Tjaša Mislej    

Our Warehouse

Year of writing: 2018
EVELIN: "She always has to make things difficult. It’s my turn. I am Evelin and I work at the warehouse. But this is only temporary, until I can find something better, of course. VERA: “Let her dream, babe. You know how it goes … It’s only a pipe dream!”
Total cast size: 5–9 (5 f, 1–4 m)

grown-ups

drama, tragicomedy
everymen, interpersonal relations, current social picture of the world

In a megastore warehouse four female workers. Hour after hour, day in day out, weeks on end stack the shelves with new stock. They actually live in the warehouse as they can only go home on Sundays, except of course if something unpredictable was to happen. Each one of them dreams of a different, better life, they are convinced this situation is only temporary. Even though at one point, they start kindling a desire to rebel, this idea soon dies out and the wheels of the capitalistic world, based on exploitation, continue to turn.

VERA: There. Don’t forget. And now a smoke break.

SUZY: Yippie, a smoke break.

EVELYN: What are we playing?

VERA: Girls, I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t! I’m fed up.

SUZY: Tomorrow is Sunday! Girls, we’re going home tomorrow.

VERA: We don’t know that for sure.

MARIA: On Sundays, they sometimes let us go home. Unless it’s a holiday or some special event, like autumn sales or Black Friday.

SUZY: Tomorrow’s nothing special. Tomorrow we’re going home.

Translations

Barbara Skubic

Our Warehouse

Language of translation: English

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Recently added

Awards, nominations, shortlists and recommendations

Slavko Grum Award for Best Play

Four women work in a warehouse of a huge store. They talk about work and even more about other things: each of them has her own story, her own bits of happiness and misery, her own hopes and fears. They worry about their boss walking in on them, catching them committing god knows what kind of professional malpractice; or even that she might bring along the manager who only every talks about optimisation which is another word for layoffs. In short, this is a social piece. Except it’s actually funny. A comedy then? Actually yes, maybe even a farce, but with a sad core. Realism? Enough for it to be absurd. Set locally and in our time? Yes, but almost utopian. And actually more of a negative utopia, a dystopia, as the Americans would call it these days. A type of dystopia that’s only around the corner. Either it will happen any time now or it had overtaken us, passed and became the past. The world is nothing but a closed box: a warehouse is a closed box inside of which there is an endless number of smaller boxes, full of different things, from beans to … One of them, a special, magical box, a TV, is both inside and out. (Even another frame, a monitor, monitoring, would have had the same effect.) And actually the stage is another one of these boxes, inside and all around us at the same time. What kind of person is someone who lives and survives in such a world? Naïve probably. More precisely, someone like a soldier in a world of war: either naïve or corrupt. A naïve person is one thing, but a person depicted in a naïve art style, is a different thing altogether. It’s different all right, but it’s a well-known fact that a playwright should be close to her characters and should take a step away from self (a fact often forgotten in a world where “me, myself and I” are heard loud from all the speakers and flickering on all the screens). So, a playwright is supposed to be a sensitive narrator, as the recent Nobel Prize winner put it. But to what degree is such a narrator allowed to surpass her subjects in intelligence or in knowledge? This question remains unanswered here, there will be other opportunities, as Beckett put it, to try again and fail better. From time to time, a customer wanders into the warehouse. Some want to buy things that are not for sale and pay with … let’s not get ahead of ourselves. From time to time a reporter comes in, wishing to satisfy and shock his audience with a real life story, but the life of our four workers doesn’t strike him as real enough. How could it be? It’s only life in a box.

2020

Play's productions

Directed by: Mateja Kokol

Skladišče (bralna uprizoritev)

Festival Vzkrik!, 2018

Link Directed by: Mateja Kokol

Naše skladišče

Prešernovo gledališče Kranj, 2020

Link