(Stryk’s article appears in the June 2011 issue of The Brooklyn Rail.)
I bump into my favorite professor from grad school, Marvin Carlson, in the lobby at this year’s Theatertreffen—the festival of German-speaking theater held annually in Berlin each May. His first Theatertreffen was in 1985 (it began in 1963), but he’s been flying in from New York to see it with regularity for 15 years and writing about it for just as long. And yet, he says, casting a bemused expression my way and scratching his head, “How do you describe German theater to Americans? It’s like another planet.”