Auf der Greifswalder Straße

In the organizer's words:

The Zwiebacken present
On the Greifswalder Straße

by Roland Schimmelpfennig

"If you only had 24 hours left - what would you do?" - Rudolf is warned about the giraffe in a dream and confronted with his impending death. Fritz burns his necklace to impress Katja. Simona is bitten by a dog. Hans has a strange feeling in his head. Nobody notices Bille. And an old silver spoon is found on a building site. The lives of the residents⋅of Greifswalder Strasse are more closely intertwined than they would like. And after a fateful encounter, everything suddenly seems to fall apart at the seams. As if a rift is running through time.

How do you put something on stage that doesn't belong there? Roland Schimmelpfennig's "Auf der Greifswalder Straße" dares to do just that: the hustle and bustle of a city street is forced into the corset of a theater plot - which simply doesn't seem to fit. The theater group "Die Zwiebacken" transforms the stage at the TiK into the eponymous street, where surreal and fantastic things take place for a day.

Background
Schimmelpfennig (born 1967 in Göttingen) is one of the most frequently performed German playwrights of the present day. He wrote "Auf der Greifswalder Straße" after living on this very street in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg district for several years. Everyday observations, absurd encounters and classical theater forms merge into a social study in which everything is significant and nothing makes sense.

The Zwiebacken
The amateur theater company "Die Zwiebacken" consists of actors from the Rhine-Neckar region. The performers already played theater together when they were students. What makes it special is that there is no director and all decisions are made democratically by the members. The entire production is therefore in the hands of the performers, from make-up to stage design and lighting technology. In mid-2023, the Zwiebacken performed Wolfgang Borchert's "Draußen vor der Tür" at the Karlstorbahnhof for the first time. "Auf der Greifswalder Straße" is the group's second production.

"Die Zwiebacken" are a member of the Freie Theaterverein Heidelberg e.V.