Hotel Good luck
by Alejandro Ricaño
 
Direction: Michal Dočekal 
Stage Design: Dragan Stojčevski 
Film director: Jakub Šmíd 
Music and Songs: Ivan Acher 
 
On stage: 
 
BOBBY- Martin Donutil
MOTHER, LILIAN- Nina Horáková
FATHER, LARRY- Tomáš Milostný 
 
Czech translate:  Petr Gojda 
English translate:  Jacqueline E. Bixler 

Prague city Theatres
 
Prague City Theatres are one of Prague’s most significant cultural institutions with a rich history dating back to 1950. Beginning in 2018, with a new management headed by Daniel Přibyl as managing director and Michal Dočekal as artistic chief, Prague City Theatres are comprised of three main venues: Rokoko, ABC, and Komedie Theatre. In addition to those venues, activities and productions in the open air or in various non-theatrical buildings are planned. The aim is to transform Prague City Theatres into a theatre institution with international connections, one that will tackle deep issues of the modern day and play an active role in the development of Czech and European theatre and society.
 
The ABC theatre is the largest of the three theatres. A venue with a proscenium stage and an elegant auditorium that can seat almost 500 spectators in the stalls, boxes and on balcony, it was built in the late 1920s. ABC is focused on more serious repertoire, with strong personalities of modern European stage direction invited to stage contemporary drama as well as daring new looks at classic plays.
 
The Rokoko theatre is a smaller venue right off Wenceslas Square. Originally a cabaret that first started operation in 1916, it is fairly intimate space with a very direct contact between the stage and the auditorium (seating 200 spectators). Nowadays Rokoko is a space for the ensemble’s more intimate productions of the works of contemporary playwrights – it is intended to go back to the roots and harbour extravagant cabaret-style productions.
 
The Komedie theatre is situated in a landmark funcionalistic building from 1930. In 2018, it is not intended primarily to serve the needs of the Theatres’ resident ensemble, but rather to become an open space for independent companies, co-productions, visiting performances by regional and international playhouses, special events and festivals.

I discovered André Gorz through his Letter à D., a few months after it was published in 2006. Deeply moved by this text, I had decided to get to work on acting and directing it for the stage.  After the production of En Route-Kaddish, a close collaboration with actor Elios Noël allowed this new writing project to take shape, totally leaving behind the auto-fictional questions raised in that show.
 
I decided to try to write a voice for Doreen. Then from this voice, Gérard also reappeared. Finally, the idea of fictional framework took hold.
 
 I had written En Route-Kaddish, my previous project, over a long period, after doing a great deal of research in my own family’s documents and archives. This family history paralleled a larger history, that of the Israeli-Palestinian confict.  It dealt with familial and intimate legacies, with history and politics.
 
For Doreen, after starting from the narrative in the Letter to D., I tried to learn more by looking at the couple’s archives. Several months before their suicide, Gérard had taken care of organizing what would happen after their deaths. He left IMEC (The Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives) all his professional and personal archives: research documents, essays, reviews, newspaper articles, manuscripts, correspondence, family records, photos, films, collections of stamps, LPs, and valuable objects. After spending time doing research at IMEC and reading Gorz’s work, I gradually attempted to take my own stab at recreating the story of their love. Many elements were missing: Gorz had left a lot of archival material dealing with his philosophical and journalistic work and relatively little with his private life. Meeting members of his circle allowed me to learn a little more. But the closer I got to the real model, the more I felt I needed to move away from it to be able to compose action. So, I decided to go into the holes and gaps they left behind, and to make up a Doreen and a Gérard who would tell us as much about the real couple of the last century as about a couple with whom we could identify today, close to 10 years after their suicide. It is this zone of friction behind an absolutely real past and actional present, played by two 35-year-old actors who will span human ages and historical eras, that now seems potentially pertinent to create a theatrical object based on André Gorz’s text. There is also mirroring at play: in Letter to D., Gorz himself fictionalizes and creates a representation of the couple he formed with Doreen. His work also drew on that specific form of representing the real that discreetly uses fiction to serve the narrative. Doreen offers a theatrical parallel to this literary representation, to this fulcrum of the real and fiction. We will invariably move from documents and real-life anecdotes to scenes from married life imagined and improvised by the actors based on these documents. How do the political and social questions Gorz tackled in his essays surface in his private life?
 
As Gorz did by publishing his Letter to D., we will invite the world to enter into the couple’s private life. We will devise a form of staging that will aim to blur the boundaries between actors and spectators, between reality and fiction, to find the right proximity, the possibility for respectful revelation that touches you the way that you’re touched by the solitary reading of the devastating romance between two people who chose to die together rather than risk surviving each other.
 
The show will deal with love and abandonment, with utopia and political disillusion, and with what remains after you’re gone. Gérard and Doreen had no children. Gérard said he did not want children because “I would have been jealous of them, I wanted to keep Doreen for myself!” Over the 20 years they spent in Vosnon, he would plant a grove of 200 trees. A few months before their suicide, André said: “What will remain of us is the trees.”  But in this time when we are faced with the barbary he regularly discussed in his writings, when that barbary is starting to show on the terrible horizon of our era, it seems that the Letter will remain as their real legacy.
 
Writing a few months after Letter to D. was published, André’s friend Paul Virilio wrote: “In this world of catastrophes, we still have this. I thank you for existing; for showing that instead of being withdrawal into yourselves, love can be renewed and flourish throughout a life, by fitting with the successive mutations of the era of which you as a couple were also active participants.”
 
We will try both to pass on this legacy and to be among its heirs.