This past weekend, I had the opportunity to see a showcase performance in New York of Berlin, a new musical by a very promising young LDS artist, Erik Orton.

Before I tell you about it, a few disclaimers are in order. Erik Orton is a former student of mine, and I led an intensive WDA workshop of Berlin while he was here. In addition, he and I have begun a collaboration to turn my play A Love Affair With Electrons to a musical. He's a wonderful guy, an absolute credit to BYU and to the Church. Although I don't want this to be a 'proud papa' type review, I do sort of feel like a proud papa. I couldn't be more thrilled for him, and I wish the show the best.

Having said that, I must also say that Berlin remains a work in progress, with some genuine strengths and weaknesses.

It's set in Berlin immediately following WWII, and deals primarily with the Berlin airlift of 1948. It essentially interweaves four story lines, three historical and one fictional. First, it describes the career of Ernst Reuter, the first mayor of Berlin. Second, it deals with the Berlin airlift itself, and especially the efforts of General William Tunner, who was the main logistical genius that made the airlift possible. Third, it talks about the Soviet General Sokolovsky, whose family died in Stalingrad, and who consequently has become ideologically intransigent, and finally, the one fictional story, follows a young German woman, Stephanie Herzfeldt, who is raped and impregnated by a Russian soldier, and who subsequently struggles to survive and provide for her child in the bombed out rubble of a ruined city. She eventually meets and falls in love with an American pilot, and that becomes the main romantic subplot of the second act.

As I describe the plot of the play to you, it occurs to me how many right choices Orton has made. First of all, I like the decision to focus on Ernst Reuter, a fundamentally decent man in an indecent time. Reuter was a former communist who rejected Naziism, fled Germany a step ahead of the SS, lived in exile in Turkey during the war, then returned to Berlin, where he ran for mayor. As such, he embodies a number of the political contradictions and tensions of the era, while also providing the play with a powerful and compelling protagonist. What does it mean to serve as Mayor of a city not only lacking water, electricity, or working sewage lines, but with hardly a single standing building or cleared road? And yet, Reuter coped.

The Herzfeldt storyline is also well chosen. The story of Berlin in 1945-48 is primarily a story about politics, but a story in which the political became personal in ways I can barely comprehend. To see politicians making decisions and then to see the impact of those decisions on the lives or ordinary people makes for compelling drama.

Unfortunately, neither of these storylines is explored as fully as they might have been. Reuter would be more compelling if we actually saw him do more. For example, Tunner decides Berlin needs a third airfield. We see him decide that, and we see Reuter working alongside Berlin citizens to build one. What we don't see is Reuter working as a leader to get it built. We don't see politics working. Nor, for that matter, do we get a sufficient sense of Stephanie's day to day struggle to survive. And I don't care the romantic subplot, but when have I ever?

Let's face it, it's not even possible for us to imagine the tangled politics of Berlin in the forties. Here's a city run by four foreign nations, each of which 'controls' one sector. And it's basically an island city, smack dab in the middle of East German, which is Soviet controlled. French, American, British and Soviet military commanders had to unanimously agree on ANY action taken by ANY of them. They all know that power has to, at some point, be transferred back to some German. But it can't be just any German; it has to be someone who they ALL can trust, who can work with all of them, and who, most important of all, wasn't a Nazi. Erik suggests some of the political complexity of the time, but it really doesn't get explored anywhere near enough.

To some degree, in fact, the politics of this piece mirror the politics of another great musical, Les Mis. Let's face it, Les Mis is politically naive. A group of young student revolutionaries, who are Good because they're Idealistic, lead a foolish and ill conceived revolt, and are mostly slaughtered. It's all very Good guys/Bad guys, and it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. Les Mis is still a great musical, because there are other dramatic values than political ones at which it excels, but purely politically, it's naive.

Well, Berlin is sort of like that, only in Berlin, ca. 1945-48, politics was EVERYTHING. Frankly, Berlin feels more than a trifle jingoistic. The Russians are villainous and the Americans are heroic. Now, let me quickly add that the Berlin airlift WAS an American a moral triumph. Heck, we fed and clothed the people who had been our bitter enemy. But our actions were not purely altruistic; we were seeking strategic advantages too, no less than the Russians were.

Besides, when you see the good people of Berlin singing about how they're rejecting the communists, it's difficult to silence the nagging voice in the backs of our heads which point out that the very essence of Naziism was the rejection of Communism. And so we want at least some acknowledgment of German national guilt in bringing the architects of the Holocaust to power, or in permitting it to happen.

I find myself wondering if there's something in LDS culture that helps explain the political naivete of the piece. Do we not do politics well? Perhaps we overemphasize the notion that 'good and virtuous men' work to defeat 'wicked and designing men,' and miss the very essence of politics, which is flawed men of differing opinions trying to compromise, so that solutions can be found to fix things, help, get water running and roads built.

All in all, it was an engaging evening in the theatre. The house was mostly full. I'm thrilled for Erik and his cast, and am rooting, of course, for some producer to pick it up for Off-Broadway. The play was well directed and acted, and Erik's music is lovely. I especially like the final love song, "Love has no borders," though not the love scene it supports.

Eric Samuelsen