Drehbuch, Haymon-Verlag, Innsbruck, 1991
Herausgegeben in Zusammenarbeit mit NDR und ORF
Felix Mitterer's work, and specifically "Die Piefke-Saga," highlights the peculiar comedy and ambivalence resulting from cultures interlinking, joined by the common electronic medium of TV. We see humans rendered inhuman through media, visitors turned into perpetrators of "Massentourismus." Germans and Austrians both speak the same language, and hail from neighboring countries. To an outsider, they might seem the same: Yet Mitterer limns for us the chasms of difference between a Tyrolean host serving a German "Piefke" client. The client is a tourist, and the play reveals the fragilities of a home environment once visitors arrive.
It is fitting that Mitterer's work is presented on the Internet for the first time at the 1995 Frankfurt Book Fair. The drama highlights the Fair's "Schwerpunkt" by exploring the theme of dissolving boundaries around books and people in an electronic age. Secondly, Internet represents a new dramatic medium for Mitterer, a renowned playwrite who, until today, has evolved his art from the medium of vernacular people's theater to television and to print.
The story of the OBS production of Felix Mitterer's work itself represents a converging of media, languages, and countries, involving close cooperation among people from Austria (Innsbruck and Vienna), Germany, Ireland, Romania, and the United States. What began as a "virtual" family discussion in Leutschach, Austria, between a brain surgeon from Innsbruck and an Internet publisher from Rockport, Massachusetts, became, through the intermediation of its OBS Link Editor from Romania, a "distributed" publication which demonstrates some of the possibilities of a new and international dramatic form.
OBS is proud to advance the comic and perplexing work of Felix Mitterer as a first scene in the new area of Internet Dynamic art.