Gretchen 89ff

Lutz Hübner's comedy takes one small passage — Gretchen finding the jewel box in Goethe's Faust, the lines numbered 2865 following, which is where the title comes from — and rehearses it eight times over with the most different possible pairings of actress and director. Each pair is certain it has found the scene. None of them agrees with any of the others. It is the funniest available account of how theatre is actually made, and it works particularly well in a town where the play in question is treated as scripture: the audience knows the eleven lines, and watches them survive eight incompatible readings.