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.Stefan Schütz 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.In 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.