Café Europa vs. dog eat dog

“My story is worth telling. I have a story to tell. But I have no language. My name is Menem. MENEM. It is written the same front to back, Menem. I am thirty years old, I carry everything in me and am none of this at all. Both my parents are dead. I buried them in a country whose language they didn´t speak, I gave them two headstones and had their names written on the stones in that language that wasn´t theirs.”

Menem once was Serkan and Serkan will be Menem. They both work as bouncers at a nightclub. At their workplace they check out the people going in and out, while all the time really only trying to get a grip on their own fragmented self. Both Serkan are Hakan are challenged to leave their place by the door.

“Not inside, not outside, forehead outside, bum inside.”
A door, centre stage. The nightclub is outside, outside is inside. Outside the door the gang of youngsters from Dog eat Dog act out their passions. Serkan wants to leave the suburban drabness and start a new life with Pola, a girl spending her life in dreams. But his best friend Tom does not want to be left behind alone.
Menem has made himself at home outside the door of the Café Europa. He does not expect much from life any more. Things are the way they are. Then suddenly Natascha appears, a famous actress, and asks him to go away with her. And Eva, the waitress who brings him coffee every night, talks to him for the very first time.
The evening takes its course. The characters start to drift. The shift is coming to its end, the beats from the nightclub are slowing down. The door becomes the backdrop for the history of Yussuf and Maria, the parents of the doormen. They are on their way back into their homeland, to the magic well which holds warm water in winter and cold water in summer.
This search for identity described by Nuran David Calis conjures up his own Armenian-Jewish origins. The profession of the bouncers becomes a symbol of homelessness, not just that of migrants.
Café Europa vs. Dog eat Dog by Nuran David Calis brings one of the most successful young playwrights to the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse. Director Mehdi Moinzadeh has combined two plays from Calis´ “Homeland Trilogy”. Iranian born Moinzadeh, who like Calis used to work as a bouncer, sets the stories up against each other. Without false harmony. A battle.
Kreuzberg Hip Hop artist Volkan T. provides the live soundtrack to the performance.