The Provocative Beast

Still in Berlin, looking for a place to spend the night, Rose remembers the circus tent on Anhalterstraße, and slips through the tent's canvas flap, settling down in his sleeping bag. Like the scene in the Berlin train station, the narrative is taken from Rose's 1983 play, Berlin Zoo. The actor narrates the scene lying on his back describing how he is awakened by a "clump of this slimy substance" hitting him on the chest, on the back, face, and neck. Recognizing it is just a playful elephant seeing a handsome young man or a pretty young girl, a sheyn maydele, and wanting to flirt by tossing a bit of dung his way, Rose happily wishes the elephant a good morning. Eventually discovered and banished from the tent by a circus guard, Rose runs away. Still, charged by the elephant's provocation, an incitement to act, he comes up with the idea to stage a big party - invite more elephants, a ragtag group of his Berlin friends, and other outcasts to knock down the Berlin Wall. An evermore-ecstatic Rose envisions a wild knock-the-Wall-down party ending in the unification of the two Germanys with himself riding on the elephant's back as the unified land's new king.

This scene was first written and staged in1983 in New York and then throughout West Germany. At that time The Wall still existed, as did its status as physical icon of the cold war and a divided Europe. "'Berlin Zoo' is about the demographic reality of a city that's divided", explained Rose in an interview in 1989 on the occasion of the play's premiere in L.A. "At the same time", he goes on to say, "this piece is also about the split within its protagonist." In 2005, 16 years after the big party that did in fact bring the Wall down, this scene has a more personal meaning, revealed in the relation between elephant and man or provocateur and provocateur. The protagonist, incited by the elephant's action, imagines fantastic possibilities. Of course he is thrown, his dream as the unifier unseated, his position as king of a unified world dethroned. Still, the moment arrives when the actor recognizes that he is the elephant: the provocateur, the strong sturdy beast who can now carry a fledgling dream on his back.

Rose leaves Germany celebrating by way of an ecstatic poem written and performed in German about a new unleashed energy. He is on his way to Wroclaw, Poland, and headlong into contact with Jerzy Grotowski's Active Culture and Open Movement…