The study aims to explore the poetics and aesthetics of alternative theater in the German-speaking world, starting from the theatrical works of the Viennese Bernardon performer Joseph Felix von Kurz, primarily focusing on its simultaneity with bourgeois theater. It addresses the tensions of "other" theater in relation to the bourgeois model in terms of artistically productive interdependencies. The traditional methods of commedia dell'arte-inspired theater forms underwent a transformation in meaning within the new context of the bourgeois era, possessing the potential to thematize alternative models of bourgeois identity through theatrical means.