Five Minutes of Silence

Three nameless people who didn't know each other before come together on stage, i.e., in a room filled with the waste of affluence, such as cardboard boxes, beverage cans, plastic tarps, and fabric scraps. They decide to just not say anything for five minutes, to listen to the silence and the wind in the cornfield, to the birds in the branches, to feel their own heartbeats.

So, everyone shut up, everyone just enjoy the silence, five minutes without an opinion, don't say a word for 5 minutes ... starting now.

They are in complete agreement that this would help us move forward, right here, in this very place. Yet, turning off the constant background noise of opinions and attitudes for just five minutes is more complicated than initially assumed.

Leo Meier, actor and the playwright of Fünf Minuten Stille, studied dramatics and philosophy in Bochum and acting at the Folkwang University of the Arts. Meier crafted the play as a self-critical, absurdist, and entertaining play. It is a refreshingly witty drama full of liberating humor about the desire for peace and quiet in a noisy world.

The three actors long for silence but remain stuck in debate and complaint about the state of the world, since "intelligence is only useful if you're smart enough to use it properly."

"I'd thought about that too - saving the world or something along those lines. We already have the evil part down. But it's good that we're saying it again!"

And so the chatter goes on.

During 90 minutes, the three protagonists pour a torrent of words over the audience. The Wallgraben trio performs linguistically brilliant, chaotic theater. They impress with their gestures, anarchic joy, and wonderful wit.

Near the end, the audience lived through five minutes of silence, as the three sat around a freshly planted tree on stage. While Red Baron deliberated how they knew, when the five minutes had passed, a voice from off announced that the five minutes were not yet over.

The world out there needs improvement, but how? The three agree on one thing: It's the fault of those out there. Hell is the other people.

The male protagonist admits that he has a small car with only one door, drives at 120 km/h, and that, living in the countryside, where public transportation is practically nonexistent, he uses his car only in very special emergencies. One such emergency is his terminally ill father, whom he has to visit at the city hospital. Yet it turns out that his father, a retiree, scraped together his savings to fly to Australia. While surfing at the beach, a shark bit off his head. It's simply impossible for the plot of the play to get any more absurd than that.

Near the end, the male and one of the female actors leave the stage not to save the world, but to save his vintage Padoda-style Mercedes convertible from the scratches of an angry mob running amok outside.

Don't just talk - take action. So the last actress on stage finds a transparent plastic jumpsuit, puts it on, and begins filling it, little by little, with the trash of affluence. Then, exhausted, she collapses like an inflated doll onto the rest of the rubbish, which she can no longer dispose of on her own. She is filled up.

©Lars Peterson on Facebook

The thunderous applause and the many curtains were well deserved.

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