This play presents a situation which I have often noted in police reports. Suicide is, in many cases, unbelievably tidy. The preparations for suicide do not violate the victim’s mundane, everyday activities: and the act itself is performed with the same love of order, and as silently desperate which provoked it.

Like animals these people communicate their desperate situations by remaining mute, which implies a stern measure of order, of resignation, or of “things as they are,” of exploitation, and of repression to the point of infirmity and collapse.
If the explosive force resulting from this exploitation and repression were not self-directed, that is, against the exploited and repressed themselves, we would have a revolutionary situation. Instead we have many cases of suicide and murder which only serve a positive purpose in that the perpetrators, having summoned up enough power and courage to throw their own lives in the balance, deliver themselves up into the jurisdiction of their natural enemies. Thereby they disappear into prisons or graves, which amount to the same thing. This is the only way that the inhuman order in which we live and must continue to live can be maintained.

-the Introduction to Request Concert
- Franz Xavier Kroetz

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Almost overnight, women have become new immigrants. They are taking over the low rungs of the labor market…The egalitarian ideal glorifies work, even in its meanest, for all women and it asks no favors…I fear that the present trajectory of women’s lives is aiming toward a bleak future. I see my daughter…and her generation living alone most of their adult lives in small efficiency apartments.

- The Equality Trap
- Mary Ann Mason

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Suicide is man’s attempt to give final human meaning to a life which has become humanly meaningless. The involuntary sense of horror which seizes us when we are faced with the fact of a suicide is not to be attributed to the inquity of the deed but to the terrible lonliness and freedom in which this deed is performed, a deed in which the positive attitude to life is reflected only in the destruction of life.

Man, unlike the beasts, does not carry his life as a compulsion which he cannot throw off. He is free either to accept his life or to destroy it. Only because man is free to choose death can he lay down the life of his body for some higher good. Without freedom to sacrifice one’s life in death, there can be no freedom towards God, there can be no human life.
-Ethics
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer