SYNOPSIS

Laudakia caucasia

Tragic Farce / 3 men, 2 women / full length, 2 acts

February 16, 1913 Vienna. 19, Berggasse Street. Anna Schillage, the waitress at the café “Central” and a part-time whore at the hotel “The Diamond” (at nights), sneaks into Sigmund Freud’s study and attends the phsycho-analytic séance by Freud with the owner of “The Diamond” hotel, Irma Sresseli-Weiland. When her presence is revealed, Anna asks for Siggy’s (Sigmund Freud) and Irma’s help to find out whether she is going to give birth to a lizard from Stavros Papandopoulos, who first came to Anna disguised as a woman, in a dress and a veil and who has a webbed foot, like a lizard.

Unless Anna gets help, she refuses to serve high class clients in the Diamond hotel which will lead to Irma losing a considerable income. In addition, Anna’s lover, painter Dolfie (Adolf Hitler), who lives in a shelter for homeless people, learns about Stavros Papandopulos and intends killing him.

Promised that he will get 4 kilos of cocaine, imported from Colombia, from Irma, Siggy agrees to hold a psychological séance in the café “Central”, by which he saves not only Anna, but, also, Irma and Dolfie.

All three of them go to “The Central”. The street painter Dolfie also arrives and offers his paintings to Stavros Papandopulos, although it turns out that the latter is Soso (Joseph Jughashvili, alias Stalin).

Dolfie and Irma point their revolvers at Soso’s temples but Siggy interferes and gives them cocaine balls from his jewlery box. After this, Soso and Dolfie, experiencing halluscinations, start to play a chess game in which each piece on the board represents an actual living person. If the opponent removes a piece of the player, the person it stands for has to be killed in real life before the game can continue. (This “rule” is taken from the records by Friedrich Dürrenmatt “The Chess Player”). The opponents play “The blockade of Leningrad”, “The defence of Stalingrad” and later “The siege of Berlin”. Soso checkmates Dolfie and he is forced to commit suicide.

Soso is pleased and believes that he is the winner but sees that in 2010 his monument is being torn down with a crane in his home town Gori. Later, he is extremely pleased to see that his statue is put back in its place but he is thoroughly unhappy when his monument is painted red and people demand the dictator’s monument to be pulled down. Dolfie is worried that his home town Bernau does not have a monument to him.

Finally, by employing the furniture made by Michael Thonet, Siggy creates the psychoanalytical portrait of the XXc, in which he himself is the coatstand, or SUPER-EGO; an ordinary Vienna chair is Dolfie, or ID. Soso is a chair with a knot on its leg, or EGO. Anna is a table, or a conscious part of the scheme whereas Irma is the other table or the subconscious side.

Unfortunately, Anna Schillage cannot find out whether she will give birth to a lizard, or to an agama (the Caucasian agama or Laudakia caucasia, in Latin), which is wide spread in Soso’s home country.