OUR NEED FOR CONSOLATION

In 1947, the young and wildly successful Swedish writer Stig Dagerman (http://www.dagerman.us/) meets Viennese-Jewish intellectual Etta Federn in her hotel room in Paris. They become friends. Or do they? Federn worships her dead son, a hero in the French Resistance. But how does she treat the son who’s still alive? Dagerman witnesses her behavior, and writes his play in a flash of inspiration. Marty’s Shadow. About the losses that overshadow our lives. First performed in Stockholm at the renowned Royal Dramatic Theater in 1948, Marty’s Shadow has since been performed to acclaim across Europe. Stig Dagerman’s work is currently gaining attention in the United States. (See Colm Tóibín, New York Review of Books, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/07/09/stig-dagerman-hard-won-truthnorth/). In June 2015, Marty’s Shadow had a standing-room-only stage reading by the August Strindberg Repertory Theater of New York. The project is supported by Dagerman’s daughter, Lo Dagerman, and by writer Nancy Pick, an American relative of Etta Federn’s. Together, they have translated the play and written a book (forthcoming Norstedts, 2017) about its genesis. Lo Dagerman is the manager of Our Need for Consolation LLC, an entity devoted to the promotion of Stig Dagerman’s writing in the United States.