David Hare: Berlin,Wall at the Public

Berlin,Wall written and performed by David Hare, appears at the Public Theater this month

BERLIN
For his whole adult life, David Hare has been visiting the city which so many young people regard as the most exciting in Europe. But there’s something in Berlin’s elusive character that makes him feel he’s always missing the point. Now, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall, Hare reads a 55-minute meditation about Germany’s restored capital—both what it represents in European history and the peculiar part it has played in his own life.

WALL
The Israeli/Palestine security fence will one day stretch 486 miles, from one end of Israel to the other. It will be four times as long as the Berlin wall, and in places twice as high. In this second monologue, Hare offers a history of the wall’s building, an exploration of the philosophy behind it and a personal account of those who live on either side.

(The text of WALL: A Monologue appears in the current NY Review of Books. )

Edward Rothsetin writes about the Berlin Wall in today's NY Times:
After East Germany erected the Wall in 1961, turning itself into a kind of prison where the penalty for failed escape was often death, the Wall provided a compass that seemed to define the directions and tensions of the cold war. It was as if some immense laboratory experiment had gone on for half a century according to rigorous principles: Take a single defeated society, weary with guilt, wounds and hatred, and divide it in two. Split apart families and friends; workplaces and factories; resources and opportunities. And see what kinds of worlds develop under very different visions of social and political order. The Wall was an attempt to enforce the experiment’s continuation; instead, its confession of the need for force anticipated the experiment’s conclusion.