Productions | English Theatre Berlin

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Tonight, There Are No Stars In The Sky

What’s the meaning of leaving?

What’s the meaning of home? What’s the meaning of being a foreigner, an immigrant, an expat, an adventurer, exiled? What’s the meaning of never looking back, until one evening you are forced to do so?

Tonight, There Are No Stars In The Sky is a short play about two sisters who haven’t seen each other for seven years: Claire left, Marion stayed. One evening Marion shows up at Claire’s door step by surprise, and their encounter demolishes old patterns of thought, feeling, speech, movement, perspective, memories and of dreams.

Claire is a writer who left her country of origin after her book wasn’t published and after her sister Anna killed herself. Marion stayed, and dealt with her losses in silence until one day, she finds Claire’s manuscript in a box at her parents’ house. After reading it, she decides it’s time to confront their silences.

During fifty volatile minutes, this brief encounter between two sisters – who have made very different life choices – brings to the foreground ambivalent realities, leading the action to an honest confrontation of ideas about immigration, exile, lines, frontiers, spaces and how we choose to cross [or to inhabit] them.

The 614th Commandment

A documentary theater examination of American-Jewish notions of Germany

The 614th Commandment is a darkly funny play in which two actors embodying multiple characters examine both the role of Holocaust history in contemporary Jewish identity and American- Jewish perspectives regarding Germany in the
21st century, all through a critical, absurdist lens.

It is based on over 100 interviews conducted with Jewish people of a variety of backgrounds in Los Angeles, California, and was inspired by the writer’s experiences as an American Jewish woman living in Berlin.

Two Girls, One Pope … And A Mattress

A satirical, provocative comedy written especially for the Expat Expo | Immigrant Invasion Festival. Amusing, fast paced, challenging, with a little bit of romance. To make people laugh while making them think as well.

Daria and Lidia, two young women who love each other, just moved from Rome to Berlin. They are hunted by a mysterious and ambiguous, almost schizophrenic, version of the Pope. Lidia is very enthusiastic about the relocation. She thinks that in Berlin they will finally find the freedom they always dreamed about, plus an open-minded society where they can freely live being openly gay and sincere with everyone about their relationship. On the other side, Daria thinks that moving in Berlin won’t change much. She sees all the downsides of the new state of things and doesn’t feel ready to be so sincere about her sexuality, especially since she is still kept back by the guilt that her family and her Catholic education have always put into her for not being the woman, heterosexual mother and wife that she was expected to be.

At the same time, she doesn’t want to lose her partner, which puts her under a lot of pressure. All these contrasts with her lover and within herself bring her to such a state that she has visions of an unusual version of the Pope, who is experiencing a gradual transformation into a drag queen. This invasive presence at times attacks her for being a sinner and at other times seems to be enthralled by the perspective of having a free sexual life himself. These visions are another source of conflict within the couple, and the fight grows to be more intense as the drag queen Pope starts to become real and both the women’s relationship and their transfer to Berlin’s “Eldorado” risk ending in disgraceful tragedy…will they?

We Meet In Paradise

A theatrical collage of escape and exile

The soundscapes of the city fade away as we are drawn to a wooden box roaming around. The journey was long, lasting days, through unknown lands. It searches for a place to arrive. Speechless, they emerge. Where are they? Exile is the name of their destination. Asylum is their hope. They tell tales from their escape and arrival, dreams and fears and how they start their lives anew.

For this project, TheatreFragile worked with refugees and supporters in Germany gathering their stories,
thoughts and inner struggles to create a piece that offers a different insight to this topic far from the current heated debate.

TheatreFragile’s productions intertwine dramatic and fine arts with documentary theater through a combination of mask performance, walk-through art installations, documentary research and fictional narrative.

The international Berlin-based company seeks a new vocabulary that can unite the magic of mask play with the direct audience contact of street theater. They are fascinated by the various levels of play between distance and proximity, everyday life and the poetic universe of theater. A playfulness with the audience and an invitation to come closer to see and listen to the installation give the performers opportunities to share and interact with individuals as well as the group at large. The audience goes from being passive onlookers to active visitors and even participants in the installation.

This Wall

The world is in crisis and people are more divided than ever.

Immigration, migration and a refugee crisis has sparked both empathy and fear across Europe, as well as media frenzy.

A weary traveler approaches a wall and hears the voice of a woman. Tentatively at first, he finds a renewed optimism in this encounter. Their relationship develops, but why does the divide between them seem to widen? There is a looming violence that endangers her, and threatens to emasculate him. Will they overcome this? They are confronted by their own view of the unknown and whether they have agency for change.

There are walls being put up and walls all around us. There are walls long established, which seem to be getting wider, taller and stronger. Even in the most intimate relationships, there’s a barrier. This Wall questions representation, preconceptions and the power we have to do something about the situations around us. How much can either of them really know each other? And crucially, will he and can he help her?

Sleep No More – The Madness of Lady Macbeth

Taking Act 5, Scene 1 of The Tragedy of Macbeth by William Shakespeare as a point of departure, we have created a theatrical/musical performance to present a portrait of Lady Macbeth.

Using the form of the monologue to play with different techniques of story-telling, we present the picture of a woman in whom desire and imagination overreach the space that her time and social conditions have defined for her. The woman in a closed room has existed always, exists today.

An attempt at observing the consequences of confining, even forgetting about, the desires and imaginations of one such woman.

Through the character of Lady Macbeth, we explore the spaces created by one recurring, dominant narrative; in her mind, this space becomes her cage. Imprisoned by her narrative, Lady Macbeth is trapped in time and space in a recurring loop that presents no window of escape.

While observing a character trapped inside the dominance of a single narrative, the act of the performance itself attempts to offer a tentative way of escape from the clutches of a single, dominant narrative by engaging itself with multiple narratives. In concrete terms, while Lady Macbeth cannot transcend her narrative, the performers themselves achieve a space where transcendence becomes possible – by merging forms, donning and letting go of different identities (characters), by slipping from spoken text to song to movement.

She Came, She Saw, She Said: Meme

When Hyunsin encountered dance, she was quite relieved to no longer be limited to the representation of the female Asian stereotypes, quite common in theater and film. She soon realized, however, that the international dance scene had its own mechanisms of exoticizing of “the other”.

The Western pioneers of dance dived into the “Far East” at the beginning of the 20th century. The “foreign”, with its aspects of beauty, naturalness, authenticity and erotic became the inspiration for the “new” dance which appeared afterwards. Ted Shawn became Shiva, Mary Wigman a witch. Although the fascination of the other is no longer primarily expressed through impersonation and representation anymore, its attraction somehow continues to persist. Hyunsin now asks the naïve question: Can stereotypes exist beyond mere parody and reproduction? Could there be a way to turn them into means of empowerment? Together with live music by Baly Nguyen, Hyunsin delves into these clichés.

ÜBERSETZUNG/TRANSLATION/TRADUÇÃO

We came to Berlin about 7 months ago.

One day we bought a one-way ticket from Lisbon to Berlin and left everything behind. The purpose? Start over. The world is a far too good experience to miss. New country. New city. New people. New language(s). A room and then another, and then a flat. Papers to fill, the verbs, the articles, der, die, das, and Europe on the brink.

Somewhere between spoken word theater and a “dysfunctional” musical in English, Portuguese and German, Übersetzung is a kaleidoscopic view on what’s happening in Europe today.

Gordas

When women get Gordas, they get thick, heavy, strong, penetrating, troubled and really powerful. Be Gordas!

Gordas is a performance that spins around what’s feminine. From its inception, it was aimed to address the issues of what it means to be a woman personally, socially and professionally.

We are actresses investigating passions, concepts, forms, deformities and intensities. So, what does being a female mean? And what does being an actress mean? In the answers we found different concepts: beautiful, skinny, docile, friendly, crazy, incomprehensible, unbalanced, passionate, erotic, etc.

We address three large chaotic groups as research materials: The chaos inside of ourselves (our personal history, our prejudices, our memories, our pains, etc.), the external chaos (social networks, media, the speed of information, movies, theater, music, dance, images, news, etc.) and the possibility of a chaotic relationship between these two large groups (how to articulate what we are with what happens in the outside world).

We step out of the ordinary, reaching beyond conventional patterns, making every day’s life a theatrical dramatization, an artifice, a metaphor of the battle we fight against the established order. In Gordas, all this information implodes in the body of the actresses and becomes performance. Everything that happens is a performance, everything around us is reality and everything we do is an interpretation.

The Ermine

In 1934 in Berlin, a furrier designed a coat for the wife of a man who would become one of the world’s most notorious war criminals.

In 2005 in Bali, Ben, the great-grandson of the man who tailored his last coat before perishing in Chelmno meets Elsa, the daughter of the coat’s wearer who has been trying to escape her father’s legacy for over 40 years. Over the course of one evening, they engage in a confrontation over the fate of this coat on what happens to be one of the darkest nights in Indonesian memory.

Followed by a post-performance discussion

Daniel Sauermilch is a playwright from Brooklyn, New York. His plays have been developed at Second Stage, The SUNY Potsdam Arts Festival, PTP/NYC, The Kennedy Center, The Boston Theater Marathon and Living Room Productions in Berlin. His work has also won the John Cauble Short Play Award and been a semi-finalist for the Princess Grace Award. He began writing as a part of the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Write Now program, taught by David Auburn and Chris Ceraso. He currently lives in Berlin. B.A., Middlebury College and King’s College London.