Riley Bartlebaugh (front) and Christian Sullivan act out a scene during a rehearsal of ‘The Human Capacity’ in the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on Monday, April 27.

Jennifer Barclay is obsessed with Berlin.

Her play, The Human Capacity, which premieres this weekend at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, reflects on the communist German Democratic Republic and its implications for the human race.

“It is a period of time that we don’t often talk about,” said Riley Bartlebaugh, a senior theatre major and actress in the play. “It would be very easy to talk about it in a very sterile way, but it’s impossible to do with the way that the play is written because it’s all about people.”

The play deals with the former GDR, more commonly known as East Germany, during the Cold War. It picks an introspective lens, however, and depicts history through the lives of people who lived through the Stasi regime, participated in its severe brand of security work and dealt with the ramifications after the group and the Berlin Wall fell.

The play is a decade in the making and will run for the first time in the Kogod Theatre this Saturday. Before bringing it to America, Barclay conceived the work during a six-month backpacking trip that landed her in Germany’s historic capital.

“The more I learned about Berlin and its history and the wall and what it was like when it was divided into countries, the more it was fascinating to me,” Barclay said. “I became most fascinated with the personal stories that I heard, both about Stasi officers and regular citizens that weren’t trying to do anything wrong. Some people ended up having their lives and their families completely shattered.”

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Barclay “obsessively” researched. She visited the site of the Berlin Wall. She interviewed people whose lives it changed.

Back in America, The Human Capacity won many awards and secured many residencies, but hasn’t been thoroughly produced until now.

Production within the theater, dance and performance studies school began last spring. Under the direction of Forum Theatre Artistic Director Michael Dove, the play seeks to not only narrate the horrors of the GDR’s big-brother-like government, but call into question the human capacity for “evil, cruelty, mercy [and] forgiveness,” according to Barclay.

Because of its humanistic scope, Dove allowed the actors to get “down and dirty” with the text, feeling their way through parts that are based on the true lives of former GDR citizens and authority figures, according to Bartlebaugh.

“The show is really challenging,” she said. “It’s a really big show in the sense that it spans a lot of time … and political situations. In order to tell the story well, we have to be more human with it.”

Unlike Bartlebaugh, who plays a victim of extreme Stasi interrogation practice, Natasha Joyce plays a character who lives in the 1990s, after the German reunification, but still must piece back together the events that shaped her country.

“[My character is] a file librarian,” said the senior theatre major. “My job is to take all of the scraps and the files left over from the Stasi government and put them back together.”

Joyce’s fictional character (whose job was real and still exists today) is, in the play, the daughter of Erich Honecker’s personal cartographer, Hagen Koch, who mapped out the Berlin Wall.

This is exemplary. Throughout, the play intertwines the hypothetical with the historical to discover how calculated, diplomatic motives have a trickle-down effect, not only into the lives of the governed, but also the generations to come.

“I hope that the more specific I am, [I can] delve into themes that are more universal,” Barclay said. “I want to bring up … personal reflections about what we’re capable of.”

The Human Capacity runs from May 2 to May 9 in the Kogod Theatre at The Clarice. Tickets are on sale at theclarice.umd.edu.