Shows set during the collapse of Germany’s Weimar Republic and Hitler’s ascent to power have been popular choices for revivals in recent years, as theatre artists look to the past in an attempt to make sense of rising authoritarianism in the present. In 2019, New York’s Public Theater staged the first major revival of A Bright Room Called Day, Tony Kushner’s 1985 play about a group of artists in early 1930s Berlin. Kushner said in an interview with The Nation at the time that theatres first began to express renewed interest in the play during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Across the pond, a 2021 immersive production of the Weimer-set musical Cabaret set the record for the most Oliver Awards won by a revival, and the production is still playing in the West End and on Broadway.
From April 19 to May 11, Chicago’s Court Theatre, winner of the 2022 Regional Theatre Tony Award, contributes a new take on this era with the first-ever stage adaptation of Berlin, a graphic novel by American artist Jason Lutes. Playwright Mickle Maher pens the script for this world premiere, and Charles Newell—who served as Court’s artistic director for 30 years and is currently its senior artistic consultant—directs the production.
Lutes spent more than two decades writing Berlin, which was released in serial form between 1996 and 2018, with the full collection filling a nearly 550-page hardcover volume. With a sweeping scope and layers of intersecting narratives, the book features an eclectic cast of artists, journalists, musicians, and laborers living in the German capital from 1928 to 1933. Lutes’ black-and-white illustrations, inspired by historical photographs of the city, depict political turmoil, civil unrest, and individual moral dilemmas as his characters—most of whom are fictional—respond to the rise of fascism.
In an interview with Playbill, Newell said that Court’s executive director, Angel Ysaguirre, introduced him to the graphic novel after reading it for a book group, and Newell immediately saw its potential for a stage adaptation. When asked how Berlin fits into the landscape of other shows about Weimar Germany, playwright Maher says, “It’s a big enough period, an important enough moment in our shared history, that I think there could be a thousand plays written about it, and we still wouldn’t get at the mystery of it. So, I think we should tell as many stories as possible about what we think happened in that time for people to reflect on and hopefully use in some way in their present moment.”
The play’s relevance is “glaringly obvious,” in Maher’s words, and he and Newell feel that the story speaks for itself without the need to add overt gestures to present-day America. “Anyone that’s going to come and see this is going to bring all of themselves to the experience,” says Newell. “And so, I think our primary goal is, how do we tell this story well? And people will draw from it what they will.”
To adapt such a long, complex novel for the stage, Maher’s script focuses on the journeys of 12 principal characters, each played by a different member of Court’s cast. Within the world of the play, many of these primary characters also portray additional characters from Lutes’ book—a layered approach that calls for “a very different kind of muscle for an actor to try to wrestle with,” observes Newell.
The production design does not recreate Lutes’ drawings, but aims to evoke Berlin’s architecture while allowing plenty of open space for physically dynamic, fluid staging. “We sort of think of the city in this period as a primary character in the story,” explains Newell. “We very much wanted to follow a metaphor that is embedded in the novel around the flowing of a river, or trains coming and going, coursing across the geography that is the city. And so, rather than trying to clumsily make scene changes between every change of storytelling that’s going on, we decided to distill the whole thing down to the most basic simple objects that can be used in lots of different ways, so that there’s no time to pause or wait for scene changes.”
Although Lutes couldn’t have foreseen today’s political climate when he started writing Berlin, by the time the full novel was published, he felt “horrified by the global resurgence in nationalism” but was “not surprised by it,” he told The Austin Chronicle in 2018. “I never expected the dark heart of America to be revealed so nakedly, much less for it to garner such vehement and widespread support. There are parallels [between the United States in the 21st century and Germany in 1930], but in many ways our current moment is vastly different. Although the prognosis is not good, the future is yet unwritten.” More than half a decade later, with new chapters of history already in the books, the prognosis is perhaps more alarming than ever, and the need for stories such as Berlin feels urgent.
