East of Berlin: Daddy’s Boy
Although the Vancouver run of this "Tarragon Theatre":http://www.tarragontheatre.com/ production has finished, if you’re planning on seeing *East of Berlin* in Edmonton, you might want to skip this review as it gives away key plot points.
*East of Berlin* by Hannah Moscovitch is about a disturbed young man. Unable to detach his ego from his father, he obsesses over the sins his old man committed and in the process blights his own life and those around him before finally killing himself in the “shocking” conclusion.
Strangely, *East of Berlin* does not feel like a play exploring the impacts of psychological instability. Instead, I think the audience is meant to see Rudi’s behaviour as a logical outcome of the shock he receives at the age of seventeen when a school chum, Hermann (played by Paul Dunn), tells him of the atrocities Rudi’s father committed at the Nazi death-camps, which included horrific operations on Jewish prisoners. Up until that time, Rudi (played by Brendan Gall with a stuttering intensity) thought of his father as a distant patrician who was sometimes nasty to the servants and fucked Rudi’s mother with 16 thrusts every Wednesday night.
To do what Rudi’s father did at Auschwitz took a certain type of man and, as the play itself points out, many – even card-carrying Nazi’s – had no stomach for it. Yet, within the world of the play, Rudi had no inkling about his father’s true nature until the age of seventeen. While it’s plausible that the depths of daddy’s depravity were not the subject of dinner-time conversations, it seems strange that Rudi did not suffer any form of imprinting from his father. For example, Rudi is distressed that his father decided who would live and who would die on their way into the camp; yet, wouldn’t Rudi have been brought up to think that it was his Aryan right to make such decisions? Sure, a son can (and will) reject his father’s prejudices – and thank god they can and do – but Rudi doesn’t reject his father’s belief structure he’s simply shocked by it. It’s as if he’d lived his childhood in a vacuum. Although there was a picture of Hitler on his father’s desk and a Nazi uniform in the cupboard and the family lived in some sort of German (ie Nazi) enclave in South America, Rudi seems to have been raised neither anti-Semitic nor pro-Nazi. We see no evidence of an internal struggle, no wrestling between conscience and upbringing. Rather he immediately knows what is right and is plunged into a vortex of guilt and disturbed behaviour. I never had any sense of Rudi’s childhood or the context of his rebellion. It was as if he had been jetted into his father’s household from another world – let’s call that world 21st century Canada.
But here’s the main thing: East of Berlin is about the sins of the father visited on the child, yet the father is never seen. He’s locked up – like some bogey-man –behind a door that stands, ominously, centre stage. So the central and most powerful dynamic in the play is left out of the equation. Instead, we get three young people – the generation that followed those who directly experienced the death-camps – who seem to be just as damaged as their parents. Leaving aside that this is a rather bleak assessment of the capacity of humans to recover through time, I’m afraid I didn’t find any of this particularly compelling or interesting. *East of Berlin* is basically a one-person narrative with two incidental characters brought in to add texture. Standing at the door to his unseen father’s study, Rudi narrates directly to the audience about his recent past, with Sarah and Hermann floating in from his memories to show – through their relationships with him – just how profoundly damaged Rudi is. Never mind he’s not actually done anything wrong.
Rudi, who has been raised in Paraguay, runs away from home. Before leaving, he gives his old man a good thrashing and then, for good measure, gives Hermann a blow job in his father’s study (he doesn’t even stop when dad steps into the room) – so I guess he’s not that scared of the monster. Rudi then moves to Berlin, smokes lots of cigarettes, drinks too much, becomes a brilliant medical student, experiences obsessive guilt and then – while going through the archives to feel even more guilt – meets a nice Jewish girl from New York, who is at the same archives researching about her mother who survived the death-camps (only to later commit suicide in the US).
Rudi and the Jewish girl, Sarah (played by Diana Donnelly), develop a relationship. They go to Auschwitz (the East of Berlin) in some bizarre shared exploration of displaced guilt/anger. So we have a sort of Romeo and Juliet of the death-camp – well, not quite, because the death camp is now closed and they are really just visiting tourists. By having the children experience this transgressive love affair – rather than using characters who had directly experienced the camps - Moscovitch lowers the dramatic stakes. The guilt/anger they feel is not of their own shared experience but of other, unseen characters. There is something pale about the entire enterprise for me, despite strong performance by Gall and particularly Donnelly.
If the play had been about the struggle of coping with the imprinting of the prejudices and fears of parents onto their children it might have been interesting but really what we are served up with Rudi and Sarah are two static creations: one guilty for what his dad did, the other angry for what Rudi’s father did. I can’t help but feel that Moscovitch shied away from the real tension at the heart of the play, specifically who or what exists behind the door.
_East of Berlin by Hannah Moscovitch; Directed by Alisa Palmer, featuring Diana Donnelly, Paul Dunn and Brendan Gall. A Tarragon Theatre production, presented at Chutzpah! by Touchstone Theatre, the Firehall Arts Centre and Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad._