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Long night of the playwrights returns with Autor:innen Tage at the Deutsches Theater

The “long night of the playwrights” returns to the Deutsches Theater (June 4-15) to highlight the work of German writers for the stage.

Photo: Birgit Hupfeld

Last year’s eulogies for the Deutsches Theater’s ”author days” festival and its climax, “the long night of the playwrights” – originally a project of longtime former intendant Ulrich Khuon – have thankfully proved premature.

You’ll be able to see the fruits of these collaborative residencies, called ‘ateliers’, at the long night

The current intendant, Iris Laufenberg, is continuing with the festival – a Berlin institution for new playwriting for almost 30 years – having secured €500,000 from the Senate exclusively for its support.

Along with featuring 10 theatrical Berlin premieres from across the German-speaking world, including Leonie Böhm’s celebrated collaboration with Kim de l’Horizon, an adaptation of l’Horizon’s feted Blutbuch into Blutstück, it will also involve for the first time the work of four year-long residents.

You’ll be able to see the fruits of these collaborative residencies, called ‘ateliers’, at the long night. Its exciting lineup will include Caren Jeß’s Von der Mutter ein Gruß (“A Greeting from Mother”), an animal parable about a German shepherd and an eagle founding a new Germany together after the eagle has survived a murderous sibling dynamic, and Patty Kim Hamilton’s Und der Himmel über uns ist sein eigenes Land (“And the sky over us is its own country”), which takes the return of a broken-hearted Wessi composer to his dead father’s Heimat in Saxony-Anhalt as an opportunity to reflect on the state of current Germany.

Ewe Benbenek will reconsider the myth of Iphigenia in Ix, and Nele Stuhler makes the simple complex in the inclusive Leichter Gesang, a play on the idea of simple language or leichte Sprache that you could translate as “easy,” “light” or “simple singing”, and which promises to be anything but! Long live the long night of the playwrights!

  • Deutsches Theater, Schumannstr. 13A, Mitte, Jun 4 – 15, details.