Duffy lifts the lid on communist East Germany in Puzzler, his world-premiere play at Sacred Fools. The intrigue, duplicity and betrayal that kept that criminal enterprise going for nearly 50 years are well-dramatized in Puzzler, which is set in Berlin in the early 1990s.
Mark Birnhall, in a masterful performance, plays Niklas Keller, a Federal employee whose Kafkaesque task it is to sift through the old files of the Stasi--the dreaded East German secret police. In a country where one in six was a paid informer, the Stasi amassed a mountain of information, all of which was shredded when the Wall fell. Now Keller and a few dozen others like him must try and reassemble those files and make sense of them.
It is a ridiculous, even insane enterprise but Keller, like the dutiful civil servant he is, keeps picking through the bags of confetti like a man searching for a needle in a haystack. We soon learn that he is also being driven by a personal motive: to find the record of the last conversation he had with his wife, before she disappeared some 30 years ago. The Stasi, of course, had something to do with that.
Additional urgency is supplied by his boss, Fischer (the urbane Ian Patrick Williams), who informs him that text-recognition computers will take over from him in the morning. Also ratcheting up the suspense is the arrival of a young American woman, Robin (Jeanne Syquia), who claims to be a student writing a paper on the machinations of the Stasi (yet is carrying a pistol!)
As all these strange, noirish things unfold, a mysterious woman on the second floor (Ruth Silveira) watches the action through a peephole (and occasionally explains things, or translates from the German, for the benefit of the audience). It's a relief to know that spying is alive and well in Germany.
