Only God Can Cancel Me  

Elias Adam writes in a touching, poetic text—rich in self-irony—about the relationship between a young artist and his mother, and about all the dreams she let die for the men in her life. She once dreamed of a career as a singer, but as a woman at that time she was expected to fulfill very specific roles: daughter, wife, housewife, mother. Yet even this is not appreciated in her marriage—the husband and father, now deceased, also never accepted that his son is gay. Instead, the mother finds small, individual ways to fight the patriarchy on her own limited terms.

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With great sensitivity, Elias Adam’s text—skillfully oscillating between autobiography and fiction—traces the life of this mother and shows the young artist’s struggle for words and, again and again, with the emotional legacy his parents have left him. Is he allowed to use his mother’s suffering for his art? Or does that make him just another man who exploits and suppresses this woman in a different way? Wrestling with feelings of guilt and shame, he ultimately also questions his own identity as a young theatre-maker in the digital age.

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The play premiered in April 2025 at Theater Oberhausen in Oberhausen, Germany.

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