A small startup theater group, a play with no director and deserting actors was a disaster in the making. But a group of determined Berlin transplants decided to save The Harvest Chamber at any cost.

Imagine you’re a small start up theater company, producing English language theatre in Berlin, and your second ever production opens in two weeks. All of a sudden your director has a nervous breakdown, flies home to Canada, and your entire cast walk out because they don’t want to start all over again with a new director. Tickets have already been sold for the opening night, the press is expecting to see a show, and the theater is holding you to your contract to produce a play. What do you do?

This is exactly what happened to Three of Cups Productions. Artistic Director Ashley Brandt and producer Katie Griggs had to make a decision: to cancel the show, effectively killing the company or to pull an entirely new show out of nothing and put it on in less than 14 days.

What they decided to do was to not only put on a show but to make it bigger and better than anyone had ever thought possible. After all, they had nothing left to lose. So why not go for broke? Griggs and Brandt came up with a new concept for their play, decided that it required a cast five times larger than before, and set about producing it. By the time the show was cast and rehearsals were begun, there was only seven days left to the opening night.

The Harvest Chamber is a sci-fi comedy, set 100 years in the future. Human beings live in tiny pods, called cells, and communicate via the Internet, through their keyboards. No one has ever seen another human, and sexual reproduction takes place in the Harvest Chamber, where the eggs and sperm are extracted while the subjects are unconscious. The play itself is set in a forest clearing, where a man and woman meet for the first time, and are instructed to have sex with one another. The only problem is that neither of them have any idea of how to do this.

This is a meaty play. Some of the themes explored in the piece include the cycle of life, the idea of an Orwellian big brother culture, the manipulation of one group of individuals by another, and the influence of technology on our very existence as social animals. At only an hour and fifteen minutes, there is no time for the audience to snooze. Most of the humor comes from the irony of the fact that we are watching two grown adults trying to learn how to have sex from a book, and getting it all wrong.

The production itself is accompanied by a very abstract set design from Irish designer Will McNeice. The tree, which is central to this production, is split in half, with a square base and a series of vertical branches hanging from the sky. Incidentally, in the all-new Harvest Chamber, this tree has a speaking part! The entire set is white, as are the costumes, and the lighting design is sterile and bare, stripping away any remaining color you might see. The sound design is eerie, and none of this would give an audience member any clue that they are about to watch a very funny comedy. But the play doesn’t need it. The humor would come through even if this play were performed in a university café with a cardboard cutout tree and a beer crate for the actors to sit on.

With this production, Griggs and Brandt have achieved exactly what they set out to do. They turned a total disaster into a success. They produced a play with ten actors, and did it in exactly ten days. There is no hint of a rushed production on stage; the cast is made up of professionals, and everyone brought their own personality to the performance. Some classic moments to watch out for are Johnny Melville and Maike Möller’s opening scene, where they learn to speak for the first time, Laura Mohre and Diana Aurisch examining each other’s genitals to find that they don’t match up to the diagram (was there a computer error?), and Stella Stocker’s rather bizarre relationship with a sarcastic and obnoxious tree.

This production runs until Saturday. Go se it if you can. Remember, Big Brother is watching you.

Copyright Expatica