Tags: Max Cohnreich

The Berlin Diaries is about Stolowitz's fraught relationship with the journal of her great-grandfather, Max Cohnreich, a Jewish doctor who escaped Berlin during the Holocaust. The play has been reconfigured as an audio drama by Artists Repertory Theatre, a transformation that hasn't diminished either its intense compassion or its offbeat wit. The format suits Stolowitz's writing, which zigzags through Cohnreich's life with jazzlike grace, excavating traumas of the past to alleviate traumas of the present.