes he’s an authority figure or a debonair leading man. He was willing to completely humiliate himself. He used his beauty and his imposing physicality as a kind of canvas on which he could paint any kind of disgusting or extraordinary quality that any of his characters needed.”In Mr. Stone’s play “Komplizen,” which he said translates not quite accurately as “Complicit,” Mr. Simonischek played an industrialist who is facing a reckoning as the world turns against him and his ilk.It is Mr. Stone’s process to write his scripts in rehearsal, to encourage the actors to come to the material fresh and make room for improvisation. It’s a grueling process, he said, and Mr. Simonischek excelled at it, cheering on the younger cast members who struggled with the practice. Also, the production called for a rotating stage, making rehearsals even more grueling.“Once you’ve got Peter in your corner, you can achieve anything,” Mr. Stone said. “His brilliance was infectious; he shared it with the cast on a daily basis. It’s a quality he has had from the beginning of his career — to make other actors brilliant while never becoming less brilliant himself.”Peter Simonischek was born on Aug. 6, 1946, in Graz, Austria. His mother was a homemaker and his father was a dentist who had hoped his son would study medicine, as Mr. Simonischek told an interviewer last year. But after seeing a performance of “Hamlet” when he was a teenager, he said, “I was lost.”He attended the Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, and found work as an actor in Switzerland and Germany. In 1979, he joined the Berlin Schaubühne, an innovative ensemble theater, where he became a star. He joined the Bur in 2000.In addition to “Toni Erdmann,” for which he received the European Film Award for best actor, his most recent film roles include “The Interpreter,” a 2018 Slovak film, and “Measure of Men,” a German film about the country’s colonial atrocities in Africa; it came out in February.Besides his wife, who is also an actor, Mr. Simonischek is survived by three sons, Max, Kaspar and Benedikt, and two grandchildren. His first marriage, to Charlotte Schwab, ended in divorce.Just before his death, Mr. Simonischek had been playing the stage role of the patriarch of a Pakistani American family in a production of Ayad Akhtar’s “The Who and the What” at the Renaissance Theater in Berlin, following an enormously popular run at the Burg, where it opened in 2018. (The Renaissance stopped the show when Mr. Simonischek fell ill a few weeks ago.)The play tells the story of a devout and charismatic Muslim man whose daughter has written a novel about the Prophet Muhammad, scandalizing their traditional community and upending their relationship.Mr. Akhtar, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2013 and is the author of the critically acclaimed 2020 novel, “Homeland Elegies,” said that of all his plays this production is the longest running and most popular. And in contrast to its American run in 2014, it was staged with an all-white cast, only because that is the cultural and racial makeup of Burg’s ensemble. It’s a scenario that in years past might have given him pause, as he told Mr. Goldmann of The Times in 2018. But Mr. Simonischek and his castmates had won him over.Mr. Simonischek in 2008 with the German actress Sophie von Kessel in a dress rehearsal of “Jedermann” at the Salzburg Festival.Schaadfoto, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“What was remarkable was this weird alchemy,” Mr. Akhtar said in a phone interview, “because Simonischek at that point was the patriarch of Austrian theater, a father figure to the Austrian public, and he was playing this conservative Muslim father.“On opening night the notoriously stoic Viennese audience was in tears,” he went on. “Maybe not as much as me” — Mr. Akhtar said he was sobbing onstage at the curtain call — “but not far from it. It was one of the peak moments of my career.”At Mr. Simonischek’s death, Mr. Akhtar was in the middle of writing a play for him. Mr. Simonischek, he said, was “soulful, precise and enthralling — an actor whose heart and generosity were as wide as his talent.” More

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      ‘The Inheritance’ Arrives at a Festival of German Drama

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      A new production of Matthew López’s seven-hour play was among 10 shows chosen for Theatertreffen, a celebration of the best theater from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.Midway through Matthew López’s “The Inheritance,” a character lashes out at E.M. Forster, the British author of “Howards End,” who appears as a spiritual guru to the play’s protagonists.“Why should we listen to you lecture us about fearlessness and honesty? You were never honest about yourself,” the character screams, excoriating Forster for spending his long life in the closet.When “The Inheritance,” a seven-hour intergenerational saga about gay men in New York, opened in London in 2018, it was praised to the heavens. When the production transferred to Broadway a year later, there was far less critical love.This month, a reprise of the first German production of “The Inheritance” kicked off the annual Theatertreffen, a showcase of the best German-language theater, for which organizers selected “10 remarkable productions” from 461 theatrical premieres in Germany, Austria and Switzerland that debuted last year. The ethics of storytelling and of responsible representation emerged as unofficial themes of the lineup.López’s skill as a dramatist comes through in Hannes Becker’s translation, but the lyricism of his prose less so. Despite the impressive plotting and memorable characters, “The Inheritance” often fizzles during its generous running time. And the play’s cliché-riddled depiction of New York — an entire scene consists of little other than a lesson in how to order correctly at Peter Luger, the celebrated steakhouse — often had this New Yorker rolling his eyes.In the end, the production, which hails from the Residenztheater in Munich, is redeemed by heroic performances from the company’s ensemble. It’s a tough call, but for my money Vincent zur Linden gives the evening’s most indelible turn: Playing both the aspiring actor Adam and the hustler Leo, zur Linden shifts between coyness, arrogance and twitching brokenness. As Eric Glass, the play’s central character, Thiemo Strutzenberger fills a bland role with emotional complexity. And Michael Goldberg, one of the troupe’s older members, inhabits the play’s two mentor-like figures, Forster and Walter Poole, with avuncular gentleness and secret sorrow.Theatertreffen loves a good theatrical marathon, like Frank Castorf’s seven-hour “Faust,” seen here in 2018, or Christopher Rüping’s even longer “Dionysos Stadt” a year later. Yet sheer length does not an epic make. Compared to those gutsy avant-garde extravaganzas, Philip Stölzl’s sleek, handsome production of “The Inheritance” felt tame.“The Bus to Dachau” considers how the Holocaust is depicted in art and how it will be taught and commemorated when no survivors are left.Isabel Machado RiosWhen I returned to the festival several nights later, it was for a production much more in line with the formally daring, conceptually knotty theater more commonly found at Theatertreffen: “The Bus to Dachau,” a coproduction between the Dutch theater collective De Warme Winkel and the Schauspielhaus Bochum theater in western Germany.Subtitled “a 21st century memory play,” this absorbing production takes a singular and idiosyncratic approach to confronting the Holocaust through art, and asks what form commemoration and education will take once all of the survivors are gone.Featuring audience participation and live video — including blue-screen effects and Snapchat filters — the production tackles its weighty themes with an off-kilter mix of irreverence and severity. As the actors feel their way through the material, they explore the moral implications of depicting the Holocaust onscreen and how Germany’s culture of memory can carry a whiff of arrogance and even, perversely, of possessiveness.“The Ego and Its Own” was inspired by an 19th-century paean to radical selfishness by Max Stirner, the German philosopher.Arno DeclairYet while “The Bus to Dachau” found compelling ways to dramatize its risky and sensitive themes, another aesthetically bold production at Theatertreffen was ultimately less successful at bringing unlikely material to the stage.That work, “The Ego and Its Own,” from the Deutsches Theater, was one of two shows on the lineup that originated at Berlin playhouses. (The other was the choreographer Florentina Holzinger’s latest freak-out vaudeville-style revue, “Ophelia’s Got Talent.”)Inspired by an 1844 paean to radical selfishness by the German philosopher Max Stirner, the abstract production finds six actors cavorting on a white spiral ramp that resembles the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The play’s director, Sebastian Hartmann, a festival favorite, and the composer PC Nackt fashion a musical revue from Stirner’s opus that is equally arresting and bewildering.The actors intone and belt out slogans from the 19th-century text while Nackt and a drummer accompany them with a wild, mostly electronic score. Stark lighting, live video, fog and even 3-D projections contribute to the trippy expressionistic atmosphere. But despite the constant multisensory stimulation and energetic performances, it quickly grows tiresome. It’s a trip, to be sure — but I’m not sure how it illuminates Stirner’s influential and contentious ideas.One of the festival’s closing plays, “Zwiegespräch” by the Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke is an emotionally resonant production about intergenerational conflicts.Susanne Hassler-SmithControversy often attends the works Peter Handke, the Austrian who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019. For many, Handke has been tainted by his sympathy for Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian war criminal. The news of the writer’s Nobel win was met, by some, with disbelief, and his 2020 play “Zdenek Adamec” premiered at the Salzburg Festival under the threat of protest. Still, Handke, now 80, continues to publish and be performed at an impressive clip.His latest text for the stage, “Zwiegespräch,” was published as a book shortly before its world premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna. The author dedicated the dramatic dialogue to the actors Otto Sander and Bruno Ganz, the stars of the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desire,” which Handke wrote the screenplay for; much of this brief, poetic text is concerned with the essence of acting and storytelling. There is also a sense of fraught struggles between grandfathers, fathers and sons.At Theaterteffen, “Zwiegespräch” will be performed on Saturday and Sunday as one of the festival’s closing productions. Not long ago, it headlined another one of Germany’s main theater festivals, “Radikal Jung,” at the Volkstheater, in Munich, which is where I caught it last month.The dazzling production, overseen by Rieke Süsskow, a young Berlin-born director, heightens the dialogue’s intergenerational conflicts. She sets her production in a nursing home and distributes Handke’s text to a cast of actors playing frail residents and their sinister caregivers, somehow creating a convincing dramaturgy without clearly differentiated characters or a conventional plot.Much credit is due to her stage designer, Mirjam Stängl, and her ingenious set, a succession of folding panels that expand and contract over the width of the stage like a fan, and Marcus Loran for his hallucinatory lighting design. Thanks to the attentive artistry of Süsskow and her team, Handke’s 60-odd page pamphlet comes to life in an emotionally resonant performance about memory, loss, regret and the nature of art.Separating the art from the artist shouldn’t mean giving artists a free pass. In the context of this sensitively paced and finely wrought production, however, there seemed little doubt that Handke is attuned to the moral responsibilities of storytelling.TheatertreffenThrough May 29 at various venues in Berlin; berlinerfestspiele.de. More

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      In Salzburg, New Lives for Two Scandalous Plays

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      Works that once horrified European audiences are now centerpieces of the drama offerings at the tony Austrian festival.SALZBURG, Austria — The 1920 premiere of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Reigen” provoked a riot in a Berlin theater. A year later, in Vienna, the work was shut down by the police. Shortly afterward, the playwright, who was prosecuted for indecency, banned further performances in Germany and Austria. The play, a merry-go-round of love affairs with a cast of characters drawn from all echelons of society, was not performed again in German until 1982, over half a century after Schnitzler’s death. Instead, its fame spread in translation, including French film adaptations by Max Ophüls and Roger Vadim.Last week, a new play inspired by Schnitzler’s succès de scandale premiered at the Salzburg Festival, where it was one of two reworked classics during the event’s opening days. The Salzburg Festival is, of course, better known for its musical offerings, including the high-profile opera premieres it rolls out each summer, but drama is Salzburg’s oldest tradition, dating back to the production of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Jedermann” that opened the first festival, in 1920. Nowadays, the plays at the festival draw a more diverse crowd than the exorbitantly priced operas, but Salzburg remains a blue-chip event, and the audience is swankier (and generally older) than your typical theatergoers in Berlin or Hamburg.For her Salzburg debut, the Latvian American director Yana Ross asked European writers under 50 to devise new scenes using “Reigen,” a cycle of 10 pre- and postcoital dialogues, as a rough guide. The result is a 21st-century homage that bears little resemblance to the original. As an anthology of short dramatic texts by a diverse group of established and emerging writers, it is both varied and, perhaps inevitably, uneven.Ross strings them together in a handsome production set in an upscale restaurant. Throughout the evening, the constantly reshuffling couples meet to share the quiet intimacy of a meal, with the tables and their occupants reflected in a large tilted mirror. The seven main actors dance their way from scene to scene to the strains of Maurice Ravel’s “La Valse,” or electronic and pop music.It feels like a misstep to start the production with a difficult, experimental retelling of the original play’s opening scene: a rendezvous between an eager prostitute and a reluctant soldier. The poetic rewrite, by the Austrian Lydia Haider, mixing heightened and vulgar speech, is a confusing way into the piece. And the Swiss playwright Lukas Barfüss’s unsettling and surreal version of the closing scene, where the erotic carousel comes full circle, is similarly disorienting and cryptic.Foreground from left, Urs Peter Halter, Sibylle Canonica and Matthias Neukirch in “Reigen.” Lucie JanschIn between, however, the production is on more solid footing, starting with the Finnish author Sofi Oksanen’s thoroughly contemporary reworking of the play’s second dialogue, between a soldier and a chambermaid.In Oksanen’s version, a man flirts over the intercom with his food delivery courier and then panics when she accepts his invitation to come up and share his dinner. Face to face with her, he is painfully awkward. Eventually, she discovers that her customer is a far-right internet troll, a revelation that sours any attraction she might have felt. Tabita Johannes lends the courier a shy curiosity before lashing out at the creep who’s lured her into his living room. It is one of several dazzling turns by Johannes, who like much of the cast belongs to the acting ensemble of the Schauspielhaus Zurich, where the production will transfer in September. (The majority of “Reigen’s” authors are women, and the female characters are generally better written and more interesting than the men.)Johannes also appears as a woman who accuses her boss of forcing himself on her, in a #MeToo-era twist on Schnitzler’s dialogue between a young man and a chambermaid. In the scene, by the French Moroccan author Leïla Slimani, the woman takes her employer to court, where she recounts his serial abuse in painful detail. Elsewhere Johannes gets to show her seductive, manipulative side as the clandestine lover of an older female author, in a scene by the Berlin writer Hengameh Yaghoobifarah that is the only one approaching the sexiness of the original play.Several other episodes are awkward fits, including one by the Hungarian author Kata Weber, about an actress nearing 40 who is terrified that her career will evaporate in her middle age. Lena Schwarz’s flamboyant, scenery-chewing performance notwithstanding, the episode comes across as clichéd and seems off topic.The production’s biggest gamble is a Skype conversation between a mother and son, written by the Russian author Mikhail Durnenkov. (The split-screen video is projected onstage.)Durnenkov, who now lives in Finland, rewrote the segment after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. The opening dispute, about a family friend arrested for kissing a man at a protest, works better than the son’s subsequent revelation that he is going into exile. “As long as we live here, they’re making war in our names. I won’t give them that right,” he says, struggling to convince his conservative mother. I can understand Durnenkov’s desire to make an antiwar statement, but his ideas are poorly dramatized and it is unclear how his scene relates to the others.Dagna Litzenberger Vinet, standing, as Alma, with Lilith Hässle as Berta and the ensemble in “Ingolstadt,” directed by Ivo van Hove.Matthias HornSeveral years after the “Reigen” premiere, Berlin kicked up another legendary Weimar Republic theater scandal with a 1929 production of Marieluise Fleisser’s “Pioneers in Ingolstadt.” Set in Fleisser’s Bavarian hometown, the play follows the fortunes of a young woman, Berta, who falls in love with Korl, a callous soldier stationed in town to repair a broken bridge. Audiences were shocked by the play’s depiction of small-town sexism and military cruelty, embellished for the premiere by Bertolt Brecht, who co-directed the production and staged the scene where Berta loses her virginity to Korl in an onstage shed that shook during their lovemaking.In Ivo van Hove’s new Salzburg Festival production, that scene is far more explicit than anything Brecht could have gotten away with. The Belgian director stages it unambiguously as a rape scene, with Korl pinning Berta down as she screams and flails in the shallow water that covers most of the large stage. It is one of many violent acts — stoning, torture, drowning, you name it — enacted with much squirming and splashing during the unrelentingly grim production.Van Hove, making his festival debut with this coproduction with Vienna’s Burgtheater, where it will transfer in September, fused “Pioneers in Ingolstadt” with an earlier play by Fleisser, “Purgatory in Ingolstadt,” about a pregnant schoolgirl and a former classmate with a savior complex. A new script, by Koen Tachelet, weaves the two plays together in a seamless, but not entirely convincing, way. The actors bring Fleisser’s hard, cold dialogue to life in emotionally raw performances, but they are miserable company to spend two and a half hours with. All that water onstage can’t wash away the humiliation and suffering. Nor did all the staging’s violence and cruelty produce a tremor of outrage. In lieu of a riot, the festival audience responded with polite, generous applause.Reigen. Directed by Yana Ross. Salzburg Festival through Aug. 11.Ingolstadt. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Salzburg Festival through Aug. 7. More

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      A German Festival Takes Stock of Pandemic-Era Theater

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      Online for a second year, Theatertreffen showcases the highs and lows of recent innovations in German-language digital dramaturgy.MUNICH — The most immediately striking aspect of this year’s Theatertreffen, the annual showcase of the best of German-language theater, is the numbers.To make their selection, the 2020 festival jury watched 285 productions in 60 cities across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The resulting program, which runs until Monday, is dauntingly full, with 80 hours of streaming events on a digital festival platform.When the seven jurors announced their selection in February, the festival hoped to hold in-person performances. But a third wave of the coronavirus, which has gripped Germany in recent months, meant that for the second year in a row, Theatertreffen was confined to this online presentation.Since the start of the pandemic, German playhouses have been uniquely proactive in adapting to social distancing restrictions. Many have devised new theatrical formats, including immersive live productions for solo spectators or digital-only productions that have enlisted social media, video messaging apps, chat rooms and video gaming technology to create art that responds to our circumstances.Keeping up with this creative proliferation has been occasionally exhausting; more consistently, it has been inspiring to see how theater here — much of which receives robust state funding — has refused to lie down and die.A moment during the 12-hour production “Show Me a Good Time,” by the German-British theater collective Gob Squad.Eike Walkenhorst/Berlin FestivalI had hoped that this year’s Theatertreffen would take the full measure of this challenging year, so I was dismayed that the jury chose only one “corona show” among the 10 productions selected for the festival.But what a production it was!“Show Me a Good Time” by the German-British theater collective Gob Squad, was a wild noon-to-midnight performance that whizzed between the empty stage of the Berliner Festspiele and various participants in the outside world, discussing life during the pandemic, conducting man-on-the-street interviews about theater and soliciting artistic suggestions from callers. The performers at the theater, driving through Berlin and traipsing around England were connected via headsets and cameras in what often had the aspect of a theatrical telethon.Yet despite the marathon running time, it was accessible and down to earth. By design, it was a show that one could dip into and out of at will; over the 12 hours, more than 3,000 people popped their virtual heads in.While meditating on life, theater and the intersection of the two, the performers routinely injected their largely ad-libbed performances (in German and English) with generous doses of humor and silliness. One example: For two minutes each hour, they dropped everything and screeched with laughter.Rainald Goetz’s “Empire of Death” directed by Karin Beier, who leads the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. Arno DeclairWhile none of the other productions provided a similar degree of meaningful reflection on life during Covid-19, the reality of the pandemic clearly influenced the aesthetic choices behind several of the other streamed productions.Theaters had already reopened, at limited capacity, in Switzerland when a livestream of Schauspielhaus Zurich’s “It’s Only the End of the World” opened Theatertreffen last week. But the director, Christopher Rüping, a regular at the festival who has been a prominent proponent of new digital possibilities for theater during the pandemic, decided to keep the live audience out. Instead of performing for a handful of spectators, the actors addressed cameras. The result, watched online, was a hybrid theatrical experience reminiscent of cinéma vérité.Roving hand-held cameras captured Jean-Luc Lagarce’s 1990 play about a gay man who returns to his estranged family after a long absence. Most impressive was how effective the livestream’s filming style was at capturing the nuances of the production’s fine actors, including Ulrike Krumbiegel as the nervous, broken matriarch and Wiebke Mollenhauer and Nils Kahnwald as a pair of emotionally scarred siblings.This was also the second year that Theatertreffen’s jury voted to adopt a quota system to ensure that at least half the productions would be directed by women or majority-female collectives. (A recent study by the European Theater Convention that surveyed 22 countries found that there are six men for every four women working in theater).Last year’s Theatertreffen program looked quite similar to earlier installments despite the marked increase in female-led productions. This time around, though, an unofficial feminist theme seemed to reflect the festival’s focus on female theatermakers.“NAME HER. In Search of Women+,” a 7½-hour multimedia performance-lecture, directed by Marie Schleef, about overlooked women throughout history.Hendrik LietmannBy far the most didactic was “NAME HER. In Search of Women+,” a 7½-hour multimedia performance-lecture, directed by Marie Schleef, about overlooked women throughout history. Standing in front of a triptych of large iPhone-like displays of biographical information, charts and videos, the actress Anne Tismer gave an engaging performance that, however heroic, did suffer on video. Watching her rattle off this A to Z of brilliant and unjustly ignored woman, it was hard not to imagine it would have had an entirely different immediacy and energy if experienced live.One of the most prominent female theatermakers in Germany, and a frequent presence at Theatertreffen, is Karin Beier, who leads the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. This year, her production of Rainald Goetz’s “Empire of Death” served up a savage indictment of America’s post-9/11 military adventures abroad and democratic degeneracy at home, and it was easily the grimmest thing at the festival. I couldn’t wait for the four-hour theatrical scream to end.After so many lengthy shows, I was also grateful for those that clocked in at little more than an hour. They provided a sense of intimacy that was missing from the more sprawling productions.One was Leonie Böhm’s internal monologue version of “Medea*,” Schauspielhaus Zurich’s second production at the festival, which worked best as a finely tuned psychological examination of one of world literature’s most famous villainesses. In it, the actress Maja Beckmann’s Medea struggles with how Euripides’ tragedy fates her to be a child murderer, and how history will forever judge her a monster.Staged in a large white tent, “Medea*” created an atmosphere of privacy that it shared with the festival’s most unusual entry, the fragile dance performance “Scores That Shaped Our Friendship,” a physically tender exploration of the friendship between Lucy Wilke, a performer with spinal muscular atrophy, and Pawel Dudus, a queer Polish artist and dancer.Maja Beckmann in Leonie Böhm’s internal monologue version of “Medea*” from Schauspielhaus Zurich.Gina FollyDespite the quota system, this year’s Theatertreffen featured only one conventional play by a female playwright that was also directed by a woman: Anna Gmeyner’s “Automatenbüfett.”We have the Burgtheater in Vienna and the director Barbara Frey to thank for the rediscovery of this 1932 play by the Austrian-Jewish Gmeyner. In it, she combines folk realism with symbolic elements for a parable-like tale of the common good undermined by avarice and sexual dependency, set largely in a vending-machine restaurant. The automat dominates the drab set of Frey’s dramatically incisive and impeccably acted production.It is far and away the most traditional production in this Theatertreffen, as well as one of the best. Starting late this month, it will again be seen onstage in Vienna, where theaters have just reopened after half a year of hibernation. More