Tonight some exchange students at my university have organized a visit to the theatre. We saw Neil LaBute’s “Das Ma der Dinge” (in English shown as “The Shape of Things”) – once shown on the broadway. A play about the manipulation of persons, shown by the transformation of the in the beginning so ugly, shy guy Adam to a handsome, adorable man by the crazy and dominant Evelyn. It turned out that Evelyn did all this not out of love, as she pretended, but for her final work in her art studies. So LaBute raised in this play the question if art should change persons or more general it shows that society itself is keen on changing other people, such as somebody’s face or nose, and hence the play asks for the moral justification. For me in the end the author leaves this question open because not everything that Evelyn did was just cold, calculating and inhuman.

In Ingolstadt it will be running till end of January 2004, but you can also watch the very popular play on DVD or read it.