The folk play (German Volksstück) was a specific form of popular theater. The term is generally used in the context of German-language theater history. The most characteristic form emerged in the Vienna Volkstheater in the late 18th century. Its heyday came in the 19th century and it spawned successors in variants of boulevard theater as well as (to this day) in sophisticated, sometimes socially critical plays. The Volkstheater [5] was relatively unstandardized and adopted ef…