The Cross

At the fork in the road, there's a cross. The moon only shines on it after the carpentry apprentices, have managed to raise it. But when they leave the scene to bring the paint for the statue of the Messiah, Christ exchanges his place with a thirty-three-year old who strangles his bossy mother in front of his eyes, and then lays his hand on himself.
Matjaž Briški (1973) enlaces his poetic and philosophic play The Cross with traces left behind in the second half of the past century by some authors considered classics today, such as Gregor Strniša and Samuel Beckett. The characters of the carpentry apprentices echo the typical pair of clowns from the drama of the absurd; the absurd that the author introduces with a series of (linguistic) measures, for example word plays and iteration, helps to give a characteristic form to the play which -- while generally starting from today's state of devaluation – at the same time reaches beyond simply reacting to the present time by opening certain fundamental questions of human existence. Christ, who in the play is replaced on the equivocal cross by a man, is finally living the same destiny as he used to.

The Cross won Matjaž Briški the 2005 Grum Award at the Week of Slovenian drama, and will see its first performance in the coming season, directed by Samo M. Strelec