When: May 21, 2012

Where: Goethe-Institut New York, Wyoming Building: 5 East 3rd Street, NYC

What time: 7:30 p.m.

Free and open to the public.

Daniel Brunet received a PEN Translation Fund Award in 2010 to support his translation of Dea Loher’s play The Last Fire. He has continued to translate Loher’s work, and now is presenting a reading of his latest: Dea Loher’sBluebeard—Hope of Women, which will be shown as a staged reading this Monday at the Goethe Institut’s event space in the East Village, the Wyoming Building.

Here’s Brunet description of the event:

What is love? How does it change us? And how far are we willing to go for it? To answer these questions, Dea Loher used a decidedly unconventional source; La Barbe bleue (Bluebeard), the 1697 French folktale by Charles Perrault of a brutal nobleman with a penchant for murdering his wives. Turning this story on its head, Loher transposes the tale to the modern era and reimagines the rich and powerful Bluebeard as a simple, thoroughly mediocre women’s shoe salesman. He has few talents, fewer ambitions and none of the power of his literary namesake. In essence, he is a blank slate onto which a series of women, each an active master of her own destiny, project their fantasies of the ideal man, unfailingly with deadly results. In Loher’s own words, “These are women who yearn for radical, absolute love and make no compromises in searching for it.”

Bluebeard—Hope of Women premiered at the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel in Munich in 1997. Working closely with director Andreas Kriegenburg and a company of seven women and one man, Loher developed the piece as a work in progress, exploring ideas and scenes by means of improvisation during daily rehearsals and fixing them into the architecture of a complete play in the evenings following rehearsals.

With a career dating back to 1992, Dea Loher is one of Germany’s most produced and most celebrated contemporary playwrights. Her nearly 20 plays have been awarded virtually every major award in the German-speaking theater world, some multiple times, and have been translated into 28 different languages.

While Bluebeard is one of Loher’s most successful plays and has been produced in over 15 different countries around the world, this is the first time it has ever been translated into English.

Featuring Christen Clifford*, Melissa Hurst*, Sheila Joon*, Johanna McKeon, Julia Moss*, Rebecca Nelson*, Diana Ruppe* and Jesse Paul Wilson.