The appointment

namely the story of a Jewish cock

"But even now it irritates me how anything, ever, is designed around.

to the so-called human body, the body equipped with a dick, putting half the population to risk of death to because of everyday objects. And I'm sure it applies to everything from toothbrushes to elevators, from hot water bottles to pianos to toilet seats." We are to London, in the muffled office of a psychoanalyst, Dr. Seligman. to speaking is a young German patient. Speaking in English, and not in her native tongue, takes away her inhibitions, helps her to strip away every cultural superstructure, every convention that ...she, often with cruel self-mockery, tears off like layers of living flesh. The young German woman talks, talks nonstop: hers is a monologue, and just as in Cocteau's Voix Humaine we wonder if there is actually someone on the other end of the phone, so here we wonder if the analyst is listening to her. Dr. Seligman is actually with her in the room but he never interrupts her; he is a barely perceived presence, like the invisible adults in the Peanuts strips.

Making a play from that long monologue that is Katharina Volckmer's A Jewish Cock (La nave di Teseo 2021, translation by Chiara Spaziani), is a considerable challenge. The text that Volckmer, born in Germany in 1987, wrote and published in English is torrential, provocative, to at times unbearable but also atrociously funny. On writing in English instead of her own language, Volckmer simply said, "It allowed me to take more freedom. Even Freud if he had to say something improper used French." It is a text at once lucid and delirious, moving from confessions of sexual fantasies linked to Hitler and Nazism, to descriptions of casual sex encounters in public restrooms, from deplorations of bad German cuisine to the impossibility of feeling to comfortable in a woman's body. A Jewish Cock is a monologue about identity that is anything but consolatory: the narrator does not know where she is going, does not follow an arc that from self-awareness will lead her to to a happy ending, to an unraveling of her tangle. She only knows that she must continue to shattering, to making to smaller and smaller pieces of her identity as a female and a German. Both Volckmer and her character have one priority: to break the silence. And the analyst's silence is the wall against which stubbornly, painfully, the protagonist keeps to banging her head.

What the Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung ("overcoming the past") turned into a leaden void: the Nazi past was simply removed in the name of an unctuous, token anti-racism that blunts or denies any difference: "thirty German children and not a single Jew in the distance," the patient recalls, "and we sang in Hebrew to make sure we remained de-Nazified and deeply considerate. But we never mourned, if anything we behaved by pandering to a new version of ourselves -- hysterically non-racist under any circumstances, and ready to to deny any difference. (...) Yet we never restored the Jews' status as human beings or allowed them to interfere with our interpretation of history, even to the point of to that sad pile of stones that was placed to Berlin to commemorating the Holocaust."

The questioning of her own belonging to German culture also becomes a radical questioning of her own being born female: "once I learned to to think for myself, I started going to male toilets," she explains to the analyst. And the public toilet becomes for her, in a comical reversal of the U.S. controversy over the use of female bathrooms for trans people, a place of self-discovery.

As we write, director Fabio Cherstich is creating the show with the collaboration of Katharina Volckmer herself. "I envision the woman and Dr. Seligman within a mental space," he explains in his director's notes, "not a doctor's office but a visual device in which through the use of translucent lenses, opalescent glass, photographic filters, the protagonist's body and her image can appear to the audience in a shifting and continuously transformable, fluid and mysterious form." Cherstich then, to the dimension of the word will add the visual one, to make plastic the protagonist's need to transform, to become other from herself, to leave behind what she was. She has in mind the dirty, moody, confessional art of British artist Tracey Emin, whose visual stream of consciousness is studded with crumpled Kleenex, unmade beds, used condoms, and scribbles made over her head. Or the medico-ritual performances of French artist ORLAN, who has made extreme cosmetic surgery his poetics. Cherstich not only wants us to hear the protagonist's voice but also wants us to see what is clustering and forming in her imagination: she asks us to become witnesses to a process of self-destruction that is also an ode to the complexity and fluidity of who we are, what we might dare to be, and what we will be: "Let us be gold, Dr. Seligman. Let us change shape over the centuries, but without disappearing."

Daniel Cassandro