You suddenly complete me

I've always had this fascination with twins. One of my best friends, with whom I lived for half a year, is an identical twin. I would pry her for details and childhood stories constantly. Did you blame the other one when you were afraid of geting in trouble? (Yes.) Did your parents mix you up? (No...because they kept our ID bracelets on for months as infants) Do you have a special connection that goes beyond words? (Yes.) Then there are the 7 year old fraternal twin sons of a friend of mine. They couldn't be more different, personality-wise, but the cord between them is tight. Whether they're playing or joking or fighting for attention, there's this constant awareness of the presence of the other.





So you can imagine my reaction when Johannes cast me as a twin in his most recent piece, raus bist du. Dream-come-true time.





For those of us who are not twins, I think the attraction lies in having a person who understands us totally, with whom we have an unbreakable, unspeakable connection. Twins seem complete. Like they are not searching for another half, because they already have one.



But I'm getting ahead of myself....



My twin in the piece is played by Eva. In real life we have many similarities, like where we went to college, and the fact that neither of us was raised with TV and both of us have a parent who works in a church. We also have many differences, most visibly our sizes. Now I know you're probably wondering, does that mean I get to play the "bad" twin, since I'm bigger? Gute Frage. For the answer, you'll have to come to the show...



Both famous and obscure twin stories inspired us while we were developing the characters. Johnny and Luther Htoo, for example, the chain-smoking Burmese leaders of a gurilla group in Thailand in the 90s. They believed they had magical powers including invulnerability to bullets and the ability to kill a man by pointing a rifle at the ground and concentrating. And lots of you have probably heard about the twins who were at one point the Prime Minister and President of Poland. Super compelling are the Gibbons twins in England, often referred to as the Silent Twins because they developed their own secret language. They refused to speak to others after the age of 8. Their creativity took the form of writing, and they both finished books as teenagers. But at the age of 15, after a rash of adolescent crimes, they were institutionalized, where they remained for years. They made a pact only to speak if one of them died, and that is what happened. In 1993, after their release, one of the twins mysteriously died, and the other began to tell her story. Google "gibbons twins" if I've got you curious...



And it goes on: there's an open court case here in Germany at the moment, a jewelry robbery at KaDeWe the police can't quite solve. The DNA they've got on the glove they found? It belongs to identical twins.