DOI: 10.20375/0000-0011-48e2-d
title: Muuuh! Eine Bergbauerntragödie in einem Akt

description: Abstract: 
Muuuh! Eine Bergbauerntragödie in einem Akt (Mooo! A Tragedy of the Mountain Farmers in One Act) is a drama that tells the love story of a young couple forced to make a dangerous escape from the village due to their rival fathers. The play gets its name from the cows in the village near the mountains.

Details: 
A woman in a grey dress enters the stage. In Bavarian dialect, she yells, “No, not another sad play like that,” and puts on a dirndl, the typical dress from Bavaria. As she leaves the stage, numerous musicians with their traditional instruments and women in folk costumes walk across the stage. Brass music and accordion are played, and the sound of cows mooing accompanies them often. Only when some women walk across the stage with the “moo can,” which imitates the sound of cows mooing, it becomes clear where the animals are coming from.
This scene is followed by a girl’s monologue describing life for farmers in the mountains. The paths are steep, the shoes have to fit, and it is a hard life in the mountains. Four exemplary farmers appear on stage during this monologue, representing the mountain farmers with their exhausted faces and typical clothing. When the mooing sounds, the farmers start looking everywhere for the animals, like under chairs and in front or behind the curtain. A bizarre chase begins between the women with the moo cans and the men who run after the sound.
Two chairs are placed on the stage, where first a woman in a dirndl and a little later a man take their seats. He tries to contact her, but she keeps ignoring him. When the man starts to reach out his hand to her, she keeps slapping it away. This reaching out and smacking continues to be accompanied by brass music, which does not stop when the man steals the woman’s hat and lets her chase him across the stage. Finally, the woman recovers her hat, and the two return to their seats. However, at this moment, the fathers of the two come on stage, who disapprove of their contact. They argue and take the chairs away while their children leave the scene separately. 
“Mother, I wanted to tell you that I am going to marry Benni,” the woman explains to her mum. However, she does not support her daughter either and wants her to avoid contact with him. At a party in the village, where the young couple is dancing without permission, they are caught by their fathers, who each seek a violent confrontation with the other parent.
The couple flees into the mountains while the fathers hit each other with chairs. The two lovers are already on the way when the parents realize this. The village people think the couple might have “also crashed into the canyon,” so they search for them. “Stones and silence, alpenglow, dreadful silence” is told in another monologue, for “only man, the restless one, must conquer it, must climb it, up and down, up and down. The mountain, it calls the restless”. During a thunderstorm, the couple falls into the canyon, and the people searching are also affected by the natural event. It seems as if everyone has fallen into the ravine. The only one still alive is the mother, who finds them all and sadly exclaims, “These are the bad moments when it is quiet.”
Inexplicably, a red glow lights up the stage. A song is played, “It is going on again,” while everyone gets up and continues running: the couple on the run in front, chased by the fathers and the village community. After a moo can be heard and everyone stops to look for the sound, the woman from the beginning enters the stage with a large bag carrying many items like clothing. In this last scene, stereotypes of traditional peasant theatre are unpacked, such as the premarital child, the evil mother-in-law who chases the groom with a rolling pin, and the final marriage of the lovers.