Maramba.

Cornelia Rainer brings Paula Köhlmeier’s novel “Maramba” to the stage for the first time, which contains 47 short stories, screenplay synopses, and other fragments of a novel. The name of the novel was chosen by Paula’s parents, Michael Köhlmeier and Monika Helfer, inspired by Paula’s magical word for her ambivalent feeling of happiness and sadness, which she called “I don’t know.”

“The coherence of a novel did not correspond to her sense of life,” write her parents in the afterword. “She experienced a lot and experienced quickly. But the purposeless beauty of everyday epiphanies, which she wanted to conjure up, resisted the grand form as well as the grand words.”

The stories, often only one or two pages long, are staged by Cornelia Rainer in a condensed theatrical-filmic installation. Moments of loneliness, jealousy, longing, heartbreak, betrayal, murder, and suicide take center stage, “where every vague feeling and every superfluous word is radically eliminated.”