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characters belong, but their age group. The four major protagonists belong to my generation. They're just emerging from what some people call their youth and are entering what others call "the mature years." Older people testify to it, and younger people feel it when it comes on - that vacuum period when you're not a twenty-something, but you're still not fully a thirty-something, either, and you don't know exactly where you belong. You aren't exactly naive, life is full of watersheds, break-ups, rejections, but also heightened sensitivity, focus, maybe even your first real stability. You take a deep breath and, lungs filled with the past, you dive into an uncertain future. You talk about success, about a specific time of life. Are there other questions, too? Maybe "Have I done well enough for someone my age?" Thomas' key line, the one that introduces his behavior in the drama and defines him, is this: "In my entire life, 1 have never encountered anything more shameful than success." This is from someone who is 30 years old and is supposed to become a tenured university professor. For years, his whole life has been directed toward that goal, he has taken every step required of him and then, all of a sudden, just before he gets there, he admits that there is nothing more shameful than what he has been striving for. Meanwhile, Maria, Thomas'wife, has determined that success in her life is something that only appears to be less socially relevant, and that is a successful marriage. They come to realize that they have devoted most of their lives to the wrong things, and it is entirely logical that they start to ask whether success is worth all they have invested. Each of the four protagonists, each in his or her own way, comes to the same question: is it worth carrying on? That's perhaps the biggest catch in their game: how far should you go, how far can you go - and where? I intentionally use the word "game," since it's clear that behind every emotional watershed, there is a complex psychological game and vice versa: each psychological frame of mind is associated with changeable emotional states. Musil was absolutely influenced by Freud: that is how we came to get four dreamers who rise and fall like the keys of a piano, revealing different reflections on the world through their psycho-emotive music-making. It's a game à quatre that is trying to be à trois so that it can maybe eventually be a deux and then, only then will the quartet sense the "one and only." Except the only true "one and only" is the quartet itself. Musil left no character unto himself, or herself, a secure, circumscribed terrain. The protagonists and their lives are interwoven and affirm each other, so it's necessary that you understand and accept conflicting positions as equally valid and justified, since only that way do they comprise a whole. I recognize myself in each of the four protagonists. Each of them, with each individual action, shapes the differences among themselves, and each does it in his or her own way. All in one piece, but in conflict with themselves - and so they start to resemble me. All that sounds great, but how do you put it up on stage? For starters, it's not easy for a director to succeed in bringing Musil to a broad audience, since Musil is a genuinely gloomy writer. Fie does

THE ENTHUSIASTS