The great-grandfather of Oregon Book Award-winning playwright Andrea Stolowitz kept a journal for his descendants after escaping to New York City in 1939 as a German Jew.
Following the complicated lure of genealogy, Stolowitz goes back to Berlin to bring the story of her unknown ancestors out of the archives into the light. The record keeps as many secrets as it shares; how do people become verschollen, lost, like library books?
A limited number of free tickets have been reserved for secondary school student groups and their teachers. Please register as soon as possible by email at tickets@etberlin.de
This production is part of the 2023 Berlin Performing Arts Festival, May 31 to June 3, 2023 | paf.berlin
Complete funding for this production and the 2022 performances was generously provided by the U.S. Embassy in Berlin.
These additional performances in 2023 have been made possible thank to the Wiederaufnahmeförderung program of Fonds Darstellende Künste
Andrea Stolowitz is a German/American playwright currently living and working in Cork, Ireland. Her work embraces bold theatricality ranging from intimate portrayals of the human condition to the intersection of national history on private lives. Andrea is a member of New Dramatists class of 2026, an alumna of The Playwrights’ Center, and a collaborating writer with the internationally lauded devised theater company Hand2Mouth Theatre. Andrea is the Lacroute Playwright-in-Residence at Artists Repertory Theater. Andrea has taught at Duke University, NYU, UC-San Diego, Willamette University and NUI-Galway.
Everywhere they look things are not equal; in the taxi at the end of the night, on the bench in the middle of a village, in the congregation, in the boardroom, in the home. They tell stories of abortion, sing about violence and dance about menopause. They remember the lies they were told as children and question the hope that things might be different for future generations.
Jaws / Der Weisse Hai captures the aura of a turning point in history – the mid 1970s – and transforms the film’s images, its music, its evocative qualities into a long overdue conversation with a cultural icon. By examining the (then) critical content and (dwindling) relevance of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 movie Jaws we’re dancing and performing an entertaining and critical new look at this mega blockbuster (in fact, the first one of the so called “blockbuster era” of Hollywood movies).
Spielberg’s Jaws is a striking example of a cultural turning point: Just when the so-called counterculture seemed to finally dominate, preparations for a new era began. The names Thatcher, Reagan and Kohl and the economic terms neoliberalism, deregulation and privatization brought traditional values back to the fore and countered the ideas of counterculture. After ten years of youthful optimism, but also mistrust, defeat and fear – Nixon and Watergate; defeat in the Vietnam War, the oil crisis and economic decline – Jaws showed a society banding together in the face of a grave threat, recalling its old values and again producing heroes from its midst.