Prepping the Pines

I’m about to start rehearsals for Whispering Pines, which is a new play by Richard Sanger. I’m in love with the script, and excited about the work.

I’d call it Chekhov-meets-East-Germany, if that makes any sense. The story of the play revolves around a woman named Renate who, many years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, applies to see her Stasi file and discovers that her husband was an informant. Much of the action involves reconstructing memories and imagining confrontations: what is the truth, and how do we respond to having to face it?

One of the most enjoyable aspects of my work is diving in to the world of a play. This year, alone, I’ve delved into 17th century France and Civil-War-era New England; before the end of the year it’ll be 19th century England and the Book of Genesis. Right now, my life is all about the German Democratic Republic. As part of my summer work, I’ve been reading books, watching films, and looking at documentaries about the socialist East German experiment.

The GDR employed about 97,000 people as part of its secret police force, and used a structured network of almost 200,000 informants. Taken along with part-time informers who made reports about their neighbours and friends, it is estimated there was one informer for every 6.5 citizens living in East Germany. By contrast, the Gestapo only ever managed one informant for every 2000 citizens in the Third Reich. People living in East Germany, before the wall fell, found themselves in a sort of panopticon — but a rather corrupt one.

People informed for myriad reasons — from a sense of duty, to a sense of loneliness, to a desire for “perks”, to fear of the consequences of not being a model socialist, to everything in between. The atmosphere must have been stifling… but in all my reading, the most painful stories are the ones where citizens have discovered, in the years since November 9, 1989, that people they loved and trusted were, in effect, state spies.

A few of my sources were terrific reads, so I want to pass them on in case you’re interested: