My year of rest and relaxation
based on the novel by Ottessa Moshfegh and directed by Katharina Stoll
German premiere
A woman is asleep. The world seems empty of meaning to her, she despises her surroundings - the New York art scene - and her fellow human beings. Self-realization, career and social life are of no interest to the nameless protagonist, despite her numerous privileges. Instead, she decides on a radical retreat: she wants to sleep through the night for a year. The hollowness of her world at the beginning of the millennium, the memories of her callous childhood, the death of her parents and the other remnants of her past life, such as her friend Reva, are to disappear in this hibernation. A dubious psychiatrist prescribes her countless medications. After a while, however, these have the side effect that her unconscious state develops a life of its own. Her unconscious self suddenly makes her do things that she actually wants to leave behind: self-care and parties creep back into her life while she sleeps and she can trust her memory and her sense of reality less and less.
In her acclaimed novel set against the backdrop of the early 2000s, American author Ottessa Moshfegh asks what a world devoid of meaning holds for a young generation, what a radical rejection of it can look like and how self-care is interwoven with isolation. Katharina Stoll sets the action in the New York gallery and stages it as an absurd trip through a labyrinth of dreams and reality.
More information and tickets here: https://www.muenchner-volkstheater.de/programm/schauspiel/mein-jahr-der-ruhe-und-entspannung
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