In Germany’s Theaters, Stories of Exiles and Refugees

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BERLIN — In January 2017, on the coldest day of the year, six actors from Syria, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories set out from Berlin on a two-week road trip through Germany.

Their somewhat reluctant guide was Niels Bormann, an actor in the Maxim Gorki Theater’s house ensemble, and his passengers were the members of the theater’s newly assembled refugee troupe, the Exil Ensemble. That winter journey forms the basis for the Gorki’s absorbing and bittersweet “Winterreise,” the first production devised by the Exil Ensemble and developed together with Yael Ronen, the Gorki’s innovative in-house director.

The actors’ dysfunctional bus ride through Germany (with a brief excursion into Switzerland) becomes the framework for a performance that mixes personal narratives of displacement, escape and disorientation with shrewd, witty and, at times, irreverent observations. The Palestinian actress Maryam Abu Khaled seems less shocked than downright confused when her new German boyfriend introduces her to his other girlfriend. Beyond navigating the complex sexual mores of their new homeland, the new arrivals struggle to comprehend German bathrooms (How do people clean themselves using only paper? What’s with the ubiquitous toilet shelf?), the freezing weather and the even chillier vibe they often get from the natives.

The Israeli-born Ms. Ronen often builds her shows around biographical monologues that boldly examine her performers’ emotional scars. Although the members of the Exil Ensemble are from countries torn apart by war and conflict, their stories are tempered with generous doses of humor. Hussein Al Shatheli, a Palestinian born in Syria, describes his harrowing flight to Germany via Turkey, Greece and Switzerland and his many costly attempts to buy forged travel documents as a surreal, Kafkaesque journey.

Both on and off the bus, this winter journey proves to be a bumpy ride. The admonishments of their crotchety bus driver Wolfgang (also performed by Mr. Bormann), who lectures his passengers about punctuality and keeping the bus clean, are just a droll prelude to their disastrous arrival in their first stop, Dresden. Instead of basking in the capital of German Romanticism, the troupe witnesses one of Pegida’s “evening strolls,” the anti-immigrant movement’s demonstrations that take place every Monday night in front of the city’s opera house. From their hotel rooms, the actors observe the gathering from safe distance, puzzling over the anti-Muslim group’s signs, which include a reference to the German chancellor as “Fatima Merkel” and the slogan “Potatoes, Not Doner Kebabs.” “But don’t they go well together?” one of the actors asks.

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Their next stop, Weimar, brings an entirely different kind of fiasco. Instead of exploring the city of Goethe and Schiller, the group spends the day at the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp and leaves depressed. If “Winterreise” has a weak chapter, this is it; the irony of modern-day refugees who have profited from Germany’s “willkommenskultur” (“culture of welcome”) unexpectedly confronting an earlier Germany that mercilessly slaughtered its religious and ethnic minorities is something that goes largely unexplored during this awkward, uncomfortable segment.

Though it shares the title of Franz Schubert’s great song cycle set to poems by Wilhelm Müller, “Winterreise” has little in common with that melancholy work besides the theme of wandering. So it comes as a surprise when the members of the Exil Ensemble burst into a rendition of “Der Wegweiser,” (“The Signpost”), a song from late in the cycle that features the words “I must travel a road from which no one has ever yet returned.”

That melody does not stay with a viewer as potently as the deadpan relationship advice declaimed in a halting, automated voice on an app that the actors download to help them understand sex in Germany: “The clitoris is very sensitive in Germany; in Germany, men and women satisfy themselves; be careful not to hurt yourself in Germany; people do not show emotions in Germany.”

“Not a home, but an exile, shall the land be that took us in,” Bertolt Brecht wrote in his poem “Concerning the Label Emigrant,” which is recited by the Palestinian actor Karem Daoud during “Winterreise.” That description could also apply to Karl Rossmann’s experience of the New World in “Amerika,” an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s first, unfinished novel over at the Deutsches Theater.

Dusan David Parizek’s minimal production hews closely to its source material, taking us through the surreal misadventures of its protagonist, a 16-year-old immigrant shipped to New York City by his parents to avoid a sex scandal in his native Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic. With degrees of absurdity borrowed on a scale from Monty Python to Wes Anderson, young Karl is jerked around from his wealthy uncle’s Manhattan apartment to an ominous country house, a sinister Midwestern hotel and a circuslike theater in Oklahoma. On the way he is swindled, propositioned and occasionally helped by an array of oddball characters.

Four of the Deutsches Theater’s finest ensemble actors throw themselves into the show’s dozen supporting roles, with special mention going to the limber Ulrich Matthes, and Regine Zimmermann, who gives a scene-chewing performance (in exaggerated Viennese dialect) as the hotel’s head cook.

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Like the members of the Exil Ensemble, Kafka’s young protagonist must struggle with, and master, an existential sense of foreignness. Similar feelings of alienation and dislocation hound Andreas Kragler, the missing soldier who returns to his native Berlin after World War I in Bertolt Brecht’s “Drums in the Night,” which has been given a sweaty, exciting and somewhat messy production at the hands of the director Christopher Rüping at the Münchner Kammerspiel, the theater where the play premiered in 1922.

Kragler’s homecoming after four years as a prisoner of war somewhere in Africa is not exactly greeted with celebration. His fiancée, Anna, has just gotten engaged to the wealthy war profiteer Friedrich Murk, and Berlin is ablaze with revolution. Blood runs in the streets of the city’s newspaper district, where the play takes place, during the failed uprising of 1919. Spurned by his lover, Kragler takes to the streets and joins the revolution, yet deserts his comrades when Anna comes running back to him.

“Drums in the Night” was Brecht’s first produced play, but he later expressed dissatisfaction with its ending. Should Kragler have remained to fight rather than succumb to connubial bliss?

Mr. Rüping’s production shows you can have it both ways, with two slightly alerted versions (one listed as “by Brecht”; and the other as “based on Brecht”) that alternate on the theater’s schedule. Both versions, however, end with the plywood set being torn down and noisily fed into a wood chipper, one the director’s many inspired choices in this fast-moving and unpredictable staging. Mr. Rüping has other tricks up his sleeve, which seem contrived to alienate the audience as much as to engage with it. Actors wander among the first rows of the audience, interrupt the play to comment on the action, deliver speeches or sing songs.

The small cast performs with admirable cohesion and intensity, but the production’s antics make it difficult for individual performances to shine. Damian Regbetz, an Australian actor and vocal performer cast in a variety of smaller roles, makes the most memorable impression as he meanders around the stage, crooning karaoke versions of pop songs into a microphone or politely — and then not so politely — asking an unseen figure backstage to return to his seat.

Leaving the theater on the elegant Maximilianstrasse, Munich’s Fifth Avenue, you might feel shaken, spent or exhilarated. As with “Amerika” and “Winterreise,” the sense of discombobulation that Mr. Rüping’s production leaves you with is a small taste of what it’s like to be a stranger in a strange land.