From October through December, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) is hosting the Next Wave Festival: a series of experimental theater, music, and dance performances. Shows run, on average, a few days at a time, featuring works by artists from all over the world, among them Peter Brooks, Ivo van Hove, and Aurelien Bory. One of these installments is an adaptation of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1972 Request Concert, directed by Yana Ross, starring Danuta Stenka. The show is the result of a collaboration between TR Warszawa and Krakow’s Laznia Nowa.
Request Concert follows the obsessively meticulous Ms. Rausch, thoughtfully portrayed by Ms. Stenka, as she goes through her nightly routine. Described by the BAM website as an “experiment in hyper-realism,” Request Concert presents Ms. Rausch as a fallen tragic hero, someone who, after infinite resignation, continues to believe in something in spite of, or even because of, its unlikeliness to occur. Ms. Stenka and Ms. Ross successfully illustrate that Ms. Rausch believes that one day, she will no longer be lonely; by the end of the play, she is disillusioned, and finishes off her overdose on pills with a glass of champagne.
Lighting designer Mats Ohlin deployed subtle shifts in lighting that naturally directed the audience’s attention, making the play at times intimate and at times eerie. Ms. Rausch’s both abstract and amazingly realistic apartment — designed by Simona Bieksaite and Zane Pihlstrom — rested on a platform in the center of the performance space. Audience members were encouraged to walk around the set (seating was available on the balcony). Ms. Bieksaite was also the show’s multimedia designer, an integral part of the play, since we see Ms. Rausch flipping through television channels, playing The Sims, and listening to the request program on the radio, read by host Ari Shapiro. Each of these beats allows the audience to see many different aspects of Ms. Rausch’s loneliness, adding to and highlighting her quiet suffering.
Music direction by Ms. Grochulska and Tomasz Wyszomirski helped greatly to render the action on stage hypnotic, absorbing, and heartbreaking. The songs that Ms. Rausch listens to range from upbeat to tragic, but they are almost all nostalgic, from Sir Elton John’s “Daniel” to the Arabic-language folk song, “Ya Aziz Eini.”
The adaptation itself, with Aska Grochulska and Marcin Zawada as dramaturgs and added to by Ms. Ross and Ms. Stenka, was as creative as it was true to the original’s spirit. For instance, Ms. Rausch’s original hobby of knitting her carpet is replaced by her playing The Sims, a change or rather update Kroetz himself approved of enthusiastically. The team also added a twist at the end: after Ms. Rausch finishes taking the last of the pills, the house lights are dimly lit, and she makes eye contact with every audience member, after which she steps off stage and joins us, watching her former home. The audience spends the last few minutes of the play inspecting the empty set, now highlighted in a halo of bright lights. This move was most likely meant to bring the point of the show home — in terms of the play, we are the other lonely people who have committed suicide, and she is one of us. We are encouraged to understand her suicide as a revolt, and are asked to examine what it is she revolts against.
Although Request Concert stopped running on October 29th, the Next Wave Festival will continue to display contemporary performance artworks, lectures, and visual art exhibitions until December 18th. Go check it out!
