In November 2014, we presented the American playwright Andrea Stolowitz and her play ITHAKA at the Theatersalon of the Berlin MimeCentrum.
Until July 2015, Stolowitz will be in Berlin as a DAAD scholar and artist-in-residence at English Theater Berlin. Since April, she has been writing on her new play SCHLÜTERSTRASSE 27.
This ist he first time Stolowitz takes on an autobiographical topic, because her great-grandfather Max Cohnreich lived in Berlin until the increasing repressions of the Nazi dictatorship forced him in 1936 to leave the country. The text is based on her great-grandfathers diary which the playwright found in the archives of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. In Berlin, she traces the history of her ancestors.
On 27 May, the ETB International Performance Centre presented a staged reading oft he work-in-progress. Andrea had spent a lot of time researching and gathering lots of material. We now witness how this is shaped into a theater play. It is not too often that one is able to observe a playwright in the middle of the creative process and see how, as Stolowitz here does, uses recurring themes to structure the material along motif lines. She decided to contrast the story of her ancestor who traveled from Berlin to the U.S. with her own travel from the U.S. to Berlin and thus create two historic levels. The encounters with witnesses at surprising locations like South Africa are extremely funny which is appropriately made visible by the performers’ John Keogh and Helena Prince art and the directing hand of Daniel Brunet who make the many, many characters in the play visible.
We look forward to the further development of the play.
Andrea Stolowitz’s plays have been presented and developed at The Cherry Lane (NYC), The Old Globe (SD), The Long Wharf (CT), New York Stage and Film (NY), and Portland Center Stage (OR). The LA Times calls her work “heartbreaking” and the Orange County Register characterizes her approach as a “brave refusal to sugarcoat…issues and tough decisions.”
Andrea is a founding member of the playwrights collective Playwrights West and works as a collaborating writer with the award-winning devised theater company hand2mouth theater. She is a resident artist at Artists Repertory Theater.
A Walter E. Dakin Fellow at The Sewanee Writers Conference, Andrea has also been awarded residencies at Ledig House, Soapstone, and Hedgebrook, and Arts Grants from North Carolina, Oregon, and private foundations. She is a 2013 Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship winner. She is currently the recipient of a 2014 DAAD grant to support her residency with English Theatre Berlin and her research for a new play in Berlin, Germany.
An MFA playwriting alumna of UC-San Diego, Andrea has served on the faculties at Willamette University, The University of Portland, Duke University and UC-San Diego.
More at andreastolowitz.com