Peyote

By (author): Stefan Schutz

Translated by: Harold Rhenisch

In this darkly comic monologue by one of the masters of contemporary German theatre, a German tourist visiting Banff is forced to wait out a thunderstorm in the cabin of an old shaman. By the time the night is over he has been humiliated, mocked, and enlightened, has undergone a nightmare voyage through the worlds of the living and the dead, and has been initiated into ancient shamanistic mysteries and into the peyote cult. All is, however, not as it seems.\n\nStefan SchÃÂ_tz turns long practice at rewriting Greek tragedies in the context of contemporary dictatorships into a contemporary tragedy of the confrontation of the western cult of the individual with the Native American world of myth. The tragedy follows the stages of a peyote vision. It is a shocking world of black comedy which deconstructs romantic verbal, visual, and cultural clichés, including those of deconstruction itself. The tragedy is inescapable, unexpected, and devastating, but is made even more human and generous for that.\n\nIn the course of this play\’s vision, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the guilt of patriarchy, the patronizing and colonializing qualities of contemporary tourism, and the seductions of technology merge with stories of Windigo and Coyote, with the scenery of Banff, with a playful use of language, in one writer\’s uncompromising search for a world of humanity past seductions of Utopia. Peyote is a dual-language publication: English on one side of the page, German on the other.

AUTHOR

Stefan Schutz

Stefan Schütz was born in 1944 and started his career working for the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin. One of East Germany’s strongest dissident writers, he moved to the west in 1980, and now lives in Berlin. He has written over two dozen plays, as well as novels and other prose works. In 1985 he received Germany’s highest literary award, the Alfred Döblin Prize, for his prose work, Medusa. Peyote is the result of a two-year stay in Canada.

AUTHOR

Harold Rhenisch

Harold Rhenisch lives in 150 Mile House, BC. He won the Confederation Poetry Prize, 1991, and the Arc Poem of the Year Award and the Critic’s Desk Award for best long poetry review, 2003. He has been a five-time runner-up in the CBC/Tilden/Saturday Night Literary Contest and won the BC & Yukon Community Newspapers Association Award for Best Arts and Culture Writing, 1996. His non-fiction book Tom Thomson’s Shack was shortlisted for two BC Book Prizes in 2000. Please visit www.haroldrhenisch.wordpress.com.


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Details

Dimensions:

94 Pages
8.5in * 5.5in * .31in
140gr

Published:

September 17, 2001

Publisher:

Ronsdale Press

ISBN:

9780921870890

Book Subjects:

FICTION / Literary

Featured In:

All Books

Language:

eng

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