The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne

The Schaubühne’s Festival International New Drama (FIND) is well known in Berlin theater circles as a bright spot in the season.  This year almost all of its productions sold out. The festival offers an intelligently curated and manageably compact chance to see exciting, internationally buzzy theater companies and their new productions without having to leave the city or go in search of different dates and touring schedules around town. The mix of plays and companies for 2025 was admirably balanced between highlighting a particular artist (the French director Caroline Guiela Nguyen), drawing together interestingly relatable work from other artists, and featuring chances to see new, experimental work by lesser known theater makers of the sort one might find at a larger “fringe” festival.  FIND presented productions from 6 countries that, taken together, created a picture and conversation about new forms of naturalism, autobiography, and documentary theater, specifically about artists’ attempts to depict lives and situations that do not generally fall under the gaze of mass culture and its normative myths.  All in all, the festival avoided the frequent paradoxical feeling of provinciality that can accompany efforts at “internationalization” in the cultural space—an achievement that speaks, again, to the intelligence of the Schaubühne’s current operation. Part of that cosmopolitan intelligence was an unadvertised concentration of theater pieces (4 out of 12) from Belgian companies representing different language and cultural groups—Flemish, Walloon, Burundian, and Spanish—whose histories and identities intersect complexly with the long tradition of Belgium’s own status as an “artificial” center and result of international negotiation. “Belgium” as a questioned place of belonging and citizenship in the festival could be taken as an abstract mirror for the ambivalent belonging-place of “Childhood”, another site and alleged protected center of contemporary societies that seems to cover so many silent figures of the sort the festival sought to foreground and bring to public speech.

On the first night of the festival (Friday, April 4), I attended a piece in the new ground-floor performance complex, “Ku’damm 156”, just next door to the Schaubühne’s main building. The refreshingly still roughly renovated former retail space has an expansive, open “black box” layout, with several adaptable playing areas promising flexible Schaubühne use for the next, presumably leased years. The Walloon actor Cédric Eeckhout’s memory play, Héritage, was a perfect aesthetic fit for the new facility; both site and play a featured a well-designed mixture of minimalism and leftover, consumerist clutter and formlessness. Héritage picks up on Eeckhout’s earlier work about his mother (Jo Libertiaux), who in this production appears as a co-star and is, in part, also doubly portrayed by the son, Eeckhout in drag. In the post-show discussion, it was pointed out that the play could be compellingly performed in the future by actors who have no biographical connection to either Libertiaux or Eeckhout. Indeed, adding to the subtle formal arrangement and layering of Eeckhout’s tastefully faux-informal production is the sense that the play’s two characters are sculpted allegorically in a literary fashion out of their differing last names. Libertiaux (Jo) sits square in the center of her temporary temple, listening and visibly choosing to repeat lines that are fed to her in an agreeably friendly and slightly ironic manner that captivatingly suggests her support for her son and art, her modest bemusement with being the evening’s subject and shape-giver, and, yes, her freedom from the cult and regime of theater. The on-stage Eeckhout (Cédric) eeks out indeed an independent identity through various positionalities and rhythms in relation to his mother, whom he places sometimes as conversational mirror, sometimes as central dominating planet or star for his own calmly awkward or “hysterically” frenetic orbit. It is a simple story that partially celebrates and partially mourns its muse’s never-laureled status as historically avant-garde: a suburban hairdresser in the early 1980s emancipates herself from a stifling married life in a big house and raises her sons independently, while maintaining an ambivalent, non-reactionary relation to her former husband, partially for the sake of her sons and partially for the sake of (what it used to be common to call) complex humanity and love. 

Héritage pays homage to the unknown heroism of people like Jo, who move history incrementally forward through strong, difficult, and sometimes joyful independent living. At the same time, the piece is a nuanced, honest, and multi-layered meditation on actual adult European gay male identity and the historically split social formation of “Generation X” divorce kids. In Eeckhout’s contemplative dance between the personal and the mass, the planet of littered electronic goods produces an intimately remembered, screened projection of ultimate—but only temporary—transcendence: bicycling up above it all with a wrinkly, vulnerably abject brown alien, the children accompanying ET were lifted temporarily (Cédric remarked) up into the popular gaze by Spielberg’s ingenious use of spectacle to transform the a domestic divorce drama into a 1980s blockbuster. Like ET, the “non-theatrical” Jo of Eeckhout’s bio-drama is treated, in Brechtian fashion, as a fount of reluctant wisdom; a reminder of mortality, love, and fragility in the general tempest; the subject of dispassionately extractive science; and a nostalgically restored mother goose for everyday misfits. Minimally mimicking the Spielberg sprezzatura of cloaking artificial intellectual arrangement in the bedazzlement of deployed cliche and nutritiously flavored schmalz, Eeckhout choppily smooths and composes Cédric’s generational statement-story using a dusty wedding-gift plastic blender from the 70s. That blender—a smart, developed postmodernism sturdily manufactured throughout the latter half of the last century—still quietly works in the age of optimally personalized, saturated Jamba Juice from perfectly ethically sourced ingredients on every city corner. Enhanced by Pauline Sikirdji’s skillfully modulated mixed-on-stage music, the production was the highlight of the festival for aesthetic achievement.

The following night, I saw two comparatively maximalist productions in the main building of the Schaubühne. The Swiss director Milo Rau, who is now based in Vienna after a five-year stint in Belgium, brought his Flemish-speaking cast of mostly children from the NTGent to Berlin in order to stage a much bloodier divorce story, one also based on real events. Medea’s Children combines the classical myth of Medea with the true-story criminal case of Geneviève Lhermitte, whose horrific murder of her five children shocked Belgium in 2007. Rau’s discursive meta-drama plays exquisitely with our contemporary, indulgently simultaneous embrace of “innocence” and rejection of classical tragedy’s proscription against on-stage violence. The play opens with an extended, ironic mimesis of classical tragedy’s nachträgliche narration—the method by which it produces and suppresses the obscene. Pretending to forego dramatic business in favor of our era’s supposed post-analytical efficiency, the audience is teasingly welcomed into an “after-talk” about the production of Medea’s Children that they are told they have just seen. The ensemble’s only live adult member, Peter Seynaeve, conducts a discussion with the production’s six child actors that touches—with sprinkled moments of humorously precise, rhapsodic over-intellectuality delivered by the reflective children—on classical and modern dramaturgy, from Aeschylus to Beckett. The joke of children virtuously and monstrously performing adult routines never gets old as Rau inverts the classical Greek theater’s presentation of children as mute figures. The children’s production coach, Dirk, fails to appear (like Godot, one of the children remarks at the end of the play) except on video in the role of “Dr. Glas”. But that video only appears once the fine, opening “after-talk” breaks and the curtain opens, the nightmare of the production restarting in response to the children’s enthusiastic desire to re-perform parts of the play again, including its most violent scenes. 

Rau’s theater of bare (moral) cruelty, already famous for its controversial use of child actors to re-enact incredible violence against other children (in his earlier 5 Easy Pieces), covers itself in a thick aesthetic of irony, saturated scenic design, and meta-theatrical discourse. The absorptive set of Medea’s Children, designed by ruimtevaarders (Karolien De Schepper, Christophe Engels), looks almost like a surrealistic dreamscape—Strandkorb at the end of time—waiting for the liquid element of the children’s massively spilled blood to transmogrify the solid half-architectures and extra-large back-drop video projections into satisfying art. Moving in and between these open scenic units, the talented children of Rau’s ensemble re-enact what is journalistically known about Amandine’s relationship and crimes, taking on both adult and child roles and often imitating videos previously shot on location with adult actors. Through this layered, interrupted, and always-again alienated dramatic storytelling, the audience witnesses key scenes in the tale of Dr. Glas’ long-term, pederasty-tinged financial support and live-in relationship with Amandine’s husband, whose trip to North Africa with the older man apparently drives Amandine to the gruesome, premeditated murder of their children. Where Tarantino coyly promised and demurred in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Rau goes for the full, long, real-time gore-porn shot. As the stage action lingers in excruciating naturalism, the child playing Amandine calls each of the other five children individually into a room and inefficiently strangles them, clobbers them over the head, and cuts their throats for minutes at a time. The remaining children are immersed in watching a film in an adjoining room. 

The violence done and prodigious realistic blood spilt, the after-talk element of the show and the conceit of an actor/child-training Lehrstück is restored: the children discuss their mimetic techniques and reflect on mortality, as if not just Aristotle but actually Plato had counterfactually won the argument over tragedy and the right use of role-playing. The audience, meanwhile, partially covered their eyes or walked on shaking aged legs out of the theater, supported by strangers, friends, colleagues, and theater personnel. The tenderness and care displayed in the audience—a young dating couple squirmed and took turns lightly blocking each other’s vision—produced an engrossing contrast with the scene of painstaking human slaughter and unfathomable maternal betrayal on the stage. That shared split reality between demanding allegorical art and humbly surviving audience was another highpoint of the festival and a trope of its lived and performed reality. The audience’s palpable concern for the experiences and futures of the real child actors on stage (and their peers more extensively), along with the realization that actual paramedics were racing through the city to help a patron who had fainted, produced a complex object for theater’s contemplation, though one somewhat aside from Rau’s cunning depiction of a society of over-inexperienced people learning to repeatedly, virtually investigate and enact real existential blasphemies of human extinguishment. 

With only a few minutes in between, I walked to the other main auditorium at the Schaubühne to see the Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s LACRIMA. That 3-hour drama also thematized a marital split and the difficult repercussions for a child. Here, though, the mode was tense, neoliberal realism, in which the overweening mythic violence of a harsh but supposedly personally liberating system disfigures the characters’ lives without the cathartic exaggeration of witnessed slaughter. Following the multiple suggestions of the title, LACRIMA is a distributed crime story, where the tears of the overworked choral protagonists materialize as sewed-in drops of sparkling organic embroidery within a luxuriously celebrated, complexly interwoven social fabric. In the end, the over-heaviness of all those choral pearl-lives only slightly diminishes the glittering, televisual perfection of the symbolic wedding dress worn by an English princess for the world to admire. The play’s unremitting, hard surface tells the hidden back-story of the production of that dress, throwing light into one small backstage corner behind the sumptuous festivities of the internet era’s plutocratic crème de la crème. In the society depicted, though not in Nguyen’s serious play, the overarching comic spectacle of a fairy-tale royal union glossily covers a crime whose moment, perpetrator, and location fugitively diffuse. 

The fictionalized, social documentary-drama exposes many acts of not-exactly-criminal domination and exploitation, but the only villains are distant and cartoonish, their dramaturgical remove suggesting that if we saw further into their lives, we might find privileged people also caught up in a systemic stress melodrama. A spoiled English princess—whose presence in the play is only manifested by a faraway voice giving a condescending, self-satisfied voiceover and briefly participating in a carefully arranged conference call—orders the elaborate dress that is the show’s centerpiece. In Nguyen’s feminist dramaturgy, the princesses’ cartoonishness stands in for the never- or not-yet-quite-realized, cross-gendered inheritance of the patriarchal Leviathan role: picture the kingly, absorbing figure of Hobbes’ frontispiece now replaced by the floating heroine of Super Mario Brothers, clad in virginal, virtuous white. The dress itself serves as the symbolic object for the drama’s finer gestures of reflection on artmaking in the professionalized cultural industry. 

The commercial plot shows the high-end costuming order gratefully received by a flamboyantly kowtowing, famous, and psychotically ambitious fashion designer (another cartoon systemic villain, played by Vasanth Selvam) whose small artisan shop in Paris must quickly deliver a real wearable object meeting the designer and the princess’s extreme imaginative wishes and demands. Everything is ethical, of course!ô, which leads to further layers of exploitation, strain, and plutocratic distance from the dirty work of transforming earthy material into shine. That is, any certifiably disavowed crimes are pushed deep into the lower muddy links of the neo-colonial supply chain, which, the play suggests, looks remarkably like the old (sometimes historically also perfectly ethical) pre-neocolonial supply chains. 

With so many people—spiritually collapsed by the pressure-religion of industrial careerism—competing for haute-couture jobs in the Paris of the real world, the central miracle of the show is Marion, the remarkably even-keeled and humane head of the Paris atelier. Nguyen’s martyr to eurosocialist achievement-productivity seems to honorably preside over a diverse workshop where everyone (except for the complexly acted but bad, resentful husband-employee, played by Dan Artus) cooperates and looks morally good doing it. In Marion’s benign, performing-to-death aura, the show’s Sorkin-esque realism reproduces the neo-moral, work-life championship’s banning of all but diminutive, fleeting shadows, or irrepressible “horrendous human complexity”, from its bright lights. Maud Le Grevellec plays Nguyen’s Snow White figure with compelling minimalism, breeding in the audience the show’s main suspense: will the actor ever get the chance to show Marion totally flipping out? The plot-spoiling answer is, no, this would be unprofessional. 

Nguyen has reinvented the Marian devotional mystery play for our moment of 21st-century economic structures and feminism. As it is, Marion absorbs all the stress of the cumulative distributed crimes—some of which she may even commit—so that the evil consuming princess does not have to, since appearing stressed would also be unprofessional for an envied public actor leading a marvelously crowned life. When this too-isolated, too-rigidly-suppressing, working Snow White overdoses and enters a death-like sleep, she is rescued by the miracle of love, though not by the bad-employee/ex non-Prince Charming but by her intelligently empathetic daughter (Anaele Jan Kerguistel).  We never see very far into Marion’s (or anyone’s) psyche in the rigorously paced play, but we are assured by various eye glimmers and in general by the skilled ensemble acting that psyches exist, although what the use of them is anymore only the LLMs can say. We catch the mostly unspoken admiration and loyalty of the Dwarves —respected international laborers—towards Marion as they work. Even the manager (Selvam) and the extraordinarily talented embroider (Charles Vinoth Irudhayarajof) the specialized shop in Mumbai with which Marion subcontracts do not really complain; everyone is so professional, except for bad husbands and school-age adolescents, who are still learning. As it turns out, then, even the exceptions that prove the rule are exceptionally completely functional.

Several subplots partially unfold in this environment of tremendous work intensity, one of which closely documents the lives of a storied traditional lace workshop in Avençon. The overriding point is that no one has the time to challenge various forms of suppression and domination and to have a full personal life. The tight, moving-parts realism of the play formally mimics the world it seeks to portray, leaving the audience with a feeling of breathlessness inside of which fuller emotions are suffocated. The cast is kept busy with the clockwork of fast, choreographed scene changes and this and that and this and that (a dynamic set design by Alice Duchange).  The pacing aspires to Mission Impossible, with miserable Zoom work calls and stagnant simmering structural conflicts replacing exciting M6 gadget debriefs and crashing, shooting, bombs-exploding airplane dangles. No one has a cigarette or a joke or a bout of world-melting sardonic depression. The persistent loud heartbeats of tense electronic tonal music keep the audience physically chained to the incessant tension, as if we are acoustically connected to the pacemaker of an unconsciously sadistic, overwhelmingly empathetic physician. Even during intermission, a loud announcement informed the audience that we only had a few minutes to perhaps stand up in place, we should not leave the room. The Schaubühne has a world-historically well-behaved audience in comparison with the bulk of theater history’s more balking audiences; one suspected in true horror that most of us were cultural workers with career anxieties. 

The play, in other words, was an allegory of cultural and artistic demand, the harshness of the overweening, perfectionist superego leading to a decision by the on-stage figure of the artist (Marion) to purposefully ruin a magnificent, collective cultural work. In Marion’s warped climactic vision, the dress—overwrought and misshapen by  displayably “ethical” ambition—was already ruined and had to be salvaged, but of course it was not ruined: it was a realistic, distorted reflection of the culture and its structures, if only the artisan and the artist would let the princess be clothed faux-perfectly in the asymmetry of her blithe wishes and the heavy world, a true work of art. But the art of the play emerges when Marion unaccountably repeats her manic, high-stakes gesture to salvage the dress’s warped pearl embroidery. It is an entirely irrational repetition, the one that confesses her psyche: Snow White finally smothers the evil princess’s controlling spell in a mime-like bout of doubled, only slightly frenetic ironing. Not to worry, though, the princess holds her frame (being more than the dress, though figured just as flat), the televised wedding proceeds splendidly, and the play audience was released from the voiceover’s control—scurrying agreeably into the lobby for a drink. In some after-part of the fable, Marian may get fewer orders and will now consider taking Saturday afternoons off for a while, until her daughter goes to university to major in STEM.

Perhaps a bit shy the next day, lest I should find myself again submersed under the princess’s acoustic persecution, I watched the festival’s edition of Streitraum (a periodic Schaubühne talk series) at home via a live public video feed. Carolin Emcke proved a very competent moderator, sitting with her two guests in plain chairs before the open nightmare beach-cave landscape of Medea’s Children to discuss government funding for the arts. With an unremarked-upon visual backdrop suggesting the obvious danger of too much reliance on political or state funding for artistic work, Gesche Joost, the relatively new president of the worldwide Goethe Institute (and professor of Design Research at Berlin’s University of the Arts), and Rau, wearing his hat as the Artistic Director of the Wiener Festwochen, traced certain edges and tarried conversationally square in the transparent middle of Overton’s window of current theater political discourse. Despite the talk series’ title, there was no fighting, though plenty of clubbing. Joost shared her experiences gathering and sharing cultural intelligence from Goethe Institute’s elaborate global root system, and Rau expressed genuine excitement-concern about a select collection of international political issues. Everyone affirmed that the limits of solidarity are definitely drawn when it comes to art and cultural institutions suffering cuts, expressing though not stating an apparently agreed-upon economic theory (I can’t say which one of a few that I have heard) in which more money should be produced by someone who is obviously evilly holding it back—perhaps that Princess again!  Emcke drew perhaps the festival’s biggest laugh when she pointed out that queerness for her personal history/autobiography had to do not just with abstract political commitment but with fairly uncontrollable, undeniable, even at times unwelcome and very embodied sexual desire. In other not long-ago epochs, one could have expected artists and cultural producers in Berlin to pick up on the laugh and think about the economic problem of art funding drying up as linked to the current festival’s notable sexlessness. Out of the abyss, there at the festival’s midpoint, the professionally behaving audience really did laugh just a tad too much at Emcke’s irrepressible remark, a fact that temporarily raised the question whether the general festival’s Lehrstückey dispotif toward its audience gegenüber—as in most art productions these days—was not a sociological reversal.

Two days later, Consolate’s confessional ritual-piece, ICIRORI, was playing at the festival. The audience arriving at the new “fringe” retail space of the Schaubühne campus was told to wait in the bar lobby of the main theater building. At the appointed start time, Consolate, a Walloon-Burundian actor and artist, appeared and invited anyone who had suffered under systemic racism to accompany her into the other new space across the courtyard, with anyone not so identified to wait behind for the invitation of the ushers. The bulk of the audience waited quietly, contemplating the gesture of inviting outreach that also surfaced assumptions of privilege, while a small group walked with the artist across the way into the playing space.

In a few minutes, the ushers urged the large mass of us who had remained in the bar lobby to join the others in the theater. There in a large black box space we sat on cushions laid out on low risers that formed a square, with an open playing space before us and a tilted mirror above (an effective minimalist set design by Micha Morasse). Consolate began to perform a mixed personal and social ritual with narrative, audio, and video sequences describing what she remembers and what she has reconstructed and learned about her own infancy and childhood. The audience was held and honored by the bravery and generosity of the performer’s honesty about a lived traumatic past, but also by the strong dramaturgical sensibility of the piece’s alternating opacities and clarities, storytelling, documentation, and re-enactment. In 1993, Consolate’s parents were murdered after the outbreak of a civil war in Burundi, and the four-year-old Consolate, who had survived by hiding in the woods with her sister, was found and then brought to Belgium, where she was adopted by a white family. Nearly three decades later, Consolate—already a trained theater artist—received an unexpected notice from a surviving family member in Burundi and travelled back to meet the family with whom she had shared her earliest years. The reunion was partially documented in a moving video sequence that Consolate uses in the piece to show the warmth, humor, and real recollections shared by a family separated for decades after a sudden, chaotic outbreak of extreme violence. 

A word in Kirundi, Consolate’s original language, “ICIRORI” signifies a self-reflexive investigation of the past in order to move forward. The piece has the feel of a world-opening invitation from stranger—whom one might ordinarily see on the street or speak to at a restaurant— into their private room of meditation and autobiographical struggle to simultaneously overcome unimaginable early loss and still find, in the daily fast-ticking of contemporary urban European life, the existentially necessary balance between confronting larger violent, unjust systems and building up one’s own life and identity. Some of the most affecting moments dealt with Consolate’s recollection of attempting to commune with her deceased parents—to remember and hear their voices—as a child growing up in Belgium. These moments were a reminder that childhood and even infancy are not just an amnesia, neither in a general sense nor in the constructed sense of repressing exceptional early injury: that in the imposed “forgetfulness” of childhood live—and still live—languages, loved people, and crucial stories, utterances, and singing that bind us more firmly to larger fabrics than any subsequently experienced matrix can or will.  A mood of surprising and shared strong gentleness, anger, perseverance, guilt, and respectful grief marked the hour-long piece. It concluded with the chance for the audience, if they wished, to recite in the name of Belgium a multilingual apology that Consolate had not received, in spite of a formal petition requesting recognition that adoptions like hers had been a form of human trafficking. As the play ended, Consolate left the space, and the audience was invited to leave some dried Burundian peas, which we had received along with a bandage upon entering the theater, next to an old outfit of children’s clothes that lay on the ground. Quietly, individually and in couples and small groups, the audience gave back an offering and a wish, some sustenance and encouragement to the living spirit of the child who had outgrown and left behind the outfit on the theater floor, the same clothes in which Consolate had originally traveled to Belgium. 

The immersive and deeply affecting group ritual—partially paying witness to an artist’s story and process and partially an exercise in group saying and doing—had a quick liturgical follow-up in the sermon-like quality of the Elevator Repair Service’s American revival re-performance of James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1965 debate at the Cambridge Union Society. The 2021 ERS production based its verbatim dramatization on the first hour or so of the BBC-televised event at the traditional student debate club—including the opening speeches of two student debaters (played by Gavin Price and Christopher-Rashee Stevenson) as well as those following by Baldwin and Buckley. Greig Sargeant, who provided the concept for the piece, portrays Baldwin with a sympathetic, ghostly dignity, drawing the audience’s obvious sympathy, but it is a critic’s unloved duty to witness how much we depend on villains, and in this sense Ben Jalosa Williams’ playing of Buckley, the festival’s most concretized villain, merits praise for its consummate attention to detail and rhetorically nuanced, precise character study. Omitting the three final student debaters on each side of the proposed resolution, the production cuts to the announcement of the landslide vote of the 1965 audience in favor of the resolution that was proposed by the Baldwin side. One of the most important debates in the Civil Rights Era, the debate took up the resolution “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” While the speeches by Baldwin and Buckley are the obvious centerpieces—and striking feats of rhetoric provocatively resonant with the contemporary polarized discourses in the US and elsewhere—the student speeches and the entire 1960s British university culture of formal debate add to the fascinating thought-piece that the reenactment play provides. As highlighted in the text of Baldwin’s speech, the discomfort of debating American race relations in a British setting suggested welcome cultural complexity for the central European audience, for whom facilely superior condemnations of immoral politics overseas are an everyday part of public life, as they are in most places around the world, presenting the paradox of moral hatred and xenophobia as practiced at times in the name of liberal and internationalist commitment.  

In a common scenic trope of contemporary theater productions, the John Collins-directed production restaged the original debate using much colder and darker aesthetics than the 1965 version. This very popular mode of minimal, distanced scenography, which significantly predates the pandemic (by half a century), suggests analytical separation, scientific isolation, medical sanitation, and, overall, darkness, whatever that is when it is not just the absence of diffuse light or a lazy overuse of black paint. The production would have been very different if it had included the clubby coziness of the original debate setting with the speakers and the hearers crammed together in a basic bodily sociality that one rarely sees anymore in high cultural spaces, except for those that have been taken over by mass tourism. The audience (rather than leaning on each other’s shoulders to get a good look) sat in fixed black tiered seats at a good remove from the action, and the debaters themselves stood isolated from one another and anyone else at several yards of empty distance. The sense of danger created by such a theatrical arrangement was curious, given the overriding consensus both in the room in 1965 and certainly among the FIND audience. The message seemed to be that we had to learn to mistrust each other even more, which did have the effect that one heard the arguments and threats made on both sides of the debate with a certain icy clarity. 

The iciness of the main event was to a certain degree then reversed in a short closing, imaginary scene between James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry in the former’s living room. The two famous writers joked and commiserated warmly and informally about their experiences as Black Americans and public intellectuals reacting to outrageous events and trying to formulate the best ways forward for their lives, solidarities, and politics. The epilogue-like scene transitioned at times to a faux-unscripted conversation of the two actors (Sargeant and April Matthis) playing those characters, giving the audience some history of ERC and their own engagement with it. The actors related how they had become the company’s first African-American members after being hired to play (what they hilariously parodied as strange, stereotypical, and inhuman) Black characters in ERC’s 2008 production of The Sound and the Fury. The play ended with Hansberry/Matthis bemoaning the theater’s white liberal audiences and prescribing that they should all rather become white radicals. The moral was clear, though not specific, and then it was time again not for Battle Hymn of the Republic karaoke and rows of muskets but rather for orderly lines of patient patrons at the bar, scattered tapas in the lobby, network chatting, and unknown things clicked on eager smartphones. 

After the sermon, it was time for music, which Nguyen’s latest production—playing at the festival in the annex “Studio” space as a preview of its upcoming first run in Strasbourg—served up in welcome plenty. If Nguyen’s LACRIMA (discussed above) carried the perfectionist weight of being her debut production as the Artistic Director of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, her Valentina showed signs of deft breakage and form-relaxation, suggestive of new directorial tracks and accomplishment. The genre was still contemporary stress melodrama, whose existentially symbolic situation is the busy working person on a long tense call (including unbearable, cramped-muzac-filled holds) with a powerful institution’s call center. The dosing of calculated, repetitive music as deployed emotional manipulation in that everyday situation merges into Nguyen’s realism, which characteristically keeps a steady, heart-beating soundtrack of minimal tones running over scenes that are hyper-realistic without ever being allowed to fall (or lift?) into the shadows and awkward dirty corners of naturalism. But in Valentina, the realism is shaped by the form of the vignette, putting Nguyen’s latest work more fully into conversation with the beguiling aesthetics of Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil. 

In terms of melodrama, a quintessentially 19th-century form, Rau’s Medea’s Children communes with dark gothic melodrama, while LACRIMA transplants the melodrama of the desert into the dry, extremely well-lit urban working spaces in which a few stark professionals dance a battle of the wills (surrounded by a colorful but whirling and vanishing chorus) with only a small number of actual steps and a stereotypically schematic conflict, but plenty of rhythm, coordination, and sensory overload. Valentina, meanwhile, looks melodramatically from France not westward towards the new desert-to-be-conquered of high-on-supplements Silicon Valley, but eastward, to the “folk” melodrama and its nostalgic imagination of suffering Easten Europe, a place where time once existed. 

The thematic focus and genre work well with Nguyen and her company’s signature style of blending amateur and professional actors into a seamless ensemble. Chloé Catrin gave a pitch-perfect performance as the overscheduled yet caring-underneath French doctor, a character who could have been LACRIMA’s Marion working her sneaked-in second job. The exuding warmth and dedication of the Franco-Romanian actors playing the fairy tale parts of the small struggling nuclear family—the grievously sick mother (Loredana Iancu), musician father (Paul Guta), and compassionately and resourcefully intelligent school-age heroine-daughter (Angelina Iancu/Cara Parvu)—carried the show and allowed it one of the widest emotional pallets displayed in the festival. There is something still to be said for charm and for love steadily maintaining and opening connection across the ravages of impersonal economic and societal structures, even though such a remark is usually greeted by a stern and humorlessly murderous look from a truer adherent to politically dedicated theater. Truly renewing charm and love may even still exist in majoritarian communities and contexts, but here it is the trope of the impoverished east that allows these priceless cultural, human values to break sonically and (a)rhythmically through the general Nguyen style of running-through heart-beat music and crowded screenal doubling on stage. One can take a breath when someone plays the violin because the musician (generally) must as well, and there one has something basic, an allowance to live, even if evil and manipulation and systemic villainy are everywhere. In Valentina, the father plays the violin, works, loves his child and wife, supports their urgent trip and long independent stay in France to seek medical care, and seems even to be a nice, charismatic person, salt of the earth. Maybe this was the most radical figure on Berlin’s stages all year, tucked away in an annex space, with an apparatus of ideological excuse about documentary theater and real sociological research ready at hand, just in case anyone filed a lawsuit about having heard a non-Brechtian, apolitical, organic gentle melody at the theater.

Other very Nguyen tropes repeated in Valentina: a topography of fairy tale meeting documentary naturalism; the mother-saving Deus-ex-machina miracle-work of the young daughter, who in the new play can learn the language of modern bureaucratic France, medical science, and the world more quickly than her kind ailing mother; the “Gift of the Magi” pain of people falling into tragic silence in order to try to help, support, and shield others, or just do their jobs responsibly and sustainably; and the foregrounding of competent, creative, hard-working, and compassionate women, young and old, heroically absorbing abundant, more-or-less crushing systemic pressures with “exemplary” nuance, resolve, fortitude, sharpness, and—somewhat above all—steady, committed management, or quietly non-reactionary sovereignty. The long list of qualities and adjectives signifies the “stuff” inside Nguyen’s central dramatic figures, which generally has to be shown by extremely subtle acting, given that all of those feelings and conflicts inside are not given space to emerge more expressively or enunciate themselves at length verbally: hence, the so-far defining aesthetic tension between overlaid neoliberal stress and burgeoning-up melodrama, with the formal and thematic positionalities often reversed.

The chorality of the festival continued with a final performance of Уя (Nest), a piece in Kyrgyz and Russian by Chagaldak Zamirbekov and his Bishkek ensemble. A select social portrait of modern Kyrgyzstan, the work is based upon interviews that Zamirbekov and the cast conducted with contemporaries hailing from diverse regions and groups around their country. A naked man (Zhusupbek uulu Emil) crouches in a large tin wash basin at the center of the small set, which opens in three directions to the audience, creating from the outset a sense of intimacy or privacy-invasion, of being brought into a tiny urban flat where a group of interconnected strangers live. The canny, engaging set was designed by Marat Raiymkulov and Malika Umarova and adapted for the Schaubühne space by Ulla Willis. The intimate feeling produced by the layout of audience and tiny set reproduces, to an extent, the sense of a play set in a private apartment—a situation the company often uses in their home city. Produced in a tucked-away box in Ku’damm 156, the piece proceeds as a sequence of six mostly confessional, autobiographical monologues, with some limited interaction between the disparate flatmates. The founder of an orphanage and shelter for young mothers—Tursunbaeva Gulmira, playing a split ancient and middle-aged Kyrgyz cousin to Mother Courage—presides over the flat and the scene, sometimes forcefully engaging audience members to sweep and hold various everyday objects as she gruffly keeps the flat in tidy shape and gets the other characters moving about. 

All of the characters are remarkable and passionately making their way through a complex life, but the play’s temporary spotlight on each of them sequentially also reveals the patina of urban invisibility that cloaks them in ordinary life. Even the militant nationalist (Zhusupbek), whose uniform and brash carriage seem violently out of place in the provisional community, fades and disappears again in the shifting constellation of actors using, fixing, abandoning, and returning to a questioned national home. That collective home and small-enough shelter of experience—of a mild lawyer and religious scholar whose exiled father was a radicalized Islamicist, a struggling but dancing Shisha-bar waitress, and a sometimes-activist and international worker—is threatened, as Asylbek kyzy Zeres’ cosmopolitan, politically discontent character puts it, both by Russian aggression and Western race-based non-solidarity. The aporias in the sequential monologue form repeat the aporias in the various national and international stories that the characters utilize to shape their identities: a useful reminder that even the glocally connected events that we call cities and nations, into which we were all spilled again after the festival, cohere also out of important remembered, forgotten, or never known excisions. So much tailoring for a planetary dress that wants to eat us all just a little stitch at a time or for the dreamy intricate today-costume of a still young and even forgetfully blithe world, whatever humans are or may have been.