»The Story of an Hour« is about Louise Mallard, who has just learned of her husband’s sudden death in an apparent train accident. Her sister Josephine attempts to deliver the news delicately since Louise suffers from a weak heart. She bursts into tears and locks herself in her bedroom. There, Louise is unexpectedly overcome with something she’s never felt before.

In the span of exactly sixty minutes, Kate Chopin’s short story unpacks and determines a utopia of self-determined transformation. First published in 1894, »The Story of an Hour« exemplifies this American writer’s work, but is still little known to readers outside of the United States. It will be performed for the first time on the German stage. For Marie Schleef and her team, the short story, in the form of an hour-long silent piece, becomes the basis for examining new narrative and dream spaces void of the spoken word. In this way, the artistic team expands on their experiments with visual and performative storytelling explored in two previous works. Together with the adaptation of the novel »To the Lighthouse« (Volksbühne Berlin, 2018) and »Name Her. Eine Suche nach den Frauen+« (Ballhaus Ost, 2020), a collaborative work by Marie Schleef, Jule Saworski, Anne Tismer, and Laura Andreß that was invited to the 58th Berlin Theatertreffen, »Die Geschichte einer Stunde | The Story of an Hour« completes Marie Schleef’s trilogy dealing with »rooms of emancipation« in which literature and history are investigated in terms of new and forgotten spaces of possibility.