Remembrances of a Suitcase
by Ursula Sherman

Notes on the Creation of Berlin, Jerusalem and the Moon
by Corey Fischer

by Naomi Newman

Why is it relevant today? Why mount it again? Because the concerns that fueled the work are unfortunately still very present.

Walter Benjamin and Else Lasker-Schuler were refugees, running from the Nazis in 1938. In 1994 I went to the former Yugoslavia to perform in refugee camps in Croatia and Serbia. After the Holocaust, the world said "Never again!" and since then we’ve had Vietnam, Cambodia, Haiti, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. Today hordes of people, displaced and homeless, are wandering the earth. Ethnic cleansing, genocide, mass killings, mass rapes, concentration camps and torture persist throughout the world.

In this 50th year of celebrating the creation of Israel, the conflict between Israel and Palestine is still unresolved, the tensions continue to mount and the peace plan seems dangerously close to disintegration. American Jews are increasingly divided in their reactions to the conflict in the Middle East, as is voiced in the play by the character of Izzie.

Since our writing of the play, great changes have been made in the issues the character Edie struggles with — the patriarchal aspects of Judaism. Thanks to the feminist movement, there are many women rabbis and cantors, and women are much more active in Jewish religious life. But the power, both in secular and religious organizations, is still in the hands of men. There are fewer women in the Israeli parliament today than there were 13 years ago.

And so we bring the play back. To once again feel into these issues.

This is the first time that other actors will fulfill these roles that Corey, Albert, and I created. I am convinced that ATJT has been creating plays that will enter the theatre repertoire, and this is an opportunity to prove that our pieces are not dependent on our performances. Now other actors will interpret our writing. As a director, it is a challenge not to try to recreate the old play, its staging, tempos, etc. For me, it has been extremely satisfying watching superb actors bring a new life and fresh view to Berlin, Jerusalem and the Moon.

Remembrances of a Suitcase

by Ursula Sherman

This was the first of several departures. I understood more about the later ones than about that afternoon in Nuremberg. But with every departure, I felt as if I were a piece of luggage, essential perhaps, but always taken along in silence.

Notes on the Creation of Berlin, Jerusalem, and the Moon

by Corey Fischer

Among the things that haven’t changed, our commitment to a particular way of making theatre is paramount. Call it collaborative, ensemble, or collective creation, it’s a way of working that’s markedly different from the more conventional model in which an individual playwright presents a finished script to a producer who then hires a director, designers and actors and mounts a production.

Collaborative creation usually involves a great deal of improvisation and an easing of the distinction between performer and writer. It’s a process that assumes a high level of shared responsibility and proceeds from a set of basic agreements between all participants. This does not necessarily mean that there is no division of responsibility. Often, a director or a dramaturg may be responsible for making certain decisions that proceed from an overview of the work not available to the actor/writers.

Although the roots of this kind of work can be traced to the European avant-garde of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the approach took on a particularly American sensibility in the sixties as groups like The Living Theatre, The Open Theatre, The Performance Group, The ProVisional Theater and several others created a body of work that reflected—in form, content and process—both the fragmentation of our society and the utopian, visionary and communal longings of the time.

After a year in L.A. and on the road with The Provisional Theatre, I knew that this was the kind of theatre I wanted to devote my life to. I went on to New York where I worked with Joseph Chaikin, founder of the Open Theatre; Bruce Myers, a member of Peter Brook’s company; and various survivors of other companies like Bread and Puppet and Mabou Mines. When I left New York in 1978 to return to Los Angeles to begin working with Albert and Naomi, I felt like I was carrying a tiny flame from a sacred fire. That sense of mission was heightened by increasing number of ensembles that were disbanding around this time.

Between 1983 and 1985, our commitment to collaborative creation was sorely tested. Naomi, who had directed our first three works, was to join us as a performer. We imagined we could work without a director. This pushed the concept of collaboration to new limits. No one held the overview. No one had the final word. We worked that way for most of the process, but in the final stages we were realized we could not continue without a designated director and invited New York director Michael Posnick to join us. We emerged from the whole experience quite battered and bruised but holding in our collective hands one of our richest and most complex works: Berlin, Jerusalem and the Moon. Now, in our twentieth season, we’ve revived that piece, but for the first time it’s being played by a new cast: Aaron Davidman, Julian Lopez-Morillas and Joan Mankin, with Naomi directing and Albert and myself helping with various aspects of the production. Just as this piece marked a major turning for us back in the eighties, so this revival, fifteen years later, marks a new transition as we expand our notion of A Traveling Jewish Theatre to something much larger than four-people-doing-it-all.

June 1983: After a break touring the repertory in California, Albert brings in a book: Prophets Without Honour. By Frederick Grunefeld. He is fascinated, obsessed with the German-Jewish between-the-wars cultural/political phenomenon.

Naomi resists focusing the yet non-existent piece entirely on this material. I share both her concerns and Albert’s fascination. I’m also interested in some biblical that I find troubling and want to grapple with. Through Prophets Without Honour, I become reacquainted with Walter Benjamin, whose essay on storytelling had been a major inspiration to me in 1978, around the time of beginning A TJT. I’m intrigued to discover that the story of Jacob and the Angel was a major theme in Benjamin’s work. Naomi guides me into a retelling of Jacob’s struggle in movement and language.

Albert suggests that Naomi work with the character of the German-Jewish poet, Else Lasker-Schuler. Virtually unknown in America, her works are still widely read in Germany, though few Germans pay much attention to the Jewish influences on her work. After initial resistance, we (Albert and Corey) guide her through several improvisations that surprise us with their power. Further research reveals that much of the material that seemingly came from Naomi’s imagination is completely true to the facts of Else’s life, inner and outer.

I try working with Walter Benjamin as a character, frustrated by the unyieldingly literary nature of the material.

Albert begins to look at Kafka as a possible character but more energy goes to a prototypical American Jewish Stand up comic who tells bitter jokes about Germany and the Middle-East.

August 1983

We show an" inventory" of fragments one night at Intersection. It includes:

A version of Jacob wrestling with the angel, a monologue by Naomi as Else, A stand—up routine by Albert’s comic, and some embryonic scenes involving the other characters.

[We interrupt the work on BJM in order to tour other work. We resume for a short time in May ‘84, break again, and then enter the final phase in July ‘84]

July 84-January ‘85

In this final phase, anxiety runs high. We question our choice of material, polarizing around Naomi’s resistance to a piece entirely about German Jews and Albert’s concern that we achieve a greater unity of content than in our previous work. We are also feeling the full impact of working without a director. Plans to bring Joe Chaikin out to work with us tall through when he becomes ill. I become very resistant to working with anyone else, imagining that somehow, we can develop a process to direct from within.

We continue working with Kafka, Else and Walter, Izzie (Albert’s stand-up comic) and Jacob. Naomi works on integrating Jacob’s wife Rachel into Jacob’s story and creates a new character, an American Jewish woman, Edie, married to Izzie.

In September we do four work—in—progress showings. The experience tells us we are far from solving many major issues. We are close to panic.

The German-American-Biblical triangulation that we have been trying for doesn’t seem to be working. Walter Benjamin’s material—with the exception of the account of his death—is still more literary than theatrical, as is the Kafka material. We feel isolated from each other. The characters are not interacting. They talk too much. Else, at least has color and passion.

The addition of Rachel to the Jacob story becomes problematic. Much of Naomi’s drive to include her (Rachel) comes from a desire to balance what Naomi sees as the exclusively male point of view of the Jacob story.

I fall into a resistant and reactive mode, believing that the text Naomi has written for Rachel undercuts what I am trying to do. This leads to many painful arguments.

We slowly begin to recognize that we are caught in many of the same issues as the German-Jewish writers whom we are dealing with were. A shattered landscape. We have entered the secular world as they did. There is no transcendent function. Our earlier works had elements from legend and myth that provided a sense of sacred mystery, but now everything seems flattened by the harsh light of twentieth century angst. The ground is cracking. We begin to accept the truth of this and look for ways to reveal it.

We begin to let go of some of our personal attachments: Albert drops Kafka as a character, allowing his spirit to come through Izzie who says:

"If Kafka were with us today, he be a comic——a comic with a capital K..." We seize on the fact that Kafka actually wrote, in a letter, about his fantasy of emigrating to Palestine and working as a waiter. We begin to develop the fantasy location of "Kafka’s Café in Tel-Aviv" as a place where past and present, living and dead can meet.

Naomi lets go of Rachel, developing the feminine voice through Else and Edie; I rework the Jacob material, dropping all language, condensing it into a brief moment of silent struggle.

We begin to see that the character of Izzie the K[omic] can be very useful as an "interlocutor" a binding energy for the piece. He is the bridge, the one who has access to all the worlds we’re dealing with.

We also begin to explore possible imaginary meetings between Walter and Else.

At this point (December) I have long since given up my hope that we could in fact complete the work without a director, agreeing with Albert and Naomi that we should ask our friend Michael Posnick to come to work with us. He’s available. He spends ten miraculous day with us and Susan Griffin who joins us as dramaturg.

The piece takes on a shape—finally. In these ten days we decide:

The Jacob moment will frame the piece. We will follow the parallel stories of Walter and Else in their respective flights from Germany. Izzie will indeed link and energize these stories and connect them to America/1985. Suddenly many half forgotten bits and pieces re-emerge with new clarity; the Mahler music we have been working on finds its place in the piece, A brand new character: The Angel of History lands on Albert to provide the missing element of innocence, lightness to the work. Most importantly, though, Michael helps us to start listening to each other again, to move out of our fear, our militant advocacy of this or that, into trust.

Berlin went on to tour all over the world including extended runs in New York at the 92^nd Street Y and at Chicago’s Wisdom Bridge. It was a particularly powerful experience to perform it in Vienna, Berlin and Hamburg, for audience who were intimately familiar with Walter Benjamin and Elsa Lasker-Schuler, though fairly unaware of their Jewishness. The current revival marks the first time the play has been performed in San Francisco in thirteen years.

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