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Berlin International Performing Arts Center

by Tennessee Williams

They were two ill-starred lovers: a minister´s shy, sensitive daughter and a wildly passionate, carefree young doctor. One hungered for the spirit, the other hungered for the flesh…

Alma: There are some women who turn a possibly beautiful thing into something no better than the coupling of beasts – but love is what you bring to it. Some people bring just their bodies. But there are some people, there are some women, John who can bring their hearts to it, also – who can bring their souls to it!

John: Souls again, huh – those gothic cathedrals you dream of. Your name is Alma and Alma is Spanish for soul. Some time I´d like to show you a chart of the human anatomy that I have in my office. It shows what your insides are like, and maybe you can show me where the beautiful soul is located on the chart.

On 6 October 1948, Summer and Smoke premiered at the Music Box Theater, New York. In 1952, Geraldine Page played the lead role in a revival at the newly founded Circle in the Square Theatre in downtown New York. Her legendary performance is credited with the beginning of the Off-Broadway movement.

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Tennessee Williams´ birthday English Theatre Berlin presents a production of his classic, Summer and Smoke, directed by Blake Robison, Artistic Director at Round House Theatre, Washington/DC.

Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams was born on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. The second of three children, his family life was full of tension. His parents, a shoe salesman and the daughter of a minister, often engaged in violent arguments that frightened his sister Rose.

In 1927, Williams got his first taste of literary fame when he took third place in a national essay contest sponsored by The Smart Set magazine. In 1929, he was admitted to the University of Missouri where he saw a production of Henrik Ibsen´s Ghosts and decided to become a playwright. But his degree was interrupted when his father forced him to withdraw from college and work at the International Shoe Company. Eventually, Tom returned to school. In 1937, he had two of his plays produced by Mummers of St. Louis, and in 1938, he graduated from the University of Iowa. After failing to find work in Chicago, he moved to New Orleans and changed his name from “Tom” to “Tennessee” which was the state of his father’s birth.

In 1939, the young playwright received a $1,000 Rockefeller Grant, and a year later, Battle of Angels was produced in Boston. After moving from St. Louis to New Orleans in 1939, he adopted “Tennessee Williams” as his professional name. In 1944, what many consider to be his best play, The Glass Menagerie, had a very successful run in Chicago and a year later burst its way onto Broadway.

Williams followed up with several other Broadway hits including such plays as A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, A Rose Tattoo, and Camino Real. He received his first Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for A Streetcar Named Desire, and reached an even larger world-wide audience in 1950 and 1951 when The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire were made into motion pictures. Later plays which were also made into movies include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (for which he earned a second Pulitzer Prize in 1955), Orpheus Descending, and Night of the Iguana.

On February 24, 1983, Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap at his New York City residence at the Hotel Elysee. He is buried in St. Louis, Missouri. In addition to twenty-five full length plays, Williams wrote dozens of short plays and screenplays, two novels, a novella, sixty short stories, over one-hundred poems and an autobiography.

pics: Christian Jungeblodt

10-Minute Play Competition 2011 on the theme UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA

What will life be like for children being born today? Will they see Prenzlauer Berg become a gated community? Will Mandela’s legacy cause South Africa to be the new model for civilization?

Will genetically modified tomatoes officially become animals and start appearing in zoos? Will our technological fetishes ever actually save us more time than they cost us?

The winners were:

Indecent Exposure by Tamsin K. Walker

Poor by Nicole Paschal

Three Grams of Spacebox by Oliver Ralli

Nice Woolly Cardigans by Mark Daver

The Connection by Joshua Crone

by Alan Ayckbourn

Six people in a big city. All of them are in search of a home, a niche or a relationship.

No catastrophes take place, and no one is evil, yet they all fail in their quest and eventually end up alone. That´s just how it is – shit happens. A chain of wasted chances – a comedy of failures.

For example: the first meeting of an internet date starts out embarrassingly – and ends in desaster. The longer the evening, the more alcohol gets drunk, and the sadder and more touching the meeting becomes. The very next day Dan, flowers in hand, goes to meet her again in a café. His former girl friend happens to be sitting in the same café and as they greet each other, his date misconstrues their tête-à-tête and walks away, disillusioned.

“Any idiot can face a crisis. It’s the day-to-day living that wears you out.”  Anton Chekhov

In fifty-four scenes – some of them just short clips – Alan Ayckbourn masterfully creates an atmosphere of exquisite melancholy and grotesque failure. His sympathetic view of the characters keeps schadenfreude and black humour at bay and instead makes us grin at the all-too-familiar situations from our own lives. With a keen humane eye, Ayckbourn finds a universal language for the impossible dream of fulfilled desires.

For his cinematic adaptation of the play, French director Alain Resnais transferred the story to Paris and through the title Coeurs offers a very simple idea of what the play is all about: the hearts are beating but the rhythm isn´t quite right….

We present the play in its English-language original and set it in Berlin as the new international metropolis – whose neuroses, however, remain global.privatefearsgruppefarbe

“In all this, nothing is ever wholly tragic or totally comical. The comedy, like the intelligent directing, remains unflustered, unagitated. The characters’ loneliness and their lamentable failure in matters of love require no dramatic embellishment. It’s no more than is to be expected in the life of a typical big-city single. Yet the acting is so close to life itself that one develops a real affection for this sextet and feels sad to have to leave them after 100 minutes in their company.” Berliner Morgenpost

English Theatre Berlin’s first ever 10-minute play competition was on the theme ENGLISH IN DAILY GERMAN LIFE:

You can hardly overestimate the influence the English language has in German life today: in public spaces, on the street, over the internet and on TV.

But – what influence does English have on the way we live our daily lives? How can Grandma Erna possibly understand what she see in shop windows? Does Coffee To Go really come from Togo? And what about the confusion native English speakers experience when they see words used that apparently are English but which make absolutely no sense to them?

The winners:

In Other Words by Joshua Crone

The Exam by Joshua S. Horowitz

Ten Minutes with Günther by Sonny Hayes

Bombay an der Spree by Kevin McAleer

Hooray for Hollywood by Rich Rubin

Photo: Doris Spiekermann-Klaas/DerTagesspiegel

by Sam Shepard

A quirky, often frightening family of antagonists in a claustrophobic farmhouse somewhere in the American Midwest

Buried Child is a macabre look at an American Midwestern family with a dark, terrible secret. The father stopped planting crops in his fields and took to smoking, drinking and watching TV. His wife, apparently seeking salvation, turned to religion. Her son went insane with guilt and grief, spent time in jail and only recently returned to the farm, perhaps to set everything right. With the arrival of the estranged grandson and his girlfriend, Shelly, the secret is drawn out into the light of day, and the family curse apparently lifted…

With its lower-class, sometimes humorous, recognizable characters and dialogue, Buried Child resembles the mid-century American realism and grotesquerie of Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams. However, its roots in ritual and its approach to monumental, timeless themes of human suffering – incest, murder, deceit and rebirth – resemble the destruction wreaked by the heroes of Greek tragedy. The play contains many of Shepard’s favorite motifs: a quirky, often frightening family of antagonists in a claustrophobic farmhouse somewhere in the American Midwest.

“We don´t know each other in America. It starts on the family level, and there are certain areas in the country like in the west and in the south where `family´ is very strong, and there are other areas where it doesn´t even exist! People don´t have any connection whatsoever to each other, to their siblings, or know who their father is or their mother, they´re just wild.

I´m haunted by that character. The American character is more about that than anything else, more than success, more than power and strength and all the other things that we present ourselves to be. It´s more about the strange, strange lack of identity. We don´t really know who we are, we never have known who we are. We’ve invented it! We don´t have a clue! We´re like wandering vagabonds!” Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard is one of America’s most prolific playwrights and actors of our time. Famous for his acting roles in such movies as The Right Stuff, Homo Faber, Black Hawk Down and The Assassination of Jesse James, he made a name for himself very early as a writer of plays such as True West and Fool for Love. For Buried Child he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Best Drama in 1979. He also wrote numerous movie scripts, two of them for German director Wim Wenders (Paris Texas and Don´t Come Knocking). In his plays Shepard dissects the rituals, the vernacular and the moral codes of the American lower class with a crude mixture of action, sarcastic humour and bone-dry realism.

Veronika Nowag-Jones has directed numerous plays by Brecht, Tabori, Shepard, Euripides and others for theatres in Berlin, New York City (NY), Louisville (KY), Philadelphia (PA), and Atlanta (GA).

English Theatre Berlin presents Buried Child as a Germany premiere in collaboration wth 7 Stages Theatre Atlanta.

by Noel Coward

Desperate Housewives in London

Julia and Jane, the fallen angels, are youngish married women, best friends, bored with their husbands and eager to reclaim their lost youth in the shape of a young Frenchman – with very little knowledge of English but considerable skills in the wooing department! – who had an affair with both of them before marriage. He sends a postcard to both women saying he is coming to London. They work themselves up into a drunken state of excitement in anticipation of their long-lost lover’s return…

Fallen Angels is one of Coward’s earliest plays: written in 1923, premiered in 1925, revived in 1949 and produced in America in 1955. In 1958 Coward returned to the play, re-writing and updating the set to 1934. The play’s scenario was, according to some reports, based on a real life episode when Coward and Gladys Calthrop were both dressed up waiting for a mutual boyfriend to arrive. (It is knowledge that Coward was homosexual).

The play was nearly refused its licence as “brightly written, but extremely dubious” and because “the women’s obvious willingness to go wrong, and about their pre-nuptial going wrong, would cause too great a scandal”. But the Lord Chamberlain, official censor of theatrical performances, passed it, with only a few dialogue changes, because he saw it as “so much unreal farcical comedy” – but nevertheless, Fallen Angels caused a lot of moral outrage when it was premiered in 1925.

Klaus Chatten studied acting at the Max Reinhardt-Seminar in Vienna and at the Actor´s Studio in New York. He worked as an actor at Maxim-Gorki-Theater, Theater am Kudamm, Schiller Theater, a. o. Since 1992 he has directed numerous productions for Freie Volksbühne, Kampnagelfabrik Hamburg, a. o. He wrote the script for Dani Levy’s 1996 movie Stille Nacht? Ein Fest der Liebe. His own plays include Klassentreffen and Sugar Dollies which opened 1996 at the Gate Theatre, London. Chatten has translated nine of Coward´s plays for gallissas publishing company.

Photos: Anya Kinneavy

by Edward Albee

As an imperious, acerbic old woman lies dying, she is tended by two other women – her middle-aged, sympathetic caretaker, and a brashly confident 25-year-old from her lawyer’s office who has come to discuss finances. She is visited by a young man.

Albee´s frank dialogue about everything from incontinence to infidelity portrays aging without sentimentality. His scenes are charged with wit, pain, and laughter, and his observations tell us about forgiveness, reconciliation, and our own fates. But it is his probing portrait of the three women that reveals Albee´s genius. Separate characters on stage in the first act, yet actually the same `everywoman´ at different ages in the second act, those “tall women” lay bare the truths of our lives ­ how we live, how we love, what we settle for, and how we die.
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A truly moving work with an undeniable affecting emotional core. It sparkles with Albee´s trademark: absurdist humour with a passionate emotional core. Three Tall Women is his finest work since Who´s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

Three Tall Women is an all-women´s project and involves – both as cast and crew – ten international female theatre makers living in Berlin.

Edward Albee has admitted in interviews that this play was directly inspired by his own adoptive mother, a domineering, Amazonian woman who, like the character in the play was prone to great hatreds and paranoia. One can¹t help but admire her, though, for her extraordinary self-confidence and stamina. Her presence reinforces a theme which continues to run through all of Albee´s works: life can only be defined by the inescapable proximity of death.

Three Tall Women first premiered at Vienna´s English Theatre on June 14, 1991. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1994.