Playwright: Franz Xaver Kroetz
At: Trap Door Theatre
Phone: 773-384-0494; $15
Runs through: July 29
By Jonathan Abarbanel
Near the beginning of Request Programme, Carolyn Shoemaker as Miss Rasch opened a window in the studio apartment set and—as if on cue—in came a fly. For the next 90 minutes I expected her to swat the fly, as Shoemaker wordlessly established Miss Rasch's obsessively tidy and compulsively clean universe in hyper-naturalistic detail. In real time she came home from a boring job, changed clothes, prepared a modest supper, did needlepoint, used the toilet, repeatedly washed her hands, went to bed and rose again to consume a bottle of sleeping pills, listening most of the while to an all-request radio broadcast, filling Miss Rasch's meaningless life with self-imposed routine and ritual.
Not really a play, director Beata Pilch and Shoemaker have created this theatrical slice of life-and-death out of an eight-page scenario from Franz Xaver Kroetz, one of the most important German playwrights of the last 35 years. I thought immediately of the plays of Samuel Beckett, especially Happy Days, in which an aggressively cheerful woman is buried in a garbage pile. The difference is that Beckett explores existential despair through semi-abstract or surreal environments, while Kroetz employs extreme realism. Whether invented by Pilch or instructed by Kroetz, Miss Rasch telegraphs her suicidal thoughts by repeatedly running her hand across the knobs of her apartment's gas stove ( ostensibly to make sure they are off ) . Despite this, I thought Miss Rasch would choose, as Beckett's characters always do, to live one more day. And then one more. And one more. Frankly, her choice to end it was something of a let-down, even if not unexpected. The heroism of Beckett's characters is the tenacity with which they cling to life, choosing to endure despair.
While one feels sorry for Miss Rasch, one also has a certain amount of contempt for her, perhaps because we enter her world with no exposition about who she is and how she got that way. She's not a sloven, she has taste, she reads a posh newspaper, she has photos of—who?—family and/or friends in her apartment and she has a telephone. Where is her outside world? Pilch and Shoemaker drop some clues about Miss Rasch's angst through self-image conflicts, fears of the outside world and—most oddly—her total silence, never speaking a word out loud to herself or humming a tune, but these clues aren't enough to make her especially appealing. She's sad rather than sympathetic.
Still, Shoemaker's carefully choreographed and disciplined performance is a model of focus and, yes, energy. For 90 minutes, she manages to retain our interest in an uninteresting character, using body language and a gradual change in facial masque ( vs. a costume mask ) to telegraph Miss Rasch's pain, slowly turning weary and stricken as we watch.