ExPats Theatre presents Testosterone, a satirical comedy by German playwright Rebekka Kricheldorf and translated by Neil Blackadder. Directed by Karin Rosnizeck, Testosterone runs March 15 – April 6 at Atlas Performing Arts Center.
The Play: Inspired by the Grimm brothers’ “The Story of a Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear,” Testosterone is Kricheldorf’s hilariously funny re-imagination of the sibling rivalry between two brothers. “Good son” Ingo resides in a high-tech security fortress that protects his family from “bad neighborhood,” a barbaric dog-eat-dog world rampant with crime and the home of his fearless brother Raul, the “bad son.” The unavoidable clash between toxic masculinity and do-goodery of the wealthy and comfortable not only reshuffles alliances and love relations but also shakes the characters’ moral compass to the core. It is an intricate mix of dark humor, black comedy, and sharp-witted social satire that does not stop at ourselves. Testosterone premiered 2012 at Staatstheater Kassel and had its first US production (in a translation by Neil Blackadder) at the Cherry Arts Theatre, Ithaca, NY in 2019.
The Playwright: Rebekka Kricheldorf, born in Freiburg im Breisgau 1974, is a playwright and novelist living in Berlin. She studied Romance languages and literature at the Humboldt University in Berlin and scenic writing at the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2004 she was an in-house playwright at the Nationaltheater Mannheim and from 2009 to 2011 a dramaturg and in-house playwright at the Theaterhaus Jena, and from 2013 to 2019 she was a juror for the Osnabrück Playwriting Prize. She has written numerous commissioned works – mostly social comedies and fairytale grotesques – for various theaters including the Staatstheater Kassel, the Deutsches Theater Göttingen and the Deutsches Theater Berlin. She has received several scholarships and prizes, such as the Publisher’s Prize and the Audience Prize of the Heidelberg Stückemarkt, the Kleist Prize, the Schiller Prize of the State of Baden-Württemberg and the Kassel Prize for Comic Literature. Her first novel Lustprinzip was published in 2021. In 2022, Alexander-Verlag published “Dem Tod ins Gesicht lachen. A Plea for Comedy and the Celebration of the Absurd in Theater,” three lectures for the Saarbrücken Poetry Lectureship.
For more information about the play and playwright, see also her recent interview about the play at www.ExPatsTheatre.com as well as her writer-in-residence program at Cornell University. https://igcs.cornell.edu/news/
The Cast
Amberrain Andrews as Dr. Solveig Rieger
Gary DuBreuil as Raul Klemmer
Eli EL as Fabian Klemmer
Elgin Martin as Dr. Ingo Klemmer
Bruce Alan Rauscher as Slatko Bogdanovic
Jenna Rossman as Silvana Bogdanovic
Production and Creative Team
Director: Karin Rosnizeck
Stage Manager/Production Manager: Shannon Saulnier
Set Designer/Projection Designer: Jonathan Dahm Robertson
Lighting Designer: Ian Claar
Costume Designer: Donna Breslin
Fight/Intimacy Choreographer: Jon Beal
Sound Designer: Jeffrey Stanley
ExPats Theatre is a 501 (c) (3) venture founded in 2019 by Karin Rosnizeck to bring contemporary international plays with new perspectives on today’s pressing global issues to Washington, DC. Previous productions include: Surfacing by Russian-Austrian playwright Julya Rabinowich, Einstein’s Wife by Serbian playwright Snežana Gnjidic (truncated by COVID in 2020, remount in 2022), Pankrác’ 45 by Czech playwright Martina Kinská, Christmas Eve by German playwright and novelist Daniel Kehlmann, The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield and Migraaants by French- Romanian playwright Matéi Visniec as well as Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad and Marlene by British playwright Pam Gems. Expats Theatre is the recipient of the 2023 John Aniello Award for Outstanding Emerging Theatre Company.
Testosterone, presented by ExPats Theatre, runs March 15-April 6, 2025 at Atlas Performing Arts Center, Lab 2, 1333 H St NE, Washington, DC 20002. Showtimes are Thursday/Friday/Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 2:30 pm. Tickets are $49 general admission, $44 for seniors, and $25 for students and available online.
