[My generous Tel Aviv friend Helen Kaye has sent me
another pair of her Jerusalem Post reviews from earlier this month. In this instance, both plays are by Israeli
dramatists, Hillel Mittelpunkt (b. 1949) and Hanoch Levin (1943-99); coincidentally,
both writers are also native Tel Avivians (though, of course, Levin was born in
Mandatory Palestine). Mittelpunkt’s The
Others is a new drama, while Levin’s The
Child Dreams (also known as The
Dreaming Child) premièred in 1993. I’ll let Helen tell you more.]
The Others
Written
& directed by Hillel Mittelpunkt
Cameri
Theater, Tel Aviv; 4 June 2018
A Mittelpunkt play is always an Event, but this is
the first Mittelpunkt play I’ve seen that doesn’t seem to be sure of itself,
trying to paper over the cracks with a lot of posturing and shouting. Like some
of his other plays, (Track to Damascus – 2010, Then,
Prague – ’13) Others
is set in the Palestine of the British Mandate, here a few months short of its
end, a period that Mittelpunkt has described as “a fertile cushion for ‘big’
dramas” because of the various and competing forces in Jewish society at the
time.
We are in Ida’s (Irit Kaplan) shabby, beachside
boarding house – a metaphor for transience – where jobless jazz musician Amiram
(Avishai Meridor) is playing the piano prior to an audition that may or may not
provide him with employment. Another resident is Thea (Kineret Limoni) who very
often entertains British soldiers in her room. Then there’s the silent Mr. Mayer
(Itzhak Heskia), a Survivor, dumped by the Jewish Agency whom a relative is
supposed to, but never does, pick up.
Then one morning Dassi (Neta Garty) arrives. Her
very presence is heinous. She is an outcast, disowned by her family, her name
on a Jewish blacklist of ‘traitors’. Her crime? She fell in love with, and
married, a British soldier, bore his child, and went to live in the UK. She is
here, ostensibly, for her sister Gila’s (Joy Rieger) wedding, but that plan
goes awry due to her father, Marshak (Dudu Niv) and despite her sympathetic
Aunt Riva (Esti Kosovitsky). From there it’s basically downhill until the (more
or less) deus ex machina ending.
I suspect that what Mittlepunkt is trying to say
with his cast of solitary and diverse characters is that we are all Others to
somebody, especially here, especially then, and even more especially now when,
if we cannot see and respect the Other – whoever he or she may be – destruction
may be the consequence.
Or as Ida says “you see how the best ideas lead to
the worst deeds? There’s no ideal in the world that justifies murdering a 17
year old.”
The characters themselves are mostly believable.
It’s some of what they do and how they act that seems contrived, even forced
sometimes as in the case of Marshak, presumably feeling guilty over his
lucrative World War II dealings with the British, whom Dudu Niv uncomfortably
plays as a bullying, raving male harridan. Esti Kosovitsky’s Riva, Dassi’s only
link to Eretz Israel, radiates sympathy, but that seems to be her sole function
while the purpose of Amiram, whom Meridor plays with a nice mix of anxiety and
nonchalance, indicates that he’s carrying a large torch for Dassi, and that’s
it. The Gila character also serves, more or less, only as a conduit but Rieger
does the best she can with her.
As Dassi, the charming Neta Garti anticipates too
much, her body and voice often signaling what’s going to happen before it does,
which is unfortunate. We get to know only that she considers herself a victim,
that she lies a lot, that she’s manipulative, which is why what she finally
does cannot ring true.
Others truly springs
fully to life first in Limoni’s unabashed yet, still innocent (despite her
profession), Thea, then in Itzhak Heskia’s quivering,
slowly-getting-less-terrified, silent-but-speaking-volumes Mayer, and finally
and most wonderfully in Irit Kaplan’s energetic, no-nonsense, utterly decent
Ida whose for-the-record barkings actually fool nobody. It’s she who gives The
Others heft.
* * * *
The Child Dreams
By
Hanoch Levin
Directed
by Omri Nitzan
Cameri/Habima
Theaters, Tel Aviv; 14 June 18
Is
there more perfect tranquility than the sight of a quietly sleeping child, the
eyelashes gently feathering pink cheeks, the small, even breaths as the little
chest rises and falls?
“Let
time stop now at the peak of happiness because better than this it cannot be,”
says the Mother (Ola Schur-Selektar) as she looks at her son (Naama Chetrit)
asleep in his little white bed, and at his Father (Ben Yosipovich) across the
bed while Yosef Bardanashvili’s starry (for the moment) music reinforces the
idyll.
Then
Hell breaks forth. Literally. From a gaping blood-red maw suddenly come
tumbling refugees, desperate, clutching their suitcases, and a violinist, dying
of a gunshot wound to the belly, still unable to believe that he should be
targeted.
This
juxtaposition drives Omri Nitzan’s beyond superb production of The Child
Dreams, each nostalgic, indifferent, tender, brutal, white-hot and
unrelentingly poetic moment perfectly tempered for maximum impact.
Polina
Adamov’s set is brutalist, á la 1950s Soviet architecture, the stage being on
two levels which a curve (to tumble on, the curve that life throws, the
curvature of the uncaring earth – you pick the metaphor) connects. The bed on
which we first see the Child becomes a boat, becomes an island, becomes limbo.
The colors of Adamov’s costumes are drab, washed out, save for the gold mesh
and bright yellow dresses, respectively, of The Woman Born for Love and the
Governor’s Wife (Ruth Asarsai). The Dead Children wear white underwear
(underwear is a Nitzan trademark signaling vulnerability and often guilelessness).
On
the surface Child deals with the fortunes of a group of refugees who
attempts to find shelter after being driven from their homes. It is the Child,
wrested from peace and innocence, hounded inexorably towards death, who drives
the narrative. For parents, for us all, the death of a child represents an
ultimate awfulness. But Levin doesn't do surface; The Child Dreams is universal; it is at once a searing
indictment of man's ghastly inhumanity to man and an anthem to mercy, even
hope.
The
20th was a seminal century, encompassing the glorious – the discovery of
antibiotics, man on the moon, and the gruesome – two horrendous world wars, MAD
[mutually assured destruction], Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, monsters
masquerading as humans, and then, around the time that Child premiered we
had the Balkan wars, the seemingly endless civil wars in Africa that are still
ongoing, and the refugees that inevitably result from conflict.
Which
makes the revival of Child almost mandatory because, at the moment,
there are some 21 million refugees in the world, more than at any time since
World War II. We have some of them and we treat them about as well as the
Governor (Alexander Krul/Shahar Raz) – he has an electric bullhorn in place of
a head – treats the refugees that attempt to land on his Island. Child
is a morality play but there’s no God present.
The
20 member cast plays many roles and every actor gives of his utmost and with
utmost effect. Most outstanding are Schur-Selektar whose Mother dredges up the
strength to continue with no hint of pathos, Chetrit’s Child is real,
disciplined and infinitely touching, and Oshrat Ingedeshat impresses as a compassionate
Dead Child. As the Woman Born for Love and the faceless Governor’s Wife,
Asarsai is beginning to realize the promise she showed in Woyzzek while
Norman Issa chills as the rapacious Captain.
Perhaps
Child’s greatness best comes through in this exchange between the Lame
Youth (Shlomi Avraham) and a Bum (Eran Sarel): “You wrote those poems to make
an impact/And now you try to impress by tearing them up./It’s too dramatic,
excessive, unnecessary/. . . You will yet learn to despair/More quietly, more
modestly/In silence. As you ought.”
[Readers
should note that The Child Dreams was written long before the current refugee and immigrant crises that
have enveloped Europe (mostly from the Syrian war against ISIS and the simultaneous
civil war) and the United States (because of Donald Trumps immigration policies
concerning our southern border). Though the Cameri/Habima production seems
especially relevant to the latter issue right now, it was obviously planned and
scheduled long before the Mexican-border crisis involving separating migrant
children from their incarcerated parents developed here.
[This
is Helen’s fifteenth installment of “Dispatches from Israel”; her last
collection of reviews was posted on Rick On Theater on 18 April. Helen’s also contributed several other articles
for this blog, but the list of her guest blogs has grown so long, I won’t include
it here. Instead, I refer interested
readers to “Dispatches 10” (11 November 2016) for the dates of Helen’s posts up
to then—look down in the afterword—and add numbers 11 (17 June 2017), 12 (27
October 2017), 13 (27 February 2018) , and 14.]
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