On actress Vanessa Stern’s late night show

Women are intelligent, beautiful, perceptive, good team players, complicated, and funny: at least according to the actress Vanessa Stern. She has been providing proof of this in her late night show La Dernière Crise at the sophiensaele theatre in Berlin since November 2011. The 35-year-old founded the Crisis Centre for Female Comedy, where she investigates live subjects in two-day workshops. This is also where she finds the performers for her show.

La Dernière Crise goes beyond bitchiness and obsessive self-criticism shedding new light on female comedy. With the motto Schöne Scheisse (Beautiful Shit), Vanessa Stern performs about other women’s strange and artistically formed crises. Talk, song or dance: when it is about expanding your own potential, anything goes! The protagonists persistently and hilariously make connections between the global economic crisis and the problem areas in their own lives. It is well-known that laughter helps prevent the unnecessary complexity which inevitably pushes its way to the forefront of such profound issues, although this demands analysis of and distance from the self. And this is exactly what is missing from the typically sentimental classic repertoire of female roles.