Just let go
On Luk Perceval’s production of “Grace and Grit“ at Schauspiel Frankfurt
von Marion Tiedtke
Erschienen in: Arbeitsbuch 2019: Luk Perceval (07/2019)
They stand there in everyday clothes before a large black body of water. A long silence follows, finally interrupted by laughter which infects everyone in turn. They double over laughing and finally plunge into the cold water. Eight actors, four men and four women, spend over two hours fighting the water and wrestling with texts that describe a fight against cancer. It isn’t a novel, it isn’t a drama, there aren’t eight different roles for the actors to slip into, to authenticate the characters; that’s not what this is about at all. Instead, it is a true story being brought to the stage.
“Grace and Grit” is the title of the 1991 book by an American author, Ken Wilber. It is an autobiographical testimony of the life and death of Treya Wilber. The transpersonal psychologist, autodidact and renowned theoretician only got to know his future wife late in life. In the summer of 1983, they met each other and called it “love at first touch”.1 Four months later came the wedding, after ten days as a married couple came the diagnosis of breast cancer. The five years that Treya and Ken had together were a battle on the frontier...
