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? 1M/1W, 100 minutes, no intermission.

“Engrossing and surprisingly funny...a play about memory and loss and the force of history, and about the limitations and possibilities of the theater itself...”

Bob Hicks, Oregon Arts Watch

“It’s not easy to get a Berlin audience to laugh at jokes about the Holocaust...The joke comes early in the play, but the themes of forgetting and remembering run throughout the project.”

Lily Kelting, ExBerliner

“Investigates the fallible nature of memory to ask how we know what we know.”

Mead Hunter, Artistic Director, New Harmony Project

“We experience something magical - a shock of true human identification.”

David Winitsky, Artistic Director Jewish Plays Project

Development History

The Berlin Diaries is a recipient of the City of New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment  Women’s Film, TV and Theatre Fund. The play was developed at English Theatre Berlin/IPAC, Hand2Mouth Theatre, New Dramatists, Theatre Lab at FSU, and the Playwrights’ Center. It has had limited theatrical runs in Portland and Berlin. It was developed into an audio drama by Artists Repertory Theatre in 2020.

script

The audio drama adaptation by Artists Repertory Theatre’s Mercury Company is available here.