Life in the Open-Air Museum, or They Cooked Little Frogs

The play transports the audience back to the atmosphere of 1980s Czechoslovakia. Through personal stories and period detail, it reveals how people lived, often merely survived. The first part, through facts and documentary elements, immerses the audience in a world of everyday shortages, queues, improvisation, and survival strategies. It opens a deeper layer of experience: the absence of freedom, a suffocating social climate, and the sense that there is nowhere left to breathe. People retreat into their private worlds to endure, but at the cost of losing perspective and hope. The second part focuses on two specific lives: a young doctor and a philosopher–Germanist. One struggles with the absence of professional role models and a distorted environment; the other has spent nearly twenty years working as a boiler attendant, despite his abilities and education pointing elsewhere. Their stories reveal how the system gradually erodes talent, ambition, and any sense of meaningful work or life. Yet, moments of human closeness quietly emerge, along with a fragile sense of hope, culminating, in the end, in a fleeting glimpse of genuine joy. The play asks what happens to a society without true authorities or natural role models, and how such a condition shapes the lives of a younger generation, especially at the moment when what is considered “normal” ceases to be normal at all.

Authors: Malinová Malinová
Directed by: Malinová Malinová
Music: Vladimír Pecka
Song Texts: Hana Malinová

Cast: L. Podaná, T. Zelenka, V. Doležalová, A. Kubeschová, H. Malinová, M. Běťák, L. Koláček, J. Horák