Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God

Karen and Martin come to Liz’s and Frank’s for dinner. All four have been friends since their student days, from med school, all four are now 41 years old. The guests have just returned from a war zone in Africa where they worked in very difficult conditions until they had to leave the hospital there because of the growing danger of a civil war. The hosts have been at home all these years, they’ve made a lot of money, they have a house and a child. All evening, their conversations circle around morals and responsibility, ignorance and powerlessness, and around the orphan for whom both couples cared, each in their own way, and whom Karen and Martin left alone in Africa when they escaped. The couples soon find out that they don’t have much understanding, and even fewer words, for each other’s actions. The conflict intensifies; in a desperate attempt to re-establish some sort of closeness between them, Liz “stages” an imaginary conversation between Peggy Pickit, their daughter’s rubber doll and a wooden figurine, a gift from her African peer with an uncertain fate in a distant homeland.
The acclaimed German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig contributed the tragicomical drama Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God to the African Trilogy, a drama project of different (European, African, NorthAmerican) authors, directors and actors that thematises the complex relationships between Africa and the West. In these relationships that are, as Schimmelpfennig says, too cruel and too complicated to be transformed into dramatic art, the author searches for a person. What theatre does best, after all, is give a name and a human face to the theory and operation of global economic structures. In this case, the faces belong to two little girls we only see through the eyes of four adult westerners, and through the girls’ toys. Director Primož Ekart, who collaborated with our Nova Gorica theatre for the first time, was the one looking into their faces.