The Natives of Maria Blood - City Theatre Klagenfurt

The idyllic village of Maria Blut with its pilgrimage chapel is a few train hours away from Vienna. It is the 1930s, a time of corporate state and civil war, Dollfuß is the Chancellor, and the natives of the "Austrian Lourdes" are in turmoil. The canned goods factory is closing, and the owner, Schellbach, tries to persuade the population to invest in his new product, the "space power." Many give their last savings for it. When Schellbach shoots himself during a folk festival, an enormous dynamic unfolds: the supposedly guilty parties are quickly found – and it becomes extremely dangerous for them.

The Viennese writer Maria Lazar is one of the most perceptive literary voices of her time. In short, gripping, and linguistically brilliant scenes, she creates wonderfully eccentric characters who are caught between Marian cult, belief in miracles, conspiracy theories, and nationalism on the eve of National Socialism, and like her contemporary Ödön von Horváth, she identifies the roots of fascism in the milieu of the disadvantaged.

For director Martina Gredler, this is her third production at the city theater. Having focused on the refugees in Horváth's Figaro and the marginalized in Sperr's Hunting Scenes, she now expands her lens to include the anti-Semitically attacked in Maria Lazar's fictional provincial village.