“It’s difficult to deal with issues like globalization on stage. They’re too big and too abstract to take in. So I’m always looking for a way to find a small world that gives a way to look at what’s happening in the bigger world.” —Roland Schimmelpfennig
Spreading from the cramped kitchen of a Thai/Chinese/Vietnamese restaurant, the action of The Golden Dragon is at once global and unnervingly intimate. Intrigued by a conversation with a friend and immigration lawyer, Roland Schimmelpfennig began to research the lives of undocumented workers in Berlin, where he lives, interested in crafting a play that could explore, in his words, “the increasing globalization and interconnectedness of the world.”
Roland Schimmelpfennig is Germany’s most-produced playwright, and his plays—theatrical, playful, and wise—are object lessons in empathy. His characters are frequently isolated from one another, but share a set of images and experiences that suggest a connection they rarely recognize, even when they’re literally sharing dreams. His disarming humor allows him to explore the hopes and disappointments of his characters’ emotional reality while evoking the social and political context that both connects and isolates them. In The Golden Dragon, the characters live and work side by side in and around a takeout restaurant in central Europe. As Schimmelpfennig tried to figure out a way to keep the audience engaged in stories about exploitation and undocumented workers, he came up with a theatrical twist in how to present the story. Each of the play’s ensemble of five actors cross age, race, and gender to play the 16 characters in The Golden Dragon.
Schimmelpfennig’s work functions as a kind of kaleidoscope, in which a simple situation fragments and allows each audience member to find his or her own connection to it. This personal connection—a recognition of your own yearning or fear—is what Schimmelpfennig aims to ignite, and the reason he is drawn again and again to the stage as a way to explore the experience of living in the contemporary world. “The focus of dramatic art is always the human being,” he says. “Theatre deals with people. Theatre is not that good at dealing with theory or with global economic structures. But theatre is good at giving these things a name and a human face.”
Since its 2009 premiere in Vienna, The Golden Dragon has received more than two dozen productions worldwide. As Studio expands its programming of international work, we are proud to offer the US premiere of this renowned German playwright and this surprising, poetic, and moving investigation of intertwining lives.