Discussion About the Pumpkins (Gespräch wegen der Kürbisse)

Two friends meet for a coffee. They are close, and have known each other for years. But after a brief moment of confusion, a crack appears in the conversation and it spirals into an absurd and grotesque verbal sparring match. In their discussion about pumpkins on the Aegean, fathers of Mossad are murdered or commit suicide in northern China. Corpses are disposed of by being sent into space, and life concepts are quashed with radical determination. In his two-woman play, Jakob Nolte portrays a neurotic society in close-up, a society in which a corpse could be lying under every palm tree.

Jakob Nolte was born in 1988 in Barsinghausen am Deister. He studied Dramatic Writing at UdK University of the Arts in Berlin. His short piece Agnes had its premiere at the Landestheater Salzburg in spring 2013. Since then, his works have been staged by the Schauspielhaus Zürich, Theater Leipzig and the Seniorenclub in Bielefeld. Along with Michel Decar, he won the Brüder-Grimm Prize of the State of Berlin in 2013 for his piece Das Tierreich (The Animal Kingdom), which has since been performed in over 15 theatres. His play Helmut Kohl läuft durch Bonn (Helmut Kohl walks through Bonn) (Theater Bonn) was invited to the Autorentheatertage 2014. Nolte’s debut novel ALFF was published in 2015 in German and English by the digital model project Fiktion and as a book by Matthes & Seitz Berlin. In 2016 he was a scholarship-holder at the Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto.

With the kind support of the Heinz und Heide Dürr Stiftung