About the work
“White Passing” is a play by the Berlin writer Sarah Kilter and was one of the three winning texts of the playwriting competition at the 2021 Autor:innentheatertage at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. It premiered on 4 September 2021 during the festival’s Long Night of Authors at the Deutsches Theater, as a co-production with Schauspiel Leipzig directed by Thirza Bruncken. In May 2022 the full text was published in the magazine Theater heute.
Plot
At its centre is a nameless young artist, “She”, whose family history is German and Algerian but whose background shows neither in her looks nor in her name. She now lives in Charlottenburg among friends from well-off academic families such as Max, Jule and Thomas. When they plan a surprise for her birthday, she flees at night right across Berlin to Wedding, to the area around Badstraße where she used to live with her father. A nameless chorus and two stock figures of the majority society, a teacher and a doctor, comment on her journey.
Cultural significance
The play takes a satirical and self-ironic look at assumptions about origin, at life between two social worlds and at the bubble of the theatre scene. In 2022 it was nominated for the Mülheim Drama Prize and invited to the Heidelberger Stückemarkt; the same year rbb and Deutschlandfunk Kultur produced a radio version directed by Nick-Julian Lehmann, and the critics’ poll of Theater heute named Sarah Kilter emerging playwright of the year.