Nikolas Gambaroff

About

In its time, Kraus’s play offered an unrelenting critique of a popular discourse fueling bigotry and blind nationalism. Written in 213 scenes, the work was considered impossible to perform—“intended for a theater on Mars,” as Kraus put it. Yet its dystopian leanings seem resonant in our day of click-bait and fake news, where language is torn from its grounding in truth and reality, dismantled by the distributive algorithms of communication platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Here Gambaroff interrogates the dissolution of language and with it, meaning, and investigates how art, often imbued with multifaceted meaning, should place itself in a time when nothing seems to mean anything at all.