Thorsten Lensing:
Unendlicher Spaß

For more than 20 years, director Thorsten Lensing has been showing his celebrated and renowned productions at Sophiensæle - a success story crowned by the invitation to this year's Theatertreffen!

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, first published in the U.S. in 1996, is an attempt to narrate today's world in 1500 pages, without reducing it to a single interpretation. Wallace states, I want to write about how it feels to live today, instead of distracting people from it. Hence, Wallace finds himself writing about everything from the serious, to the trivial, to the bizarre: birth pangs and death throes, blizzards, stories of love and separation, phobic men, excessive salivation, nurses who seem to emerge out of a racy-nursewear catalogue, and birds having heart attacksin mid-flight.

In doing so, Wallace approaches both his comical and tragic characters with an unprecedented delicacy and earnest.As Wallace believes,jokes are often the bottles in which we send out the most plangent screams for someone to care and help.

Part of the staging will centre on the three brothers of the Incandenza family: Hal, a prodigiously intelligent and talented student at the Enfield Tennis Academy; and his elder siblings, Orin, the punter for the Arizona Cardinals, and Mario, a severely deformed and disabled filmmaker and passionate radio listener. Other characters appear, such as Joelle van Dyne, a veiled radio announcer and member of the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed and Don Gately, a former thief and medicine addict from the drug rehabilitation centre Ennet House. All characters of the novel are helplessly at the mercy of life's hasards.

CAST Jasna Fritzi Bauer, Sebastian Blomberg, André Jung, Ursina Lardi, Heiko Pinkowski, Devid Striesow DIRECTOR Thorsten Lensing Co-DIRECTORBenjamin Eggers-Domsky STAGE DESIGNGordian Blumenthal und Ramun Capaul COSTUMES Anette Guther DRAMATURGY Thierry Mousset TEXT VERSION Thorsten Lensing COLLABORATION TEXT VERSIONThierry Mousset, Dirk Pilz  PRODUCTIONEva-Karen Tittmann STAGE DESIGN DIRECTORMartina Schulle TECHNICAL DIRECTORDirk Lutz ASSISTANT DIRECTOR Lucie Grünbeck, Luisa Puschendorf COSTUME ASSISTANCE Marie Fischer

A production by Thorsten Lensing in coproduction with Schauspiel Stuttgart, Schauspielhaus Zürich, Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, Kampnagel Hamburg, Theater im Pumpenhaus Münster, HELLERAU – Europäisches Zentrum der Künste, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg and SOPHIENSÆLE. Funded by the Capital Cultural Fund and the City of Münster.