The A.J. Fletcher Foundation, an organization dedicated to bettering the lives of North Carolinians, awarded Raleigh’s Burning Coal Theatre Company a $37,500 matching grant last week. This grant will help fund the world’s first performance of The Iron Curtain Trilogy in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Tony Award-winning playwright David Edgar created this series, which will debut Sep. 4–27 before moving to London’s Cockpit Theatre Nov. 13–30, according to a press release.
Burning Coal Theatre Artistic Director Jerome Davis said he envisioned the production years ago after the theatre performed the piece as separate shows, but never in its full three-part form. The company performed the U.S. premiere for two of the three plays.
“The plays are all about that geopolitical event [the fall of the Berlin Wall], which I think is the most important event in the world since the World War II, and it led to a complete reshaping of the history of Europe and continues to play out to this day in Syria, with the Arab Spring that took place three years ago and with the situation in Ukraine that was happening just a month or so ago,” Davis said. “All of those things are a direct result of the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
Edgar came to Raleigh five times in the last decade to work with Burning Coal Theatre on the individual shows, according to Davis. Edgar’s relationship with the theatre started after a fellow playwright, Alex Finlayson, approached him about the company’s production of one of his plays. When Finlayson’s sister, Kate, was in Burning Coal’s production of Pentecost (the second part of the trilogy), she told Edgar the play was “the best thing [she] had ever seen,” leading Edgar to visit the theatre when they performed the play again 10 years later.
“What really has set this up is our relationship with him, the playwright, and the fact that we had already done all three of them,” Davis said. “I wouldn’t think about taking on something this big from scratch. The fact that we already know how to do them, more or less, means that we have a better chance than a theatre that was just attacking them blindly for the first time.”
Performing the trilogy poses many challenges, including Edgar’s “dense” and “complex” writing style, the minimum 2.5 hour length of each play, the huge cast and a set that has to blow up at the end of one of the plays, according to Davis.
“Figuring them out is not easy and one of the reasons his plays don’t get done as much as they ought to is, I think, that a lot of artistic directors start reading them and about five pages in their heads are spinning around,” Davis said. “His plays take work and we like that. We like doing plays that challenge our audiences and get them leaning forward and listening and trying to work things out in place of just giving them up a pure, simple, easy story that everybody gets after the first five minutes.”
The events surrounding the fall of the Iron Curtain also add to the trilogy’s complexity.
“When the curtain fell, freedom came to people, so the question is now what are they going to do with it and sometimes that answer can get ugly depending on who is involved with it, so it is a complicated story,” Davis said.
Students studying world history at five high schools in Wake County will receive 450 tickets for three consecutive matinees (about 150 tickets for each matinee) as part of the educational partnership between the theatre and the Wake County Public School System, according to Davis.
The theatre’s director of education will go to the participating schools with actors to perform an excerpt from one of the plays, after which Edgar will talk to the students via Skype to discuss what they thought about the performance.
To add to the discussion, members of the Department of European Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill will create an interactive website dedicated to giving students a more comprehensive understanding of the Cold War from the dictatorial rule of the Soviet Union to the differing ways in which countries under its rule managed to escape.
On Nov. 9, 1989, East Germany’s politburo agreed to set up a system that allowed Germans to apply for visas to travel outside of the country after hearing complaints from its citizens, so they sent a spokesperson out to deliver a press release to the public.
“There were hundreds of press, and people all over the country were watching it on television on these big screens set up out on the Berlin Wall…and the guy reads this thing saying, ‘Forthwith, we shall create a system that allows people to travel outside of the country,’” Davis said. “He read this speech and when it was done, one of the press people raised their hand and asked what does forthwith mean, and he didn’t know, and he said, ‘Uh, it means right now!’ Over the wall they went, and the crowds just exploded and started climbing over the walls, and the guards they were just there with their machine guns and normally they were looking at one or two people trying to climb the wall, but there were 50,000 people trying to climb the wall.”
No one gave the guards orders to shoot, so they laid down their arms and let the people pass through, according to Davis.
“We tell the story in America that communism is this really bad idea that somebody had and thank God it’s over, but it’s not that at all,” Davis said. “It’s a far more complex story than that and we find out in so many different ways, in so many of those little countries over there. It’s important that young people know that story, which is really why we wanted to do the plays and work with the school system on it.”
