‘The Berlin Diaries' is a twisting and resonant search for lost family

Washington Post

4 hours ago

Playwright Andrea Stolowitz is a central character in her own 'The Berlin Diaries.' She is played by Dina Thomas in a delicately moving production at D.C.'s Theater J — except when she's played by actor Lawrence Redmond, who also inhabits the long-dead grandfather whose inherited journals set the show's affairs in motion.
Except when Redmond is stepping into the role of the playwright's Uncle David. Or one of a dozen other characters, based everywhere from Brazil to South Africa to New York to the Pacific Northwest. With me?
Fret not: If the play's structural quirkiness initially feels adventurous to the point of mild madness, it quickly reveals a method, even as its novelty settles into something like normalcy.
In fact the dialogue-juggling — in which the two actors often divide a thought mid-phrase while inhabiting the same character — deftly suggests the sort of wait-who-was-that? conundrums that any genealogist grappling with a knotty ancestral puzzle might get tangled in. For instance, I bear the same name as both my father and my grandfather, and there's another handful perched a few generations back in the family tree. This means that 'No, the Thomas who was killed when a branch fell on him in 1762 was a farmer; his son Thomas was the Presbyterian minister,' is the kind of thing I find myself clarifying mid-story, as if anyone other than a desperate family-history nerd could possibly follow.
One intriguing dynamic with 'Berlin Diaries' is precisely that Andrea Stolowitz, or at least the character with her name, doesn't seem that sort of nerd at all. She's a mildly jaded playwright and teaching artist whose family isn't all that large or all that close, and who's not particularly interested in the diary her mother has been saving all this time. Yes, they're Jewish, and yes, they emigrated from Germany — but as Uncle David shrugs, 'Everyone made it here alive. … There's nothing to find out.'
Unconvinced, but also under-inspired, and entirely uncertain what she's actually looking for, Andrea does what teaching artists do when confronted with things like old diaries: She writes a grant proposal and takes off for Europe.
Unsurprisingly, she'll uncover rather more than Uncle David's shrug suggests, and in its clean 90 minutes 'Berlin Diaries' chronicles developments as concrete as confusion about a street address and as esoteric as the singular frisson that comes with stumbling across a headstone and knowing that a faded name on a dusty page really lived and died in this actual place, at that actual time. And its protagonist will confront the reality that even now, even after decades of diligent documentation, even given the famously meticulous recordkeeping that accompanied the Holocaust, it's possible for people — for whole swaths of whole families — simply to be verschollen, lost.
Theater J's handsome production, steered with a light touch and admirable clarity by director Elizabeth Dinkova, deploys warm woods (in a set by Sarah Beth Hall) and plenty of papers (props are from Pamela Weiner), along with one of the most quietly lyrical visual vocabularies I've seen in a theater lately. (Colin K. Bills is responsible for the lighting, and Deja Collins the subtle and exquisite suite of projections.)
Redmond and Thomas navigate a tricky script with the ease of veterans and a wry, low-key charm that helps find an appropriate unifying tone for a narrative that involves the soberest of considerations — but also at least one anatomical joke and (rather boldly) the employment of mild sarcasm in the vicinity of the words 'never forget.'
And Stolowitz manages, without belaboring or dwelling on grim specifics, to convey the quiet horror of discovering the name of a lost relative in the same moment you realizing that that person's story is largely and irremediably lost.
'He who forgets what he cannot change is happy,' muses Andrea at one point, echoing a line from her grandfather's journal, though it's not clear she can bring herself to agree. 'The Berlin Diaries' will resonate, and vividly, with audiences who caught Tom Stoppard's similarly aching family chronicle 'Leopoldstadt' at the Shakespeare Theatre Company late last year – and I should imagine with any member of a Jewish American generation whose parents and grandparents simply couldn't bear to pass on the stories of the lost.
The Berlin Diaries, through June 29 at Theater J. About 90 minutes without intermission. TheaterJ.org.