Request Programme
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Kroetz’s one-woman Request Programme may be even more likely to work an audience’s last nerve now than it was in its 1971 premiere. Miss Rasch, a factory worker in her early 40s, comes home to her apartment and, without saying a word, goes through her nightly routine: changing clothes, watching TV, making dinner, checking the radiator for heat, inspecting troublesome pimples, reading the mail, taking a shit, doing needlework, smoking cigarettes, staring into space, getting ready for bed. Essentially Kroetz’s script is an extended, obsessively detailed stage direction, which he says should be performed in real time, approximately an hour. “From the sideboard she gets a glass, pours in some fruit juice, and tops it off with water. She puts the glass with the other things on the table. The fruit juice she returns immediately to the fridge. Then she sits down and begins to eat.” Still, he insists that the play should not provoke or bore the audience–and by carefully detailing an uneventful hour in an apparently uneventful life, he does dramatize the psychology of despair, which ultimately drives Miss Rasch to make the most momentous decision of her life.
Like other pieces Trap Door Theatre has produced, Request Programme is a difficult work by a seminal European playwright largely ignored in America (in Germany, by contrast, only three years after his debut Kroetz was the country’s most produced living playwright). In this staging by artistic director Beata Pilch, Carolyn Shoemaker gives Miss Rasch a placid schlumpiness–which doesn’t prevent key moments of harrowing anguish from cracking through late in the evening. When she groans like a beast while sitting on the toilet, for example, it’s clear that her life is as painful as her bowel movement.
When: Through 7/29: Thu-Sat 8 PM
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Carolyn Shoemaker.
