Thomas Irmer and Barbara Engelhardt

IRMER: During your several months stay in Berlin you have seen quite an impressive number of theatre productions. As a starting point, please tell us your impressions of the work.

DASGUPTA: We have been coming together to Germany for many, many, years, having visited the first time, though before we had known each other, in 1969. Both of us have always been very interested in German playwrights and teach German theatre. I've always admired German theatre for its theoretical and political ideas, and the philosophical breadth one finds in dramas from Büchner to Brecht, Handke, and Müller. What I was drawn to was a theatre which identified itself much more strongly with a theoretical base than the American theatre, which is closer to emotions and the private sphere. And then there were those incredible directors in the seventies, such as Zadek, Gruber, Stein, and Peymann. In the Stadttheater it was possible to see not only new plays of political significance, but also the classics, on a scale not possible in America.

MARRANCA: Through our publishing house, PAJ Publications, we have produced many volumes of German authors, representing the entire century, from early cabaret to the present. And, our journal has also featured numerous essays on German theatre over the years, helping to introduce German theatre to our readership. Many of these authors were subsequently produced in non-profit theatres and in universities. We've published more German theatre authors than any other publisher in the U.S. In fact, in 1973, a production of Peter Handke's Kaspar by Heiner Müller's translator, Carl Weber, which we saw at the Chelsea Theatre Center as graduate students, helped draw us into theatre. It made theatre seem so alive and an alternative to American psychological realism. A few years later we founded PAJ and then came as press to our first Theatretreffen [a festival of the ten best productions from German-speaking countries, held in Berlin every May] in 1978. It was a great period in contemporary German theatre, and a time when we began to follow the important productions.

IRMER: The way you speak about that particular historical moment of new playwrights and directors makes it sound as if all that were long gone now. You seem to imply that there is now very little continuity from then on. Why is it so different now?

DASGUPTA: Part of the reason is that many of the best directors have gone into opera. Everyone keeps talking about the impact of money. I'm not sure how much of that is true, though it does seem at times that the Stadttheater productions are now overdone--they're just spectacles. What you're referring to has to do with an historical moment in time. Great theatre happens at the time when there is a socio-political shift and the generations we are talking about is the generation of 1968. That was such a watershed in the history not only of Europe, but of the world. This generation changed the way we look at culture. The political and social issues that drove them are not that important now.

What had always impressed me about German theatre is that it has a national tradition. The concept of Bildung is important. What I find regrettable today is that the German theatre on the whole is not very receptive to being infiltrated by external factors. It strikes me as being very narcissistic and self-enclosed. Of course, Bob Wilson came to Germany and early on energized German theatre, but that influence has practically become a tradition here. These days in America there are by comparison much more radical plays, even if the productions aren't so radical, while in Germany an innovative production dramaturgy might still exist, but the plays themselves aren't really radical.

ENGELHARDT...