[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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