Set, props and flyer for a sequence from the play Hölderlin, written and directed by Sebas Alarcon, adapted from the original play by Peter Weiss
Performed at Lifeworld, April 3-4, 2026
“The play stages an ensemble performance about the early life of Friedrich Hölderlin, a 19c German poet who wrote his best work in a thirty year period of wholly isolated madness. The play doesn’t take that madness as romantic, rather as a result of political, sexual, and creative defeats that made him worse: political, because Hölderlin was a would-be revolutionary in a time of reaction; and sexual, because he suffers from our contemporary maladaptive sexualities, featuring porn-bred kids, moral panics, imperial cucks, and love most sweet when impossible to realize. We take Hölderlin’s madness as an experiment in making political -- didactic theater, even -- that is fun & rigorous.” - Sebas Alarcon
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Performed at Lifeworld, April 3-4, 2026
“The play stages an ensemble performance about the early life of Friedrich Hölderlin, a 19c German poet who wrote his best work in a thirty year period of wholly isolated madness. The play doesn’t take that madness as romantic, rather as a result of political, sexual, and creative defeats that made him worse: political, because Hölderlin was a would-be revolutionary in a time of reaction; and sexual, because he suffers from our contemporary maladaptive sexualities, featuring porn-bred kids, moral panics, imperial cucks, and love most sweet when impossible to realize. We take Hölderlin’s madness as an experiment in making political -- didactic theater, even -- that is fun & rigorous.” - Sebas Alarcon
