A slender yet precious thread connected playwright Andrea Stolowitz to her family’s clouded past. The exquisite diary kept by her great-grandfather Dr. Max Cohnreich detailed his pre–World War II life in Berlin, before Max and other family members escaped the Nazi threat. Using the diary as her guide, Stolowitz jumped headlong into an all-absorbing journey to recover her German Jewish family’s fuller history. Her autobiographical play, The Berlin Diaries, chronicles Stolowitz’s voyage into the Cohnreichs’ complicated story.
We travel with Andrea from archives in the U.S. to Berlin, trailing the playwright down rabbit holes in search of missing information. We feel her frustration when she seems to reach dead ends. We share her awe when the dots are connected, revealing seismic discoveries.
The regional premiere of this absorbing play, directed by Elizabeth Dinkova at Theatre J, takes place in set designer Sarah Beth Hall’s wonderfully dusty old archives, replete with faded volumes and plump packets of documents. We understand that these nondescript records contain information that no one has bothered to look at for decades. We learn that a single misfiled folder or a mistakenly recorded address can throw a passionate researcher right off the trail.
Stolowitz tells her story in a unique and challenging way. Two actors (Lawrence Redmond and Dina Thomas) perform all the roles, from Andrea herself and her great-grandfather to her mother, cousins, and the unctuous archivists she encounters along the way. Both Redmond and Thomas occasionally portray Andrea, with their fast-paced repartee representing conversations she is having with herself. The pair use the barest of props, effective accents, and nuanced body language to switch in a nanosecond from one character to the next during a fast-paced 90 minutes on stage.
The acting is truly heroic. Redmond and Thomas raise long-gone ancestors from the dead, breathing life, humor, irony, and pathos into Andrea’s forebears. But the duo can’t alleviate the confusion created by introducing so many characters so quickly during the first half of the play. We feel a bit unmoored, distracted by not quite being able to pinpoint the identity of each character, whether they exist in the past or present, and their relationships to Andrea. Too much and too little information overwhelms us too soon, threatening our attention.
Not until the midpoint do we start to grasp the whole — what is known, and, as importantly, what has remained unknown about the family.
Family lore maintains that the entire Cohnreich clan escaped the Holocaust and fanned out to Jewish enclaves in the U.S., Israel, Asia, and South America. Andrea digs way deeper, discovering missing members no one ever talked about. Their names scroll across electronic screens (by Projections Designer Deja Collins), superimposed over the archives. The number of the verschollen, the lost, is breathtaking.
As Andrea’s research reveals living cousins she never dreamed she had, she is faced with an entirely new set of questions. Who or what erased knowledge of the relatives killed by the Nazis? Would any of her newly discovered clan care about their shared history, or is this project solely her obsession? Andrea feverishly contacts every family member she can, but wisely ends her drama before we find out who responded. By then, to Stolowitz’s credit, she has engendered enough interest among playgoers to make us want to know.
The Berlin Diaries reflects the emerging 3G (third generation) movement — founded by grandchildren of Holocaust survivors whose relationships to the Nazi atrocities are more distant in time yet still inextricably bound to their outcomes. Last year’s film A Real Pain is one expression of this generation’s need to connect with their past. Andrea Stolowitz’s sensitive new drama demonstrates that even among the newest generation of survivors’ progeny, hidden histories, heroic efforts, and impossible losses remain immeasurably relevant to World War II’s Jewish descendants and to humanity itself.
Running Time: 90 minutes with no intermission
EXTENDED: The Berlin Diaries plays through June 29, 2025, presented by Theater J at the Aaron & Cecile Goldman Theater in the Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center, 1529 16th Street NW, Washington, DC. Purchase tickets ($70–$80, with member, student and military discounts available) online, by calling the ticket office at 202-777-3210, or by email (theaterj@theaterj.org).
The program for The Berlin Diaries is online here.
SEE ALSO:
Theater J to present season finale ‘The Berlin Diaries’ (news story, April 30, 2025)
