Year in Review: A Note To Future Playwrights

In the past six season, we at Rorschach have worked tirelessly at upping our game with each passing show. Never content to rest on our laurels, we've striven to learn the lessons from the past and to continue challengings ourselves with each new season--indeed, with each new show. Over the years there have been things we've done well (such as marrying one another) and things we've worked hard to improve upon (increasing the number of publicity photographs that contain women in various states of undress/carrying deadly swords). Over the past season, we've hit some new high water marks, such as successfully incorporating multi-media effects into performances and building taller, more complicated sets.

Of course, in the theatre game, it's best to remain unsatisfied with what you did before and always find ways to improve your game. Nevertheless, if there's one thing that we ave managed to master--to become known for over the past year--is that Rorschach is, without a doubt, DC's number one theatre company for plays that take place in German apartment buildings. I mean, when you think "German apartment drama", you think us, obvs.

In order to honor our mission statement, Rorschach looks for plays that are imbue with certain "epic" qualities and which contain elements of the mystic or the mythological. What a lot of people don't know is that by setting you play within a German apartment complex, you automatically bequeath these qualities to your story. It all goes back to a well-regarded piece of dramatic theory, first espoused by Bertolt Brecht's younger second cousin Detmar, of the Deutschewohnungeffekt, which correctly identified German apartment buildings as the premiere nexus of both existential angst and psychohistorical tension.

The German apartment is like a vehicle capable of containing both the entirety of time and relative dimension inside a single space. To put it in layman's terms: there is no facet of human experience that cannot be contained within a German apartment, and, furthermore, any story that is told inside a German apartment automatically expands--like gas filling a vessel--to epic breadths and depths, thus allowing a story which would look simple and routine set within, say, a townhouse in Alexandria, to inflate to such a broad degree that it could automatically stand in for the sum and summa of human experience.

Therefore, playwrights, you should take note. Let the next play you write take place inside a German apartment, send it to Rorschach and WE WILL STAGE IT. That's a firm guarantee. Heck, if you've sent us a play for consideration in the past, only to be told that it didn't fit our mission, pull it out, reframe the story so that it takes place inside a German apartment building, send it back to us and WATCH WHAT HAPPENS.

It's all a part of our new advertising slogan: "Rorschach Theatre: if you've got a play about a German apartment, then we have a generous lease agreement for you to sign."