East of Berlin

By Hannah Moscovitch

Standing outside his father’s study in Paraguay, Rudi is smoking cigarettes, trying to work up the courage to go in. It has been seven years since he stood in that same spot; seven years since he left his family and their history behind him. As a teenager, Rudi discovered that his father was a doctor at Auschwitz. Trying to reconcile his inherited guilt, Rudi lashed out against his family and his friends, and eventually fled to Germany. While there, he follows in his father’s footsteps by studying medicine, and falls in love with Sarah, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Questioning redemption, love, guilt, and the sins of the father, East of Berlin is a tour de force that follows Rudi’s emotional upheaval as he comes to terms with a frightening past that was never his own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Release date: May 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9781770911581

Hannah Moscovitch

Hannah Moscovitch is an acclaimed Canadian playwright, TV writer, and librettist whose work has been widely produced in Canada and around the world. Recent stage work includes Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes and Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story (co-created with Christian Barry and Ben Caplan). Hannah has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama, Trillium Book Award, the Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award, the Scotsman Fringe First and the Herald Angel Awards at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize administered by Yale University. She has been nominated for the international Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Drama Desk Award, and Canada’s Siminovitch Prize in Theatre. She is a playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. She spends her time between Halifax and Los Angeles.

Book preview

Cover: East of Berlin by Hannah Moscovitch

EAST OF BERLIN

HANNAH MOSCOVITCH

Playwrights Canada Press

Toronto

East of Berlin © Copyright 2009 by Hannah Moscovitch

Playwrights Canada Press

202-269 Richmond Street West, Toronto, ON, Canada M5V 1X1

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Cover design by Monnet Design

Typesetting by Blake Sproule

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Moscovitch, Hannah

East of Berlin [electronic resource] / Hannah Moscovitch.

A play.

Electronic monograph.

Issued also in print and PDF formats.

ISBN 978-1-77091-158-1

I. Title.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council (OAC)—an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,681 individual artists and 1,125 organizations in 216 communities across Ontario for a total of $52.8 million—the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

NOMINATED FOR:

The 2009 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize

The 2009 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama

The 2009 Canadian Author’s Association Carol Bolt Award

The 2008 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Play, General Category

Hannah Moscovitch [is] a young and quite irritatingly talented writer…

—Paul Isaacs, Eye Weekly

…an emotional and intellectual focus that seamlessly travels across continents and about 40 years of history.

—Kamal Al-Solaylee, Globe and Mail

…a Holocaust play with a difference.

—Jon Kaplan, NOW Magazine

…those looking for real theatre, the kind that stretches your heart and your brain, will be well-rewarded.

—Richard Ouzounian, Toronto Star

[Moscovitch is] not afraid to plunge right through areas that others might consider poor taste in order to come out the other side in search of a deeper truth.

—Variety

… important and brave work… a must-see show, by any definition.

—Fresh Daily Theatre Review

To my father, Allan Moscovitch

PLAYWRIGHT’S NOTES

A note on the title: the word East was used by the Nazis to refer to the genocide of the Jews. The official party line was that Jewish communities were being resettled in the East. This euphemism entered into the language of Berlin Jews during the war. The word East was used to refer to the death camps, and to go East of the city signified going to your death.

A note for future productions: when I wrote the script, I sought to create the possibility for a tense relationship between Rudi and the audience. I envisioned this relationship as the most important of the play.

CHARACTERS

Sarah (speaks with a slight New York accent)

Hermann

Rudi

East of Berlin was first produced by Tarragon Theatre, October 16 to November 24, 2007, with the following company:

SARAH | Diana Donnelly

HERMANN | Paul Dunn

RUDI | Brendan Gall

Directed by Alisa Palmer

Set and Costume Design by Camilla Koo

Lighting Design by Michael Walton

Music and Sound Design by John Gzowski

Stage Managed by Leigh McClymont

Fight Direction by James Binkley

Script Coordinated by Maureen Gualtieri

Do not hold against us the sins of the fathers; may your mercy come quickly to meet us, for we are in desperate need.

—Psalm 79: 7–9

It’s 1970. RUDI is in the front hallway outside his father’s study, in his family home in Asunción, Paraguay. He is trying to light a cigarette. It’s difficult because his hands are shaking. RUDI stops trying to light the cigarette for a moment and controls