etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

On November 9, the world will mark the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall and with it the beginning of the end of the so-­called Cold War between the capitalist west and communist east, ensuring the dominance of our current globalized market economy. A quarter of a century later, what does all this mean?

Ten years after the Fall of the Wall, noted US playwright and historian Charles Mee wrote Berlin Circle, a collage­like collection of spectacular events set on November 9, 1989 which takes a decidedly satirical look at the end of East Germany and the western feeding frenzy that descended upon the former state property.

This binaural audio walk with original dialog through the real locations of Berlin Circle is led by the Producing Artistic Director of ETB | IPAC, Daniel Brunet, and will take the audience from the Berliner Ensemble through Checkpoint Charlie to the Pergamon Museum. Actors have been recorded performing dialog from Mee’s text at these locations that the audience will listen to via headphones, visually juxtaposed with the present reality of these sites and the cityscape between them. A binaural soundtrack of the route itself accompanies all of this as a third level of time lapse with recordings made several weeks earlier on the same day of the week and at the same time of day.

The Berlin Circle Audio Walk serves as an introduction to the larger ETB | IPAC project 25 Jahre Mauerfall or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ossis/Wessis.

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.