25 February 2020

Dispatches from Israel 20

by Helen Kaye

[My friend Helen Kaye has been sending me articles and reviews from her work on the theater and culture desk at the Jerusalem Post since 2010 (“Help! It’s August: Kid-Friendly Summer Festivals in Israel,” posted on Rick On Theater  on 12 September), just under a year-and-a-half after I started the blog.  Her first “Dispatches from Israel” was posted on 23 January 2013, a little more than seven years ago.  Below is “Dispatches from Israel 20,” the latest in Helen’s line of 23 posts on ROT.

[I’m always glad to post Helen’s reviews from the JP because, first, it’s a window into the theater world of another society, and, second, I get to bring another voice to ROTters aside from my own.  Furthermore, when I read Helen’s JP reviews, for which she’s allowed very few words—I marvel at how clear she is in so little space, while I go on for pages and pages to no more effect and probably less.

[So here, once again (and not for the last time, I fervently hope), is Helen Kaye on the current Israeli theater scene.] 

Spring Awakening
By Frank Wedekind
Translated by Ido Riklin
Directed by Moshe Kepten
Habima Theater, Tel Aviv; 13 January 2020

These 14-year-old kids are dirt-ignorant about their physical selves. It’s not their fault but that of the society in which they live; that late 19th century German society that lays a God-mandated taboo on any discussion of the body, let alone reproduction, that makes a near-sacred virtue of obedience to parental or other authority, that enshrines repression as a virtue.

Wedekind’s Spring Awakening (1891/2), aptly subtitled A Children’s Tragedy, lays out the dire consequences in all their awful detail. Moshe Kepten’s unsentimental, spare production shows us these with restraint, compassion and love. This is a reverberant Spring Awakening that leaves us with the apprehension that our own teens, even though the knowledge of human reproduction is no longer proscribed, must also come to terms with bodies that are undergoing the (always) fraught transition from childhood to grown-up.

“One more summer of childhood,”  Wendla Bergman (Amit Farkash) begs her mother (Miki Peleg), who wants to put her in long dresses as a sign she’s growing up, but it’s not to be. “Tell me how babies come into the world,” she entreats but Mrs Bergman, as quashed, alas, as her child, literally cannot. Even after school-idol Melchior (Nadir Eldar) rapes her (he really, really didn’t mean to), she has no idea what’s happened, a letter he writes her leads to Melchior’s incarceration in a merciless reform school, and a botched abortion later kills her.

The sexual yearnings (unidentified of course), assailing Moritz (Sheffi Marciano), his father’s (Gil Frank) unachievable expectations, physical and verbal abuse, are too much for him and he commits suicide. The Utterly Depraved Forbidden feelings battering Ernst (Kobi Marimi) turn him upside-down; he’s caged, outside, yet sings of another world, one that will allow him to be gay, to be who he is without shame.

And yes, there are songs in this production. The melodies are by Ohad Hitman, the lyrics are by Noam Horev, and their purpose (achieved), is to complement and enrich the action, not to turn the play into a musical. Moreover they are sung wonderfully by Ernst, by Martha (Roni Dalumi) whose powerful “My Own Child” vows that he will grow up free of the verbal, physical and sexual abuse she is suffering, by Wendla and some of the others.

And so it goes. The times they live in bruise and maim these children, and if it all seems a tad over the top, it must be remembered that the play anticipates German Expressionism – an emotionally subjective movement.

The acting is uniformly excellent. You never feel that the adult actors who are playing these luckless children are talking down to their characters, whom each has made special. For instance, Shahar Raz, who plays Hansy – the school sneak – has invested him with a delicious snigger.

Some of the adult roles are deliberate caricatures, such as Frau Knochenbruch (Ruth Landau) or Herr Sonnenstich (Rotem Kenan), the names themselves deliberate parodies, while the others, such of those as Peleg and Frank, are cast rigidly in the mold of their time.

Eran Atzmon’s set comprises 10 chairs, a carpet of dead leaves and a ‘stone/wood cage’ that turns (literally) into a variously lighted (Avi Yona Bueno) arena – a boxing ‘ring’ turned on edge – for many of the variously venued events. To this must be added Guy Rotem’s rich video art that also enhances what’s happening.

Habima’s Spring Awakening? Theater at its most rewarding.

[Wedekind’s Spring Awakening [Frühlings Erwachen] is the source of the rock musical of the same title with book and lyrics by Steven Sater and music by Duncan Sheik that ran on Broadway   Conceived in the late 1990s, it went through various workshops, concerts, and rewrites to open at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre on 10 December 2006; the production closed on 18 January 2009 after 859 performances and 29 previews, winning eight 2007 Tonys (including Best Musical), plus 14 other Broadway and Off-Broadway awards.].

*  *  *  *
The Wanderers
By Anna Ziegler
Translated by Roy Chen
Directed by Amir I. Wolf
Gesher Theater, Tel Aviv; 28 January 2020

What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How come we’re at once transparent and opaque? Can we really say of somebody “I know you”? Aren’t there things we keep to ourselves, deep within the crannies of the heart? The Wanderers Anna Ziegler’s very accomplished, tightly knit Chinese puzzle box of a play takes a step or two toward telling us because in its essence Wanderers is a play about love, about intimacy, about levels of intimacy among two seemingly disparate sets of people. Among us all therefore?

We meet Ultra Orthodox couple Esther (Tali Osadchy) and Shmuli (Henry David) just after their arranged marriage. Each is holding one end of a black ribbon (the ties that bind?). They have not yet consummated their marriage. We meet Ultra Secular Sophie (Netta Shpiegelman) and Abe (Shlomi Bertonov) at a perilous moment in their not unfraught marriage. Both are celebrity authors. Then Abe’s initially impulsive online flirtation with glamorous movie star Julia Cheever (Lena Freifeld) pushes itself between them.

What subsequently occurs takes place on Michael Kramenko’s admirable set of ramps and screens under Karen Granek’s elusive, evocative lighting, as the connections among these five people slowly emerge.

Mr. Wolf has directed his actors as if in a series of screen close-ups, and they have responded with passionate, precisely nuanced performances that receive the audience’s absolute, totally focused attention.

“When I left Brooklyn, I thought I’d broken through the fence,” says Esther to Shmuli at once point, “but I find it’s inside me.” Osadchy’s Esther is multi-dimensional, at once fearful and courageous, pliant and adamant, hesitant and determined. As Shmuli, David is both a devout and unbending adherent of his traditions, yet willy-nilly starts to question them because he loves, and to him that love is holy. Bertonov’s Abe (Bertonov also wrote the music for the play), runs the gamut from near abject fear to brashness, as he strives to communicate, to acknowledge his heart. “Of course I hide things from myself,” he says to Sophie, whom Shpiegelman portrays with humor, guts, confidence and lack of it. Freifeld’s sensual Julia is part real, part goddess, part illusion.

This thoughtful, very excellent The Wanderers is a treat – perhaps a signpost – for the eyes and the heart.

*  *  *  *
Gently
By Shiri Nadav Naor
Directed by Moshe Naor
Lyrics by Shaanan Streett
Score by Amir Lekner
Choreography by Tom Appelbaum
Haifa Theater, Haifa; 29 January 2020

There is a deliberate irony – not forgetting the title – to  this appealing, sometimes raucous, sometimes tender, always entertaining, often hard-hitting musical, not least in its (unintentional, I’m sure), stars. They are the comic relief of Adam Hirsch and Ashot Gasparian as a couple of lazy, benighted, racist cops who have some nifty musical numbers as they bedevil, torment and generally harass the poor and black refugees of Gently. Another irony is that (mainly) Ethiopian Jewish actor/singers, themselves the targets of local cops, and whose Jewishness the all-white Rabbinate questions, are portraying African refugees whom nobody wants in a country built upon the ashes of the Jewish Holocaust so that Jews might avoid persecution by having a place to call their own.

The musical’s title is the name of an intinerant musician, the very charismatic Gili Yalo who charms his way through the character of Malachi Gently. The elegant and classy Esther Rada plays his wife Miriam who has recently been delivered of a white baby – the actual delivery scene being a very effective company number to the Hebrew translation of “Amazing Grace”. When the cops see the white baby, they arrest Miriam – she sings the bitter, hard-edged “Just Shut Up” to help her keep her mouth shut and thus avoid a beating. In desperation Malachi turns to Yaron Brovinsky who has a tour de force of his own, keeping his foot permanently in his trying-to-be PC mouth as he plays TV celeb Michael Fried, whose cleaning lady Miriam is. Fried’s intervention does the trick, Miriam and baby are released, and in gratitude Malachi invites him to dinner. Wouldn’t you know that the cops turn up there too – and things go disastrously wrong.

But you can’t have a musical that ends in tragedy, so for the finale the whole company joins in the Hebrew version of “I wish I knew how it feels to be free” by Billy Taylor and Richard Carroll Lamb that was the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement

Lily Ben Nachshon’s outrageous set of pylons, electronic billboards and skyscrapers behind a scrim is perfectly an urban grimscape. Yuval Kaspin’s costumes are ingenious, often glitzy to vulgar, and therefore wonderful, the songs tell their own story, properly complementing the plot, Bambi’s lighting zings along, the singing by both principals and the group called Liberation is top-notch, and if the choreography is prosaic, it doesn’t matter because – bottom line – Mr. Naor has given us not only a humdinger of a production but also something to think about.

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