The Greatest Story Ever
Photo: Sebastian Pollin
The Greatest Story Ever is a live act of collective perception. An unexpected mix of sci-fi and lo-fi experiences, it asks what it means to see, to believe, and to belong. The piece moves between tenderness and unease, between the ordinary and the mythic, searching for what remains true when certainty falls away. Through a series of intimate stories and quiet invitations, it explores how our shared fictions shape the world and one another. At its heart, it’s about the necessary act of recognizing ourselves in others, even when the lights go out.
Paul Budraitis returns to Acker Stadt Palast to premiere his newest solo performance, in collaboration with New York based lighting and sound designer Evan C. Anderson, dramaturgical collaborators Elif Sözer and John Kendall Wilson, fashion designer Anna Telcs, and astrophysicist Robert Fisher. Paul is an Acker Stadt Palast artist-in-residence, and this production marks a return to ASP for the creative team of Budraitis and Anderson, after the success of I Love That For You (2023) and Blue is the light that doesn't reach us (2024). I Love That For You was also performed at La MaMa E.T.C. (New York) and On the Boards (Seattle), and Blue is the light that doesn’t reach us will have its New York premiere in 2026.
Paul Budraitis - writer, director, performer, set design
Evan C. Anderson - lights, sound, music
Elif Sözer - dramaturgy
John Kendall Wilson - dramaturgy
Anna Telcs-Druss - costumes
Lennart Labarenz - script consultant
Robert Fisher, Phd. - cosmology consultant
The IllustrisTNG project (Volker Springel, principal investigator) - cosmic animations
Supported by - John Robinson, Josef Krebs, Ariel Glassman, John Neeleman, Stephen McCandless, Andrius Nemickas, Lenna Koszarny, Andrew Storms, Bebet Caguin, AJ Epstein, Kairu Yao
Paul Budraitis is a director, performer, and generative artist based in Berlin. His artistic work is informed by a fusion of international influences and an ongoing performance-based inquiry into the mysterious nature of life, death, and human interdependence. Paul earned his master’s in theater directing at the Lithuanian Music and Theater Academy under the mentorship of Jonas Vaitkus. He has directed productions in the United States and Europe, including at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Intiman Theatre (Seattle), On the Boards (Seattle), and La MaMa E.T.C. (NYC). He has appeared as a performer in productions at the Munich Biennale, the Wien Festwochen, REDCAT Theater (L.A.), and the Under the Radar Festival (NYC). Paul's solo performance, I Love That For You, premiered at Acker Stadt Palast, and was then performed in New York (La MaMa E.T.C.) and Seattle (On the Boards). His most recent solo performance, Blue is the light that doesn’t reach us, also premiered at ASP, and will have its New York premiere in 2026.
Evan Anderson is an award-winning lighting designer and composer for theatre, dance, and film. His lighting work has been seen across the United States and internationally in Europe and Asia. Frequent collaborators include The Wooster Group, zoe | juniper, and Paul Budraitis. He is a company member of CabinFever, a Burry Fredrik Design Fellow, and a graduate of Yale School of Drama. He records and releases music under his own name and composes music for theatre and dance.
Elif Sözer is a Berlin-based theatre artist, lecturer, and dramaturg. She specializes in physical and developmental theatre. Her professional practice includes acting, directing, and concept development, with a particular focus on collaborative creative processes and the interplay of body, text, and space in contemporary performance. She adapted the novel Gizli Emir by Melih Cevdet Anday for the stage. The play, which she also directed, premiered in Istanbul. For two seasons, she was part of the theatre management team at the Volksbühne Berlin, where she worked as an assistant dramaturg and dramaturg. In this role, she collaborated with directors such as Claudia Bauer, Lucia Bihler, Susanne Kennedy, and Pınar Karabulut. In 2023, she adapted the play Les Pas Pardus / Kayıp Adımlar for a Turkish audience in cooperation with director Zeynep Özden. She also contributed to the production as dramaturg and movement director. Elif Sözer and Zeynep Özden are joint fellows of the Tarabya Cultural Academy and are currently working on a new, jointly staged theatre production set to premiere in Istanbul in 2026.
John Kendall Wilson is a Professor Emeritus at Cornish College of the Arts who retired after a remarkable, 32-year career teaching theater history, dramaturgy, technical arts, and the history and theory of performance art. During his academic career, he became a champion of working collaboratively across disciplines. For him, the success of his career has been the success of the people he worked with. Most recently, he provided in-depth dramaturgical support as a member of the performance group Timothy White Eagle and The Violet Triangle, as well as for the solo performance work of Paul Budraitis.
Anna Telcs-Druss employs hand-sewing techniques and fabric manipulation to create wearable and hangable soft-sculptures in natural materials. Working as a freelance tailor and alterations expert, Telcs-Druss tailors for advertising and ‘on-set’ commercial production work, red carpet, and celebrities. As a costumer, she brings characters and movement to life with deeply researched character studies while using silhouette and materiality to enhance and support a narrative or staged image.
Lennart Laberenz is a historian, author and filmmaker. As a freelance journalist, he works for Die Zeit, Der Freitag, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, among others. As a filmmaker, he has worked, among other things, as a cameraman for the film “Crackling of Time” by Christoph Schlingensief.
Dr. Robert Fisher is a professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, specializing in computational and theoretical astrophysics. His career includes work at UC Berkeley, where he developed numerical solvers and conducted star-formation simulations, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he created the first quantitative theory of binary-star distributions. As Astrophysics Group Leader at the University of Chicago’s Flash Center, he led international teams advancing three-dimensional simulations of thermonuclear supernovae, producing widely recognized visualizations. Fisher has held visiting positions at major research institutes worldwide and continues to pursue new projects with his students in the Fisher Computational Astrophysics Group.
The IllustrisTNG Project (Dr. Volker Springel, P.I.) is a suite of state-of-the-art cosmological galaxy formation simulations. Each simulation in IllustrisTNG evolves a large swath of a mock Universe from soon after the Big-Bang until the present day while taking into account a wide range of physical processes that drive galaxy formation. The simulations can be used to study a broad range of topics surrounding how the Universe — and the galaxies within it — evolved over time.