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Puddles

What language does love speak? Does speaking multiple languages give us multiple personalities? What goes beyond language and right into our bodies?

Set in Berlin between the 1990s and now, Puddles is about a love triangle between three university friends, Judith, Max and Nora. Max and Judith were childhood sweethearts but broke up when Judith went traveling. Max and Nora got together, stayed together, married, bought a flat and are trying for a baby. These best-laid plans, however, as well all know, often go awry…

In this version, Max only speaks German, Judith only English and Nora switches between the two.

The LAB reading will be the very first work-in-progress presentation of the new multilingual version of the play, followed by a post-performance discussion.

Drama Panorama #3 – New Translations of International Drama

New Translations of International Drama

In nine readings from nine countries over three days, Drama Panorama: Forum for Translation and Theater e. V. will present staged readings and panel discussions that showcase the work of theater translators with its particularities and challenges along with new international plays and their cultural contexts.

With this festival of staged readings, Drama Panorama will present theater cultures that are usually underrepresented on German-speaking stages, introduce new plays from Central and Eastern Europe (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Ukraine), Israel, Cuba and Guinea-Bissau, and explore current issues in Portugal and the United Kingdom.

Each reading will provide an introduction to the country’s drama and theater community as well as the work of translation, which often goes beyond language transfer itself, in discussion with international dramatists and other guests.

Staged reading and talks take place every day on May 26, 27 and 28 at 3pm, 5pm and 8pm

You can reserve tickets, find an overview of the schedule and more information about the event at drama-panorama.com

Please note that this event is in German.

Friday,  May 26, 2023

3pm
Hungary: Trapped in the Patriarchy
István Tasnádi: Kartonpapa 
Translated from the Hungarian Marianne Behrmann

5pm
Ukraine: Journey Through a Country Torn Apart
Anastasiia Kosodii: Timetraveller’s Guide to Donbas
Translated from the Ukrainian by Lydia Nagel

8pm
Poland: A Bitter Pandemic Commedia dell’Arte
Ishbel Szatrawska: Totentanz. Schwarze Nacht, schwarzer Tod
Translated from the Polish by Andreas Volk

Saturday, May 27, 2023

3pm
Czech Republic: Out of the System – Shadow Economy Workers
Tomáš Ráliš: Sorex
Translated from the Czech by Maira Neubert

5pm
Israel: At the Boundaries of Humanity – Drama in Times of Catastrophe
Maya Arad Yasur: Triage
Translated from the Hebrew by Matthias Naumann
This talk will be held in English

8pm
United Kingdom: Drama and Climate
Dawn King: Das Tribunal
Translated from the English by Henning Bochert
This talk will be held in English

Sunday, May 28, 2023

3pm
Guinea-Bissau: Decolonising Thinking
Abdulai Sila: Zwei Schüsse und ein Lachen
Translated from the Portuguese by Renate Heß

5pm
Portugal: The Media in the Post-Fact Era
Rui Cardoso Martins: Neueste Nachrichten
Translated from the Portuguese by Niki Graça

8pm
Cuba: Water Rising on all Sides – The Present in the Theatre and on the Streets
Yunior García Aguilera: Jacuzzi
Translated from the Spanish by Miriam Denger

Funded by the Deutscher Übersetzerfonds and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of the NEUSTART KULTUR programme. The translation of the Czech play Sorex by Tomáš Ráliš was funded by the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.

 

Born in East Berlin

30 Jahre Mauerfall / The 30th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

A bilingual staged reading (with corresponding subtitles) of a new play by Rogelio Martinez, off-site at Stasi Headquarters, Campus for Democracy in “Haus 22” (Ruschestraße 103 in 10365 Berlin-Lichtenberg)

In 1988, Bruce Springsteen played a legendary concert in East Germany. 300,000 people showed up, making it the largest concert event in the entire history of the German Democratic Republic.

Born in East Berlin explores the ultimate juxtaposition between the freedom of a rock concert and the captivity of an oppressive government during the time of a great historical and cultural shift. Anne, a spirited road manager from the United States, navigates a labyrinth of Stasi bureaucracy and learns how personal their tactics can be. A sly look at the cost of institutionalized dishonesty and the power of rock and roll.

In cooperation with the Stasi Records Agency

Followed by a post-performance discussion with playwright Rogelio Martinez, director Johanna McKeon and Dagmar Hovestädt (Head of Communications for the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records [BStU]), moderated by Daniel Brunet

HeLa

The Poetic-Scientific Dream-Fate of Henrietta Lacks

a new play by Lauren Gunderson and Geetha Reddy

When Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old African-American mother of five was dying of cancer in a Baltimore hospital in 1951, doctors took samples of her tumor cells and gave the cell line the name HeLa. The HeLa cells were the first ones to stay alive outside the human body and multiply. They became an extremely valuable asset in medical research, generating treatments for polio and numerous other drugs. Millions of dollars were made with Henrietta´s cells. HeLa cells are still used for research in countless labs around the world. Henrietta, however, never gave her consent to have the samples taken and was not even asked. It was not until 1975 that her family learned about the connection between Henrietta and the HeLa cells.

In a kaleidoscope of emotional flashbacks, sweet memories and bitter dreams, HeLa explores the story of Henrietta Lacks’ life and death and her posthumous life. It is a tale of love, togetherness and fate, but also of exploitation, neglect and racism.

“Once again, we see how Black families in the U.S. have served us all, at great cost to themselves.”  Theatrius.com

Informed Consent

A staged reading of a new science play by Deborah Zoe Laufer about identity, representation and the answer to the question of who owns the rights to genetic knowledge.

Jillian, a young geneticist, is thrilled to be able to work with a tribe of Native Americans living in the Grand Canyon. She does tests for the susceptibility to diabetes which is threatening to wipe out the tribe. Her tests reveal no such genetic connection but she does find out other things: for example, that the tribe had originally migrated from Siberia. The tribal council, however, had not given its consent for those additional tests to be conducted: Siberia? The tribe’s origin myth clearly roots them in the Grand Canyon. The council threatens to sue the university if the results are published …

At home, Jillian has to confront her own genetic disposition: She knows that she inherited a gene variant clearly related to Alzheimer’s. Should she do tests on her daughter to find out if she has it, too? Her husband clearly says NO!

Deborah Zoe Laufer: “One of the questions the play asks is, ‘Now that we can know the story of our past and perhaps the story of our future through our genome, well, who are we?’ Are we our stories? Are we our genome? Are we our memories, our tribe, our race? What defines us?” – “A friend sent me the New York Times article about the court case between the Havasupai Native Americans, who live on the floor of the Grand Canyon, and Arizona State University. I learned subsequently that it was a landmark case concerning informed consent, and has changed the laws about what needs to be specified in consent forms for scientific research on human subjects. But what fascinated me at first was the clash of cultures, and the intersection of science and religion. And learning more about the genome, I realized questions of identity are much more complicated than we once thought.“

Deborah Zoe Laufer_picDeborah Zoe Laufer grew up in Liberty, New York. She attended State University of New York at Purchase and Juilliard School in New York City, where she graduated from the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program in 2000, and was also the playwright-in-residence. Her works have been produced at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, Portland Stage and eighty other theaters around the country, in Germany, Russia and Canada. Her plays include The Last Schwartz, Fortune, End Days, Out of Streno, Sirens, Leveling Up, Meta, The Three Sisters of Weehawken, The Gulf of Westchester, Miniatures, and Random Acts.
Deborah’s notable awards include the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award in 2009 and a Lilly Award in 2010. She is also a two-time recipient of the LeCompte du Nouy Award from The Lincoln Center Foundation. In 2008, End Days won the American Theatre Critics Association Steinberg citation.

The reading is part of ETB | IPAC’s SCIENCE & THEATRE series.

 

 

 

Salomania

MARK JACKSON is English Theatre Berlin´s Fall 2013 Playwright In Residence.

He will direct a staged reading of his play Salomania.

In 1895, Maud Durrant moved from San Francisco to Berlin, Germany, to study music. Shortly after, her brother killed two girls in the belfry of a church. Their mother told Maud to stay in Europe and change her name, lest the scandal ruin her career. Now going by Maud Allan, she became a major celebrity in Great Britain as a dancer and society personality. In 1918, in the weariest depths of WWI, she was accused by a British MP, Noel Pemberton-Billing, of being a lesbian, sadist, and German sympathizer as evidenced by her having played the title role in a private production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome.

Against the advice of friends in high places, Maud sued Billing for libel. He then used the case as a platform to promote a conspiracy theory involving a secret German book listing the names of 47,000 traitors to England, all held under the thumb of homosexual German agents. While soldiers continued to fight and die in the mud of France, people back home read the latest on the salacious events of the trial. Salomania uses this story as the basis to ask questions about how people deal with anxiety in times of incredible change. How can a society allow itself to be both hysterical and “civilized” at the same time, and expect to function either well, morally, or respectably?

Mark Jackson is a playwright, director, and performer based in San Francisco, USA. He was Artistic Director of Art Street Theatre from 1995 to 2004, during which time he wrote, directed and performed in numerous productions for the company. Mark’s work in the San Francisco area has also been seen at Aurora Theatre Company, Encore Theatre Company, EXIT Theatre, Marin Theatre Company, Potrzebie Dance Project, San Francisco International Arts Festival, Shotgun Players, and Z Space, among others. Nationally at The Catamounts (Denver) and The Studio Theatre (Washington D.C.). Internationally at Arts International Festival IV (Japan), Edinburgh Festival Fringe (UK), and Deutsches Theater Berlin (Germany). Mark has been a resident playwright of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, where he was awarded the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Honorary Fellowship, and received a 2005 Bundeskanzler-Stipendium of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Mark has been a company member of The Shotgun Players since 2010.

New Work From New People

New Work From New People is an evening featuring work by writers, actors and directors who are new to English Theatre Berlin and our community that THE LAB presents every six months, in addition to its regular monthly programming.

The August edition includes excerpts from:

The Saint Factory by Lavinia Abbott

Banking: A Ghost Story by Kishore Chakraborty

Satie et Cocteau: A Rehearsal of a Play of a Composer of a Poet by Mike Czuba

Das Traumkabarett by James Harris

Mundo Overloadus by Michael Lederer

 

Ich, KürbisGeist

By Sibyl Kempson

A staged reading introducing our partnership with Performance Space 122

Ich, KürbisGeist is presented with special permission from AO International Talent Agency.

An olde-tyme agricultural vengeance play for Hallowe’en (even though it’s August)! Inspired by Sibyl Kempson’s visit to Austria during Kürbiskernernte (pumpkin seed harvesting season), this piece features a rigorous, specific and completely invented language. Every word is semi-recognizable: an amalgam of English, Swedish, German – and Sid Caesar.

“Much like the words spoken by Shakespeare’s wily fools, the messages are scrambled. Yet the world of Ich, Kürbisgeist is whole, and surprisingly powerful. Sometimes the gut understands better than the brain.”, Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, November 6, 2012

Sibyl Kempson lives and makes theater plays in NYC and the Pocono Mountains. Her plays have been presented at Dixon Place, Soho Rep, Performance Space 122, The Chocolate Factory, New York Live Arts, the Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, the Great Plains Theater Conference in Omaha and Theater Bonn in Germany. She earned an MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College, 2007.

Isaac’s Eye

By Lucas Hnath
a staged reading from our SCIENCE & THEATRE series

isaacseye_keyvis_eyeonlyYoung Isaac Newton desperately wants to become a member of the club of clubs for scientists, the Royal Society. In order to convince Robert Hooke, the institution’s curator of experiments, he sticks a needle into his tear duct to prove that light is made of particles. Ouch!!! And if science won’t do it there is another way: Hooke keeps a detailed diary of his sex life …

Isaac’s Eye playfully blends the facts of Newton’s life with an equal dose of fiction to explore what great people are willing to sacrifice to become great people.

“Isaac’s Eye wins a whole mess of points for its originality. This odd little jeu d’esprit about the history of science considers immortal matters like male rivalry and overweening ambition from a willfully skewed perspective.” — The New York Times

Lucas Hnath’s other plays include Death Tax (Humana Fest/Steinberg Award), NightNight (short play for Humana Fest), A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney (Soho Rep) and Red Speedo (coming up at the Studio Theatre, Washington DC). A resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2011, Lucas Hnath has enjoyed playwriting residencies with The Royal Court Theatre, London and 24Seven Lab, New York.  He is a two-time winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant for his feature-length screenplays, The Painting, the Machine and the Apple and Still Life.  He received both his BFA and MFA from NYU’s Department of Dramatic Writing and is a lecturer in NYU’s Expository Writing Program.