Skidmore Theater to Present Peter Handke's KASPAR

The Skidmore College Department of Theater is pleased to announce its Spring 2016 Director's Lab, Kaspar by Peter Handke. This production is directed by senior theater student Aaron Ardisson.

Synopsis: Inspired by the story of Kaspar Hauser and written by internationally acclaimed and award winning Austrian playwright Peter Handke, Kaspar dissects the role of language in the human experience, specifically the role of language as torturer. Emerging into society with only a single sentence, Kaspar is tortured by language. Through a series of sixteen phrases, speech is deconstructed, rendering language all-powerful. Ultimately, Kaspar is, as Handke writes, "made to speak through speaking".

FROM THE DIRECTOR: As logician and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has written, "the limits of my language are the limits of my world." The expression of thought is restricted only by the confines of what can be articulated through language. Who is to say that we think in the same language we speak? Peter Handke's Kaspar explores the limits of language as a means of both expression and torture.