The Department of Theater at Swarthmore College presents the North American premier of contemporary German playwright Dea Loher‘s 2003 play INNOCENCE/ Unschuld on the weekend of December 7-9, 2007, in the Frear Ensemble Theater in the Lang Performing Arts Center (LPAC). The production uses David Tushingham’s translation of Loher’s play. The performances will take place at 8:30 pm Friday & Saturday, December 7 & 8, and at 3 pm on Saturday & Sunday, December 8 & 9.

Dea Loher is one of the leading young playwrights of the contemporary German stage, and her plays are increasingly produced internationally, as well. She was a student of the acclaimed playwright Heiner Müller, who served at the end of his life as the artistic director of the historic Berliner Ensemble, founded by Bertolt Brecht. INNOCENCE follows the tragicomic intersections of the lives of a set of contemporary characters, including a blind erotic dancer, two illegal African immigrants who unwittingly witness the suicide of a young woman, and a frustrated female philosopher determined to prove her thesis on the “unreliability” of our experience and understanding of the world. Loher’s subtly poetic play creates a cast of vivid characters that repeatedly discover mystery at the heart of their seemingly mundane lives.