Replay

A guest performance with consequences: in 1988, a celebrated opera singer from the GDR sets off for a tour in Bayreuth and stays there. She leaves her husband and daughters Lotte and Luise behind in Dresden. This move changes the lives of all four of them forever. After reunification, the two unequal sisters become contemporary variations on “Lisa and Lottie”. As adult women, they repeat and vary conflicts, neuroses and behavioural patterns from the past to the next generation almost forty years later. History seems to repeat itself - perhaps never in exactly the same way, but cyclically like the seasons: Each high phase is again followed by awakening, doubt, finally dissolution and then crisis - which in turn is followed by a new high. This applies to societies as well as to family and relationship structures, in which unresolved problems are repeated and solidarities and antipathies vary from generation to generation.

In the bitter family comedy ‘Replay’, Yael Ronen explores these recurring patterns, repetition loops and echoes that an event can have in the past. Can we free ourselves from the roots of the past, or are we doomed to be trapped in endless loops of repetition?

Last season, Yael Ronen celebrated the premiere of »Bucket List«, a musical hallucination about an overwhelming present, at the Schaubühne. The show, which she developed together with composer and songwriter Shlomi Shaban, was invited to the Theatertreffen 2024.

Yael Ronen was born in Jerusalem in 1976. She studied playwriting at HB Studio in New York and directing at the HaKibbutzim seminar in Tel Aviv. At the Schaubühne, Yael Ronen first presented the plays she developed in Israel at FIND. Together with the Schaubühne ensemble and Palestinian and Israeli actors, she developed the works »Dritte Generation« (2009) and »The Day Before the Last Day« (2011). From 2015 to 2023 she was in-house director at the Maxim Gorki Theater. Yael Ronen has been directing regularly at the Schaubühne again since the 2023/24 season.