Request Concert at BAM Fisher

On a normal workday Fra?ulein Rasch comes home at about 6:30pm after work and after her shopping. She enters the apartment house, checks her mail, finds only an advertisement, takes it, goes to her door, unlocks it, and steps in.

Not a single word is uttered in German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz’s devastating 1971 experiment in hyper-realism. Alone in her studio apartment, a middle-aged, middle-class woman—played by renowned Polish actress Danuta Stenka (Krum, 2007 Next Wave), performing a meticulous execution of Kroetz’s stage directions—goes about her well-worn evening ritual: dinner for one, dishes, a listener request program on the radio. As she brushes past audience members, gathered in the round and able to peer into director Yana Ross’ intimate, installation-like staging, this mute everywoman’s quotidian gestures, made all the more haunting by her ruthless tidiness, weave a brutal tapestry of loneliness, repression, and desperation.