I never left Berlin. Ask my tax advisor, who is also my ex. I never left Berlin, and never will. I am just one of those artists with one of those annoying bios that reads: based between. But, in all honesty, I’m in Hollywood because I wanted to go to film school without going to school, and I needed a break from Bertolt Brecht and Frank Castorf and Marx. So, it’s all gas stations, ATMs, and Lana Del Rey for me right now. When I first got here, I often said that, after being in Berlin for so long, the pace of living in Los Angeles felt like snorting white powder off the hood of a Lamborghini on the highway; unsafe, yes, also very fast, and absolutely toxic. I loved it, and still do, but I am haunted by the sound of recycling clunking into those green- and brown-domed bins. I am haunted by the snap of bike paths and the unhappy face of my gynecologist. What I am trying to say is: I miss healthcare, biking, and responsible trash collection.

The main reason I left, though, was because Max Pitegoff and I wanted to open another theater. We had run New Theater out of a storefront in Kreuzberg, done the whole thing at the Volksbühne, then ran TV Bar. I think it was a matter of wanting to have new questions. At a certain point, I felt bound to repeat the same performance over and over. While running the bars, Max and I joked that every night was a play taking place on the miniature stage of a table top. So, the months, and then years turned into an infinite string of manageable dramas. Petite Kammerspiele. We started to photograph the tables before we cleaned up, smudged with ash, with wine, with gum and other traces of the evening’s performance. But the truth was, we needed to zoom the fuck out: from the ritualized soap opera of washing up; from the dialogues of friends; from the dramaturgy of an evening spent in the same place for the 100th time.

I’ve learned you cannot escape yourself by moving; my problems followed me. But we have found plenty of new questions, as the proverbial “bar” for theater is very low in LA; for the most part, it’s just a place for actors to audition for screen time. And so much of the work that gets made in Hollywood never gets made. Years of storyboarding, thousands of hours yapping on cell phones and tapping on scripts and pitches and decks that go nowhere. It is a place of stagnancy, an emotional swamp. Ultimately, that makes theater an extremely exciting antidote: We can work quickly and, when we’re lucky, harness the machine and its highly glossed performers for our own Euro-infused-antics. Anyway, Max and I spend all our time in a black box, often barely seeing the sun, so it’s almost like we never left Berlin. The biggest surprise is how much I miss “the cultural dentists,” which is how I’ve always referred to the civically engaged theater-goers of Berlin, who attend because that’s what people in a society do – in LA, we have to invent them from scratch.

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This text appears in “Post-Cool Berlin,” a section in the 20th-anniversary issue of Spike, along with texts by Gisela Capitain, Robert Schulte, Jenny Schlenzka, and Ludwig Engel. The last hard copies are available in our online shop —