The silence of listening and the charm of words: Virgin Suicides (2017), by Susanne Kennedy

Abstract

The article examines the play Virgin Suicides (2017), conceived by the German director Susanne Kennedy for the Münchner Kammerspiele. Starting from the book by Jeffrey Eugenides, the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the audio Psychedelic Experience (1964), by Timothy Leary, the director radicalizes three of her most recurrent elements: playback, acousmatic voices and masks. It is also in this work that Kennedy demonstrates the desire to bring the director's practice closer to something similar to shamanism and, thus, to put her “Cosmic Theater” into practice. The purpose of the article is to delve into the phenomenological experience of watching Virgin Suicides to, from the selection of significant fragments, examine the shamanism pursued by Kennedy, paying special attention to the roles played by the recorded voices that resonate throughout the play. The investigation is based on the hypothesis that Kennedy elaborates an incantatory system of acousmatic voices, generator of intensive space-time, which seduce/conduct the spectator's attention, making him, in this way, recognize himself as the bearer of the active principle that activates the incantation power of the heard words.