Celia Hofmann

my year of rest and relaxation

based on ottessa moshfegh’s novel

photo credits | celia hofmann

She has everything one could wish for: she is young, successful, beautiful—and chronically bored. Her first job at a trendy gallery feels meaningless, and her free time, filled with self-care routines and parties, leaves her equally empty. She dismisses her friend Reva’s relentless self-optimization—a collage of women’s magazines, Sex and the City, and positive psychology. Instead, she devises a plan: if she sleeps long enough, she will eventually wake as someone new. With a self-prescribed “year of rest and relaxation,” she hopes to sleep away her toxic relationships and the unsettling experiences of her past. But armed with an arsenal of psychotropic drugs, she doesn’t merely sleep—she gradually begins to inhabit an unconscious parallel life…

Moshfegh’s novel is a study of thresholds. Her nameless antiheroine drifts through the seemingly carefree atmosphere of late-90s New York City—an era poised on the edge of collapse with the coming of 9/11. She slowly loses her sense of time. Boundaries erode: between consciousness and unconsciousness, adulthood and childhood, intention and dissolution, control and surrender.

thalia theater | nachtasyl | 15 december 2021

with solomia kushnir

Director | celia hofmann

costume design | hanna krümpfer

dramaturg | elvin ilhan

photo credits | celia hofmann