1908, Paris. Over three fever-dream nights in the Hotel Biron, poet Rainer Maria Rilke encounters the ghost of his good friend, artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, who died shortly after giving birth to her first child. In response to this haunting, Rilke writes his epic prose lament, "Requiem for a Friend", as a tribute to Paula and to women torn between choosing a life sacrificed to Art or to Motherhood. One hundred years later, three women - a painter, an actress and a dancer - and a theatre director prepare to stage Rilke's "Requiem" in Berkeley California as abstract performance ritual.