vending machine buffet

Venue: DT Bühne - Mrs. Adam, an enterprising landlady, runs a vending machine buffet. Despite all the modernity — food, drinks and music are delivered at the push of a button — this means: Greasing bread rolls, serving beer, being on your feet from morning until midnight. Her husband Leopold, a dreamer, is of no great help to her in this regard. Instead of helping out in business, he sits at the fishing pond and devises a theoretically good solution for providing the needy population with inexpensive protein in the form of farmed carp.

One day while fishing, he pulls a young female suicide out of the water, takes her home and things start to move. The young woman, Eva, helps out as a waitress and not only turns out to be a sales-boosting magnet in the vending machine buffet, which is both a reason for joy and a thorn in the side of the boss, but also helps the social visionary to present his business idea to the city's notables, who are initially negative but then increasingly interested.

Austrian author Anna Gmeyner wrote Vending Machine Buffet in 1932, at a time of break in the epoch: “Europe is a powder keg into which an igniting spark can fall at any moment,” the play says. Despite the controversial historical background, the piece is a loving portrait of the so-called small (and also the very poor) people who muddle through with diligence, mother wit and cunning and yet lose neither humor nor confidence. Everything goes wrong in the end, of course, but one thing can be relied upon: Lust and love will remain.