“All right. Good night” was part of the Crossing the Line Festival 2025. (Courtesy: Merlin Nadj-Torma)
One does not exactly watch the German theater group Protokoll Rimini’s performance “All Right. Good Night.” Rather, one reads and listens to it.
Its story is told entirely through text projected on a scrim, a semitransparent material used in theater, and read aloud by prerecorded voices alongside five on-stage musicians from the Zafraan Ensemble. Throughout most of the work, performers play an atmospheric, winding composition by electro-pop musician Barbara Morgenstern.
The experience resembles that of an opera, which often includes a lot of reading of supertitles, except here, there are no bodies whirling around or throwing themselves into their beloved’s arms. In “All Right. Good Night,” which played at the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in September as part of the Crossing the Line Festival, the body is resoundingly not here – and that absence is the play’s subject, explored in two parallel stories.
Events recounted in the performance unfold in chronological order over eight years, beginning with the startling, mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014.
Woven into this global narrative is a more personal, seemingly unrelated account about The Father, as he is simply named, the narrator’s parent, who shows signs of dementia and deterioration over those eight years. When each sentence of Helgard Haug’s script begins, audience members do not know immediately whether they are in the The Father’s living room or in the world of those whose loved ones were on the flight that vanished.
In interludes between each year, the violinist, percussionist, saxophonist, bassist, and clarinet players walked around onstage to rearrange a few props. Sometimes they made the stage appear like a beach on a desert island with remains of the supposedly crashed flight scattered here and there; sometimes they emptied the stage so it looked like a spacious black box.
“All Right. Good Night” is about grief, but not the clear-cut kind, where, after a loved one’s death, life has a huge, painful tear down the middle of it. Rather, the show invites reflection on a different kind of grief, one that has a name in Danish: ventesorg, “waiting-grief.”
This is the grief of losing someone slowly, or, as this play suggests, not knowing for years on end whether or how someone lost a spouse, child, parent or friend.
In one moment, the audience heard the stories of people all over the world grappling with uncertainty, and in the next, they confronted the intimate, individual story of The Father – his frailty, his daily chores – and they imagine the narrator looking at him the way everyone sometimes looks at the people most important: only half-aware, sometimes a bit annoyed.
Just as the sorrow in this play is both collective and individual, the element of disappearance was also two-sided. The passengers on the aircraft physically disappeared but in such a way that the question of their deaths lingered for years; in an opposite but equally disturbing way, the narrator located and saw The Father in flesh and blood, but something essential to who he was, his memory, was disappearing.
The forced connection between these two stories pushes the audience to reckon with life’s most fundamental contradictions: body and mind, nearness and distance, individual and collective – much in the same way that grief always feels at once utterly specific and universal.
In this way, “All Right. Good Night” recalls Juliana Spahr’s 2005 poem cycle, “This Connection of Everyone with Lungs,” in which a bodyless narrator moves through both personal and communal grief in the wake of 9/11, by connecting everything, everywhere with her words.
Like Spahr’s work, the play connected personal anguish with political themes.
When the flight suddenly lost contact with the air traffic controllers, and no one was able to find it, billions of people were left to grapple with the unbelievable fact that such a huge machine could simply disappear.
They started to point fingers: It was the Russians, the narrator read. It was the Iranians. It was this nation or that nation. In the play, the aircraft served as a symbol of the human incapacity to come together, see eye-to-eye.
Running two-and-a-half hours, “All Right. Good Night” occasionally became unnecessarily repetitive and dragged-out for the simple points it so beautifully made. But mostly, it reached depths that are incredibly difficult to capture in words – impressive for a play so heavily reliant on language.
In the play, the voice belonging to the child said, again and again into the huge, almost empty black box: “You are here.” But The Father was clearly nowhere to be seen. Those three words are so plain, yet when they were spoken on this stage, in this room, over this music, they seemed to contain all the longing of someone who had already grasped that their beloved was not here at all.
About the author(s)
Sigrid Adamsson is a Danish reporter, critic and novelist, currently enrolled in the M.A. Arts & Culture program at Columbia Journalism School.