The script is by Roland Schimmelpfennig, an up-and-coming young German playwright with a poetic bent and a knack for setting characters adrift in their thoughts and memories. It's partly serious and partly absurd, and delegates the audience to decide which is which.

The setting — presumably — is a modern German metropolis where single young working Germans and Turks live side-by-side in large apartment complexes, but never connect.

Franziska (Ryan Burbank) and Fatima (Phyllis Wong) have been roommates for four years, but Franziska makes a habit of drinking brandy after work and falling asleep on the living room sofa by sunset. As a result, she has never met Fatima's boyfriend Kalil (Robert Wyllie) who has been visiting the apartment for two years.

Hans (Frank Episale) is the building superintendent trying to fix the water shortage on the hottest day of the year, and Peter Karpati (Justin Young) is the voyeur from the opposite building, who decides to visit after watching Franziska through her bathroom window.

Enough things go wrong to propel a sex farce. People get stuck in elevators, pass each other in the stairwells and get locked out of the building without a key. Most provocatively, Fatima leaves the door to the apartment unlocked, opening the way for men to steal kisses from the sleeping Franziska — who (possibly) may be under an ancient curse.

The voyeur ends up trapped inside an empty brandy bottle while the janitor finds himself in a desert where all the building's water has been diverted.

There's enough raw material in the script to make a production crackle, but director Peter Ruocco and his cast can't seem to turn on the right knobs. Their approach is so deadpan, that it's not immediately clear how we are to take this play and spend too much time in an undefined twilight zone.