Ella is the re-working of a chapter of H. Achternbusch’s 1973 novel, The Day Will Come. It was rewritten in 1989 as commissioned by Klaus Peymann, director of the Stuttgart Staatstheater. This monologue, Ella, is based on a real-life model, Achternbusch’s aunt, whom he is guardian of. Ella had been beaten into dullness and treated meanly from the time she was little. This set her off on her misfortune-filled journey into silence. Little by little she lost her ability to express herself. However, she is absolutely precise in conveying the symbols of those various hierarchies that oppressed her – her father, her doctor, her psychiatrist, etc. In this ocean of words what starts to flow is the record of the re-collections of an unhinged memory in disconnected modules. Hers is a memory that hoards, de-composes, and recovers episodes absolutely without any chronological connection. There is a poverty of verbs, a painful quest for the right word that does not come. The scare traces of syntactic construction make us hypothesize phrases that are impoverished, lose their identities, and overlap with each other, ground into an inextricable heap. On stage Ella’s son, Josef, impersonates his mother. He tells his/her own existence, alone, until finally a cyanide coffee that he/she prepares cuts of his/her wreck of an existence. The actor is in full light. He is not asked to interpret a role, but to immerse himself in it absolutely. He talks about himself, from his life until his death. The rhythm of these 55 minutes is beaten out only by the ruinous falling of pieces of wood on the stage. These are understood as blows, punches, and the breaking up of an unstable soul. This is work on the actor.