JASKYNNÁ PANNA / A CAVEWOMAN

Eva Maliti

Cast: 7 men, 4 women

A play written in a grotesque style on a surrealistic background describes a chaos inside a soul of a young woman whose view of basic values has just fallen apart. There is an inner conflict between her active effort to search for happiness in a cruel world full of manipulations and passive expectation of redemption.

The play tells a story of a young naïve girl Meri and focuses on her inner life. Meri is expecting a baby with Cerveny Jojo and she lives with her divorced mother in a small flat on the highest floor of the first skyscraper inBratislavabuilt in 1934 which is called Manderlak. Manderlak becomes a place where the play as well as Meri’s soul are located. It has several levels. On the ground floor, there is a massage studio. In the basement, there is a mysterious boiler room. Somewhere in the middle of Manderlak you can find a café Grand. While the space full of spies makes Meri feel anxious, the flat located on the very top serves as a shelter where she can hide from the cruel reality. She shares the place with her shallow and down-to-earth mother. In the window she can sometimes see Cerveny Jojo, Meri’s dream man, who appears there from time to time. In fact he is her lover who left her pregnant and ran away. The baby that Meri is expecting is supposed to become a Messiah... Absurd figments of Meri’s imagination with political and erotic elements presented with an ironically provocative intonation imply deeper philosophical and spiritual meaning.

Eva Maliti won the second place in the Slovak drama competition Nova Drama – Trojboj 2003. The play was staged in Studio 12 Bratislava in cooperation with the Slovak National Theatre in 2004 (directed by Marian Amsler). It was presented at international theatre festivals in Vienna (Der Mitteleuropäische Karussel 2006) and Hamburg (Autorentheatertage 2007). It has been translated into Russian, German andSerbia and published in these languages.

  The play is available also in German and Russian translation.