The Womb-bat is a short play, which the author calls an «Echolocation». Echolocating is what bats do in a cave where they depend upon resonance vibrations from other bats to know where they are. In this piece, a woman from New York feels totally disconnected in her Zurich life, even within the embrace of a stable marriage to a good Swiss man. She is Jewish, literary, and anxious about an upcoming hysterectomy. In the play she is visited by personages – ghosts, dreams, visions? – of poets who have resonated with her: Anne Sexton,
Shakespeare, Yehuda Amichai, Archibald MacLeish. From these often comic conversations, she derives the strength, humor, and insight to «re-locate» emotionally, gaining the potential to deal with loss and grow into the creative, grounded woman she wishes to be. Comic? Tragic? Pastoral? Poetic? This is a play that defies definition…as does life.
Dorrie Iten-Gilden is a Swiss-American English and Drama teacher. She lives in Zurich.
Cast: David Bollag, Robert Cotton, Rose Haechler Galle, Louisa Lasdun, Daniela Vorburger, and Antonin Wagner