etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

Berlin Circle begins with the Fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 at the Berliner Ensemble and ends with a custody battle over the infant Karl Marx Honecker…

This satirical look at the end of the Cold War through a vaudeville lens brings together the real figures of Heiner Müller, Warren Buffet and Erich Honecker with a host of fictional ones to ask whether this war actually had a victor…

Inspired by The Chalk Circle (Huilan ji) a Chinese zaju play by Li Qianfu, written in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), which inspired The Chalk Circle by the German poet Klabund, which inspired Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, which inspired the Beijing opera production of Huilan ji by Hu Zhifeng.

True to the spirit of the playwright, who claims “there is no such thing as an original play”, Berlin Circle serves as the point of departure for our larger project 25 Jahre Mauerfall or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ossis/Wessis and the themes contained within it served as inspiration for We Are the Play by SISYPHOS, DER FLUGELEFANT (SdF) and Nasty Peace by copy & waste.

This scenic presentation offers the opportunity of experiencing Mee’s urtext before attending these dynamic, site-specific performances.

Charles Mee has written Big Love and True Love and First Love, bobrauschenbergamerica and Hotel Cassiopeia, Orestes 2.0 and Trojan Women A Love Story, and Summertime and Wintertime among other plays–all of them available on the internet at www.charlesmee.org, and, as a free iPhone app at the iPhone app store.

His plays have been performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, American Repertory Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, the Public Theatre, Lincoln Center, the Humana Festival, Steppenwolf, and other places in the United States as well as in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Brussels, Vienna, Istanbul and elsewhere.

He was honored with a full season of his plays at the Signature Theatre. Among other awards, he is the recipient of the gold medal for lifetime achievement in drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Obies, of a Laura Pels Award, the Booth Award, and of the Richard B. Fisher Award.

He is also the author of a number of books of history (Meeting at Potsdam, The Marshall Plan, The End of Order) that have been selections of the Book of the Month Club and the History Book Club. He is the former editor-in-chief of Horizon magazine, a magazine of history, art, literature, and the fine arts. And he is a lifetime trustee of the Washington think tank, The Urban Institute.

His work is made possible by the support of Jeanne Donovan Fisher and Richard B. Fisher.