Wüste

The Arizona desert, with a lonely motel in the middle of it and a film set nearby. Chloe and Tom are a couple; both have roles in the film, albeit of varying sizes. Whilst Tom gets to shine once again, Chloe is stuck in the motel room, going over the script with her assistant Hannah time and again, and waiting for her scars to heal following extensive cosmetic surgery. Bandaged and almost blind, Chloe is more dependent on Hannah than ever. Thus it is extremely unfortunate that, for inexplicable reasons, Hannah keeps disappearing and waking up elsewhere.

Hannah, Chloe, and Tom find themselves not only caught in a triangle of desires and dependencies, but also in a fragmented reality where, for various reasons, they each miss things happening right before their very eyes. These blind spots are, however, sometimes shamelessly exploited by the others. The mediocre film script, on the other hand, seems suspiciously close to their own lived reality and increasingly blurs the lines between the two. In the middle of the empty desert, which apparently swallows people up and spits them out again, they try to fulfil their roles as intensely as possible, driven by a need that seems to consume everything: validation from others to fill their own emptiness.

Sam Max lives in New York and works in the fields of writing, directing, music, art, and performance. “Wüste” was staged and premiered by Sam Max himself in 2024 at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. At the Schauspiel Leipzig’s Diskothek, it is directed by Wilke Weermann. He studied directing at the ADK Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg. His play “Abraum” was nominated for the Retzhofer Drama Prize in 2015 and awarded the Munich Prize for German-Language Drama in 2016. His production of “Fahrenheit 451” at the Schauspiel Stuttgart was invited to the “radikal jung” festival in Munich in 2018. Wilke Weermann has worked at the ETA Hoffmann Theater Bamberg, Schauspiel Köln, Staatstheater Stuttgart, Schauspiel Frankfurt, and the Deutsches Theater Berlin.