Danuta Stenka gives a bold, bravura performance in hypnotic revival of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s REQUEST CONCERT (photo by Richard Termine)
BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: WUNSCHKONZERT
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
October 26-29, $25, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
Danuta Stenka is absolutely mesmerizing in Request Concert, Laznia Nowa Theater and TR Warszawa’s intense, ingenious revival of German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1971 hyperrealistic play, a treatise on the state of loneliness and isolation in contemporary society. As the audience enters BAM’s intimate Fishman Space at the Fisher, Polish star Stenka (Krum, Angels in America), as Fräulein Rasch, is already onstage, standing still, midstep, returning home from her job as a stenographer. The stage, designed by Simona Biekšaitė and Zane Pihlstrom, is a studio apartment complete with kitchen, washing machine, shower, sofa bed, and bathroom in the center of the theater, on a wooden platform just off the ground. The audience is encouraged to walk around the set as Fräulein Rasch meticulously goes about her nightly routines, changing into comfy clothes, making dinner, checking the mail, and watching television, all done with an exquisite care consumed by emptiness and melancholy. She never speaks as she butters pieces of crispbread, takes drags off a cigarette, uses the (working) toilet, glances at the haute couture fashion show on TV, and pages through IKEA and Costco catalogs. Aside from a red chair, her apartment is all white and gray, small and drab yet coldly functional, with no identity of its own. It all combines for a heartbreaking portrait of solitude, made all the more sad by Stenka’s slow, studied movement and deep stares filled with longing and, perhaps, fear. The only dialogue comes from a radio program she listens to, with host Ari Shapiro (of NPR) reading letters about new lovers and happy families and playing related songs by the Beach Boys, Leonard Cohen, Bob Marley, and a band that Shapiro sings with, Pink Martini. When Fräulein Rasch sits down at her laptop, she turns on a Sims-like video game in which she has created her own alternate universe, a man, a woman, and children living in a computer-animated room based on her own surroundings. Her isolation is devastating.
Gracefully directed with sensitivity and subtlety by Yana Ross (Bambiland), Request Concert is like a modern-day version of Chantal Akerman’s 1973 minimalist classic, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, only live and in person, with the audience getting close enough to touch the performer, as there are no barriers separating Stenka from the people walking around the set, hypnotized by her every gesture; not a single action is wasted in a brave and bold tour de force. It’s so realistic that at times you’ll feel like you’re infringing on Fräulein Rasch’s privacy, wanting to look away, but you won’t be able to. We learn almost nothing about her, yet we learn everything; she is no one, yet she is everyone, the set both a zoolike cage and a mirror on ourselves. The only reason we know that she is a stenographer — a job that requires a certain anonymity and lack of personal identity, taking down the words of others with precise exactitude — is because it says so in the program. For nearly seventy-five minutes, Fräulein Rasch, and Stenka, avoids making eye contact with anyone until. . . . Well, to say more would deprive those lucky enough to score a ticket the surprise of a hypnotic finale you won’t soon forget. The show is best experienced by moving around what essentially is a living installation, following Fräulein Rasch’s captivating boredom and ritualistic behavior from every angle; standing in one place the whole time is actually unfair to those attempting to take full advantage of this unique and critical element. For those who do need to sit, there are chairs in the balcony, offering a different perspective.