Dispatches from Israel 18

by Helen Kaye

[Helen Kaye, a theater reviewer and cultural reporter for the Jerusalem Post, has been a contributor to Rick On Theater for many years now; her last contribution was posted on 26 March 2019.  I’ve published or republished many of her articles on theater and travel (which have been posted under the byline Helen Eleseari), but all her reviews have all been posted under the collective title “Dispatches from Israel,” of which this is the 18th installment, always covering two or more notices of productions from various theaters around the country.

[In this collection, Helen has included four reviews dating from 13 August to 10 September; I’m posting them in reverse chronological order because I want to spotlight the latest play for which Helen sent me a review, Shahar Pinkas’s Next in Line.  I won’t recap her review, but I want to point out that Pinkas’s biblical tale of King David, the 11th-century BCE king of Israel, is presented as a commentary on current Israeli society, politics, and political personalities.  In that sense, it resembles William Shakespeare’s history plays.

[Several of the playwrights and directors of the shows covered in “Dispatches 18” have appeared in previous installments of Helen’s contributions: playwright Pinkas (1 past review), director Omri Nitzan (4), and playwright-director Aya Kaplan (1); curious ROTters are urged to use the search application above to look up these artists’ past work as discussed on ROT by Helen Kaye.]

Next in Line

By Shahar Pinkas

Directed by Shir Goldberg

Beersheva Theater; 10 September 2019

Via the “TV” we are being earnestly addressed by King David (Natan Datner) regarding the necessity of peace talks with the Philistines and the equal necessity of making sure they fully understand the mailed fist in the armored glove, i.e. that real peace is never on the table. During his address David wears his crown, an uncomfortable looking iron circlet to which are attached sharp-pointed triangles that look like spears, alternatively a crown of thorns. And up pops another analogy “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” ([Shakespeare’s] Henry IV, p. 2, Act III, sc.1)

And the crown, right now, and incidentally he never removes it, sits insecurely on David’s head. He’s old. He’s sick. He’s failing. All the more reason to hold on, not to let go, to relinquish power to another. Holding onto power is the focus of his thinking – does this strike a chord? All else is marginal which is why, when Nehemia the Servant (Ron Bitterman) comes in to tell him at various times throughout the play that a ‘representative of the people’ seeks an audience, he’s rebuffed; and when that ‘representative’ dies, the chandelier, oddly enough – or perhaps it signifies the obligations he is ignoring – a larger version of David’s crown, collapses.

Not that the vultures aren’t circling anyway. Chief among them is his eldest son, Adoniyah whom Tom Avni meticulously and beautifully depicts as a traitorous, treacherous weasel willing to suborn, plot, lie, anything to get him the throne, anything to get his father’s withheld love. Not far behind is Yoav (Jonathan Cherchi), his top general who views David’s increasing feebleness with alarm – “If the king is weak, the nation is weak,” he pronounces as he tempts Adonyah to treason, only to be betrayed in his turn.

Then there are the women, Batsheba (Adva Edni), and Avishag (Inbar Dannon), both opportunists, the former blatant, the latter not, each manipulating David for their own ends.

Sitting (more or less) above the fray is Nathan the prophet, a solid, watchful Muli Shulman whose advice the king mostly ignores. And then there’s Solomon (Oren Cohen), also watchful, the outsider, the one who gets the crown – and we all know the story.

This is a good-looking contemporary production, designed by Ula Shevstov and Natasha Polyak, the only oddities being the belts worn by Yoav and Adoniyah, the belt signifying an encompassing will to power.

And as in other Pinkas/Goldberg productions, it’s the cast that move the few set pieces that denote place and time.

It’s a strong cast. For the rest, Datner’s David is a man beset, afraid, employing bluff and bluster to hide his weaknesses from others and himself. As Bathsheba, Edni never lets her guard down, displays an enviable single-mindedness and leaves us in no doubt where her loyalties lie. Dannon’s Avishag maintains her “sweet naivety” mask to good effect. Cherchi’s Yoav is stalwart, a man convinced of his own rectitude. As Solomon, Cohen is not only watchful, but careful and fully aware that all he has to do is let it happen.

Pinkas/Goldberg have described their intense, enthralling drama as a biblical political thriller, and it surely works in that context. As a parable for the politics and machinations of our own time, it’s more inferred than demonstrated.

[Helen makes only one passing comment referring to the parallels Pinkas depicts to present-day Israel—but remember that she’s writing for an Israeli readership.  Severely restricted in the length of her JP reviews as she is, it’s reasonable for Helen to assume that any Israeli theatergoer seeing Next in Line or reading her notice will immediately glean Pinkas’s intentions.  For us here in the U.S. and elsewhere outside Israel, suffice it to say that David is meant to evoke Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; ROTters can look up or deduce the other characters’ contemporary avatars.  (The Beersheva production of Next in Line was staged, and Helen’s review written and published, before the parliamentary elections in Israel on Tuesday, 17 September 2019.)

[By the way, I contend that Next in Line, at least from Helen’s description above, sounds as if it could apply a little to the current U.S. political scene and our political dramatis personae—perhaps not directly, but in the vein of the way Macbeth was adapted by Barbara Garson in 1967 as MacBird!  Just a thought . . . .]

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Pregnancy

By Edna Mazya

Directed by Omri Nitzan

Cameri Theater, Tel Aviv; 8 September 2019

When Efi (Maya Dagan) announces that she wants to have a baby, old flame and now fertility expert Ido (Oded Leopold) cackles mirthfully. Efi? Baby? Oh come on! Successful businesswoman Efi and famous physicist Yoni (Micha Selektar) have a wonderful and deliberately childless marriage. In fact, at her 39^th birthday party (which starts the play), Efi lets loose a pretty vicious antikid rant, so a kid? Yes, well, biology starts talking, Efi obtains Yoni’s unwilling assent and they get going. Except that Efi doesn’t get pregnant, and doesn’t get pregnant, and what started as a desire for a child has become an obsession with seemingly disastrous results.

Efi is a go-getter, successful in all that she sets her hand to. It’s therefore inconceivable that she cannot accomplish the most mundane of biological processes – that of reproduction – and it’s her growing obsession that drives this intelligent, quick-witted, and meaty drama. Pregnancy is the vehicle. Par for the Mazya course, it should be said.

Director Nitzan has liberally ladled his considerable talent onto the production so that it too is intelligent, quick-witted and meaty, engaging the eyes and the mind. The cast is uniformly excellent, acting with rather than at, each other.

Maya Dagan takes Efi from a committed, confident and energetic woman to a self-demeaning, self-abdicating wraith that never changes out of her pajamas, as she allows the character’s increasing desperation to infect her life – until . . .

At first Selektar’s Yoni never really leaves the safety of his professional world, then is prized from it inch by slow inch until he achieves humanity, due to his genuine love for Efi, and pushed, it must be said by Na’ama Shetrit, as his passionate ‘I have to change the world’ sister Nati. Kinneret Limoni shines as the exuberant yet grounded Rona, Leopld’s Ido is a tuned mix of torn emotions, Dana Meinrath’s Sarai is out of place among these high flyers but her instincts are sound and the compassion is real. Helena Yaralova cameos efficiently as Efi’s hi-tech partner, Galia.

Adam Keller’s all-white set of oblong boxes - suggesting sterility among the rest – plus an upstage table, serves as the spaces where the events occur while the table is the background for Yoav Cohen’s deft video art and graphics, so essential to move the plot along.

The play ends as it began, with a birthday party, but with a different dynamic this time, because the protagonists have grown. Dare we say grown up?

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Abdullah Schwarz

By Rami Vered

Directed by Roni Pinkovitch

Bet Lessin, Tel Aviv; 22 August 2019

The Schwarz Family lives in Savyonei Shomron, a West Bank settlement. Tziki Schwarz (Avi Kushnir) is an accountant contemplating divorce from his wife of 30 years, Tirtza (Anat Waxman). However . . .

It’s Lali Schwarz’s (Efrat Baumwald) wedding day. She’s marrying Aviel Tzur (Shlomo Tapiero), not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but . . .

The reading of a seemingly innocuous verse turns Papa Tziki Schwarz of Savyonei Shomron on the West Bank into Egyptian Abdallah with no recollection of his true identity. Reading the verse again turns him back to Tziki with no memory of his Arab identity, except that . . .

Oh for heaven’s sake!

Roni Pinkovitch has directed one of the funniest, smartest local comedies to come along in ages. It gleefully slays every sacred cow in sight while keeping its tongue firmly in its cheek. Events go south and back again as a superb cast imperturbably juggles an incipient security situation, Mossad shenanigans [Mossad is the Israeli national agency for intelligence collection, covert operations, and counterterrorism], hatred of Arabs, co-existence, romance and what not, with maximum brio and without ever dropping a ball (to mix metaphors).

It all happens on Zeev Levy’s convincing indoor/outdoor set complete with outsize Israeli flag, aided and abetted by good costuming (Aviah Bash), lighting (Adi Shimrony), music (Elad Adar), movement (Sharon Gal), and not least by Rubi Moskovich’s Arab/Egyption dialog coaching of Kushnir.

Kushnir is phenomenal as Tziki/Abdullah – there’s no other word for his effortless switching between somewhat hen-pecked, a mite gormless Tziki and the virile, potent man-with-a-mission Abdullah. Anat Atzmon, a truly fine actress, has (unhappily) been somewhat typecast these past few years as a Shrew. Yes, her Tirtza is a shrew, but muted, her pretty pink clothing complementing the mood. Then Tirtza meets Abdullah and all at once she’s bashful, giggly, sweetly smitten and an utter joy to watch. An even greater joy is watching Atzmon and Kushnir working seamlessly together.

Shahir Kabaha is Fadi, an area Arab, or “Israel from Petah Tikva” and he is delicious as Abdallah’s willy-nilly translator from Arabic to Hebrew. Father and son Tzur – respectively Hai Maor and Tapiero – charge headlong and most believably into their roles as security office/father of the groom and bridegroom. Baumwald’s dippy Lali is beautifully anxious to please and Odel Hayon makes a sturdy, eager Reli, Lali’s younger brother. Most ably rounding out this great cast is Tal Charnovsky as big sister Sari, a card-carrying Leftie, who’s come up for the wedding from planet Tel Aviv.

Abdullah Schwarz - 80 minutes of mischievous irreverence and not to be missed.

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Homeward

Written and directed by Aya Kaplan

Cameri Theater, Tel Aviv; 13 August 2019

We are told that “there is no correlation between the characters and events . . . in real life” in this soggy soap opera whose ‘charismatic guru’ Avihu Tishbi (Shmuel Vilojzny) bears a remarkable physical resemblance to real-life cult ‘guru’ Goel Ratzon [a self-proclaimed Messiah and faith healer from Tel Aviv, b. 1951], currently serving 30 years for assorted cult-related felonies.  Additionally its heroine’s story is based on that of Yehudit Herman, a Ratzon cultist for 10 years, who bore him five children, and now lectures on her ‘lost years’ throughout the country.

The story: Ora (Neta Garti), as she initially demands to be called, also has five children by Tishbi, but  in her case,16 years have gone by since she, then called Noa, fled her kibbutz home and joined the cult. Now, following Tishbi’s arrest, she must come to terms with her past and with real life, unless she wants to join Tishbi in jail – those are the alternatives that Inspector Turgeman (Ruth Asarsai) bluntly offers her. However, it’s not until her eldest daughter, Shuvi (Carmel Bin) blurts out that Tishbi has fed her the same line of guff – i.e that she is spiritually enlightened – that he intends to make her his “wife”, that the scales finally fall from Ora’s eyes. She briskly shops [that’s a British colloquialism for ‘rats out’] Tishbi, and as Noa once again, she and the children make a New Beginning, (or so it seems), at Rosh Hashana.

Cue in the hosannas, heavenly choirs and cooing doves.

However, there’s a problem with the play, and it’s that never, at any time, does it feel genuine; that here are real people showing us what makes them tick. Never, at any time, does it demonstrate the real danger that a cult represents.

A cult has been broadly defined as a system of beliefs and rituals. There are many different types of cult, but all have one ingredient in common, a blind, uncritical, unconditional devotion to the leader whose supremacy in all matters, sacred or profane, is absolute. We have only to think of Jim Jones and the mass murder/suicide at Jonestown, Guyana in 1979 to understand how lethal a cult can be.

As Tishbi, all Vilojzny can manage is a kind of avuncular charm, a kind of cuddly warmth that doesn’t even approach the charisma his character must radiate. Within this stricture, Garty does her best. Her Ora/Noa is driven, blinkered, but the emotions are manipulated and do not seem real even to the character she plays, not even when the scales fall from her eyes. The same is true of the other characters who also do the best with what they have, like Avi Termin as Noa’s stubborn, vengeful father, Odeya Koren as her always-willing-to-accommodate mother, and Asarsai as Turgeman.

The play’s most disposable role, and Assaf Solomon makes a sturdy job of it,  is that of Michael, Noa’s pre-Tishbi boy friend, who’s carried a torch for her all these years. The most difficult role is that of Gili, Noa’s younger sister, whom Maya Landesmann invests with a kind of desperation, as though she doesn’t know what is her character’s purpose in this play, and is playing it by ear. She is not helped by the ghastly costumes Yehudit Aharon designed for her, though those the other characters wear are apt.

Svetlana Breger’s set veers shockingly between a Kafka-inspired police station and the patently picture-postcard, gemütlichkeit environs of the parents’ home in the kibbutz.

Bottom line? Homeward is cult lite. On that level, it works fine.

[The German word Gemütlichkeit (which, like other nouns, would be capitalized in German) is an untranslatable word that means, among other things: ‘comfortableness,’ ‘coziness,’ ‘pleasantness,’ ‘friendliness,’ ‘geniality,’ ‘cheerfulness,’ ‘collegiality,’ ‘comradery,’ or ‘cordiality.’  (I believe Helen should have used gemütlich, the adjective, rather than the noun.)  ~Rick]

Dispatches from Israel 8

by Helen Kaye

[On 10 July, Helen Kaye, my friend who reviews for the Jerusalem Post, sent me a collection of some of her recent notices.  (I just posted two from last spring on 13 July.)  When she asked if I was interested in receiving these pieces (as if I wouldn’t be!), Helen noted that these “imply a comment on current affairs here”—meaning, of course, events and concerns in Israel and the Middle East.  What Helen, who ROTters will recall lives in Tel Aviv, means is that embedded in the plays and reviews are ideas that bear on how Israelis live and think today (even, you may be surprised to find, plays written or set long before Israel even existed).  Because the JP, the major English-language newspaper in Israel, gives Helen so little space for her reviews and because she’s writing primarily for other Israelis who already know most of the references, Helen doesn’t explain or identify them.  For us Americans (and other non-Israelis), I’ll give a brief explanation of some of the events, people, and expressions which Helen mentions.  I’ll provide those explanations following each notice.]

On the Grill

Written and directed by Dror Keren

Cameri Theatre, Tel Aviv; 11 December 2015

The last 15 minutes of Dror Keren’s from-the-heart On the Grill are worth its somewhat rambling (too much small talk), structure, and I was probably not the only one in the vociferously applauding audience with tears in their eyes. Not strictly because of what happens, but because it has to be that way, now, and for the foreseeable future.

The play’s title is actual and a metaphor; a metaphor because we’re all on the rack here [to be explained]. Actual because it’s set in the backyard of a home on a veteran kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley where the family is gathering to celebrate Independence Day, and where Zvika (the peerless Rami Baruch) is getting ready for the traditional Independence Day barbeque.

He’s brought the steaks, the chops, the sausages from the Arab butcher in the nearby village – “What a mob scene! You’ve no idea . . . but he saved them specially for me.” – because the whole family will be together, and the family is a microcosm of today’s Israel.

Grandma Gisella (Miriam Zohar) is a holocaust survivor, was an illegal immigrant, married a kibbutznik and the past. Now she’s in a wheelchair, cared for by Raja (Adam Sheffer) from India. Avinoam (Yossi Kantz), an old and still fiery rebel, is Tirtza’s (Irit Kaplan) dad and she’s rigid with worry because “the situation” may send her son Gilad (Asaf Maron) into combat. His cousin Mordi (Avishai Meridor), suffering from PTSD from a previous war, has been living in Berlin for four years. He’s come for a visit with his non-Jewish German partner Johanna (Lena-Ann Castrup). Also invited is his former lover Alona (Shelly Ben-Yosef), now divorced.

And holding it all together is no-nonsense, practical Rochale, Zvika’s wife, Mordi’s mother.

As the tension builds, as jets roar above, as they watch TV and wait for the phone to ring, it doesn’t take too long before the anger, the resentments explode, before the generations collide, before the present replays the past.

The acting is so good that it seems we’re eavesdropping, not sitting in a theater. Avishai Meridor  and Adam Sheffer need work on diction and body-language respectively, but experience will provide that, and these are quibbles against simply superb ensemble work.

Now for the explanation. We’re on the rack because our lives here are schizophrenic. We live normal lives in an abnormal situation. We realized a dream and are destroying it.

“Is that fireworks, or artillery?” asks (I think) Rochele as explosions split the night sky. That’s our reality here. That’s what On the Grill shows us. Like Hanoch Levin’s Murder, Dror Keren’s On the Grill  is an important play.

[Israeli Independence Day is marked, according to the Hebrew calendar, on 5 Iyar (the eighth month of the secular year; in 2015 that corresponded with 23 April and in 2016, 12 May).  The “dream” to which Helen alludes is, of course, the establishment of a Jewish homeland after the horror and death of the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.  It was “realized” when the State of Israel was established in 1948, but I think Helen sees its destruction in the bad decisions of some of its post-independence leaders and the continuing intransigence of its current administration to any kind of accommodation with Palestinians and its militant rejection by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government of  a two-state path to peace.  (Please note that this is my own interpretation of Helen’s comment, although she’s expressed such sentiments to me often.)]

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To the Edge of the Land

After the novel by David Grossman

Written and Directed by Hanan Snir

Joint production of Habima and Cameri Theatres, Tel Aviv; 14 March 2016

The book has been translated into a score of languages and ecstatically reviewed. The play is in Hebrew. It explains us to ourselves but it’s also the portrait of us that the world doesn’t see encapsulated into a phenomenal, unforgettable, illuminating, wrenching evening at the theater.  Just for that it deserves an English version.

An added and awful irony is that Mr. Grossman’s son Uri was killed in the 2nd Lebanon War while he was close to the end of, but still writing, the book.

For a few years now we’ve been uneasy about ourselves, about where we’re going, about what we’re doing to ourselves (and to others), as a people, as a nation.  As a people, as a nation, we’ve tried to reconcile lives that are lived on the edge of an abyss; to live normally in the fractious spaces between the endless wars.

Our theater reflects this existential dis-ease . It pops up everywhere, in plays like Mr. Snir’s brilliant take on Oedipus Rex, in the edgy, questing offerings at such as the Acre Festival, even in modern classics, such as West Side Story.

The Hebrew title of Edge is A Woman Fleeing Tidings – evil tidings, that is; that awful knock at the door, the ‘tidings’ etched on the serried ranks of military gravestones that punctuate our wars.

Edge starts and ends with war.  Ora (Efrat Ben Zur), Avram (Dror Keren) and Ilan (Amnon Wolf) meet as teens in hospital during the six day war in 1967. The relationship then established somehow endures. Now estranged husband  Ilan is somewhere in South America with their son,  Adam.  Avram lives a half life of agony, fear and regret. Ora plans on a hiking trip to the Galilee with her son Ofer (Daniel Sabbag), whose biological father Avram is. Then, on the day of his demobilization, Ofer gets a special ops call-up from the IDF.

If she flees, Ora’s panicked mind tells her, then she’ll avoid those tidings, then Ofer will be safe. She rousts out Avram, forcing him to go with her. The journey is the story of the ties that bind, that heal, that destroy, the ties of love, of pain, of joys and fears among and for us and the bruised, beautiful, laden land in which we live.

Hanan Snir has set the action in Roni Toren’s high, seemingly doorless, white walled space – itself a metaphor – on whose surface the Galilee will be drawn, and into which are brought the beds, the screens, the stones, and the other bits and pieces needed to move things along. Like an IDF troupe, and moving with military precision, the superb company punctuates this and the action with songs in Hebrew and Arabic.

The versatile Rinat Matatov neatly plays the tambourine, an Arab and a Russian nurse. Guy Mesika as Sami, a wry Arab taxi driver, has a moment of high comedy and desperation as he unleashes an avalanche of curses on Ora and Avram, getting a well-deserved round of applause, as will Ora when she precipitates a different avalanche while making Ofer an “Arabic” (very fine-cut) salad.

Ben Zur, Wolf and Keren drive the play. Watching them, I had to remember to breathe. Had to stop myself from racing up there to comfort them, to encourage them, to hear and listen.

Keren, an expert and deft comedian, here powerfully reaches tragic hero. His stumbling, pitiful, brave Avram unfolds step by painful step. As passionate, impulsive Ora, Ben Zur scales new heights. Wolf impacts boldly as Ilan . . . but then Hanan Snir always coaxes from his actors more than they realize is in them.

To the Edge of the Land will keep you on the edge of your seat. A must see.

[The book by David Grossman, a 62-year-old Israeli author, was published in Hebrew in 2008 and in English (as To the End of the Land) in 2010 by Knopf.  The Second Lebanon War Helen mentions above, also known as the Israel-Hezbollah war, took place in 2006; the First Lebanon War (or the Lebanese Civil War) occurred in 1982.  Hanan Snir’s Oedipus Rex, to which Helen refers, was called Oedipus – A Case Study, and I posted Helen’s review in “Dispatches from Israel 4,” 2 June 2015.  Helen’s reviews of the 2012 Acre (Acco) Festival, posted on 9 November 2012. gives a little background on the annual festival.  The abbreviation “IDF” stands for Israel Defense Forces, the all-service organization of Israel’s army, navy, and air force.]

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Mephisto

By Hillel Mittelpunkt

After the book by Klaus Mann

Directed by Omri Nitzan

Cameri Theatre, Tel Aviv; 16 March 2016

Watching the multilayered, biting Mittelpunkt/Nitzan production of Mephisto, a famous quote comes to mind: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing”. In other words, we can’t a) sit around like befuddled poultry and let evil grow and/or b) see only what serves our own interests.

We, that is the audience, are ‘a’ and the play indicts all of us. Hendrik Höfgen (Itai Tiran), the hero of Mephisto, stands in for us as ‘b’. Klaus Mann (1906-49) based Hendrik on his one-time [brother]-in-law, the actor/manager Gustaf Gründgens (1899-1963), insinuating that the latter collaborated with the Nazis.

“What do they want from me, I’m only an actor,” grumbles Hendrik at the end of the play, refusing even then to recognize that he has sold his soul to the devil to get what and where he wants. Driven, relentlessly ambitious, Hendrik will climb over anything and anybody for fame and recognition.

“Politics and theater don’t mix,” he says impatiently to Nicoletta (Helena Yarolova) his Lesbian colleague, but they will when Hitler comes to power in 1933, and he’ll let them because he’s unwilling (or unable) to make connections, and that takes him from Hamburg to the National Theater in Berlin, to prominence as its director, to fame for his Mephisto, the role he’s wanted all his life, and to the betrayal of former friends whom he sheds like old skin when they might endanger his future. Like his wife Barbara (Anastasia Fein), his black mistress Juliette (Ruthy Asarsay), his mentor and colleague – they’re Jews – Krug and Beck (Eli Gorenstein and Simha Barbiro), and all the rest.

Roni Toren’s set puts us on a stage of the stage where the entrances and exits are among racks of clothing, racks that will change dramatically for act II, where upstage are curtains and the footlights of the stage’s stage. Keren Granek’s lighting takes us from place to place, mixing light, shadow and darkness. Wagner and Mendelssohn make musical points alongside period music, and Polina Adamov dresses the women (not all) in sexy underwear and deprives the men of their shirts – it’s time for Omri Nitzan to leave his actors’ underwear where it belongs – under clothing. We get the often-made point that underwear reflects vulnerability.

But Mephisto will still stand among his greatest productions because the whole – we’ll get to the acting in a moment – is like a fist to the soul.

“Think” it commands. “Don’t just sit there. Don’t just talk about it. Act. We are striding down the wrong path and it will destroy us.”

“To be an actor is to know how to change masks,” says Hendrik and Tiran’s achievement in the role is that we don’t believe him as Hendrik because he never lets us see the real Hendrik, except once when the General (alias Herman Goering) verbally flays him to the bone. The phenomenal Dudu Niv plays Goering as the bully he was, reveling in the role and the power the Reich affords him, and Hendrik stands there quivering, the naked nobody he believes himself to be. Onstage, masked by the role, he’s powerful.

No wonder he’s exhausted by play’s end.

Eli Gorenstein magnificently plays three different roles: He’s Krug, manager of the Hamburg theater, Hendrik’s mentor, cynical, warm-hearted and a political realist. He’s Bruckner, Barbara’s stiff-necked, stiff-minded father. He’s von Munk, fanatical Nazi and cleanser of German Culture; and Gorenstein has different body language, stance and speech for each of them.

Asarsay has gone deep into herself for Juliette and has emerged with her most powerful performance to date, especially the scene in which she urges Hendrik to inform on her.

Yaralova’s lovely Nicoletta is wary, compassionate, and like Krug, a realist. Irit Kaplan too shines in her roles, among them the pathetic Actress and the quietly assured Leidenthal. Simcha Barbiro’s anxious, brave Beck is excellent.

Indeed, the entire cast can pat itself on the back for a job well done.

Ours is still to come, and we’d better get to it.

[The quotation Helen uses at the beginning of her review is usually attributed to the great (and much-quoted) Irish statesman, Edmund Burke (1729-97), but the fact is, its actual source is unknown and doesn’t appear in any of Burke’s published writings.  The statement has been used, in various forms, by many public figures, including John F. Kennedy, but its origins are obscure.  Novelist Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann, wrote Mephisto in 1936; the role Helen says Hendrik Höfgen “wanted all his life” is Mephistopheles, the Devil’s representative, in Goethe’s Faust.  (I published a three-part article on “Faust Clones” and I discuss Goethe’s version in Part 1, posted on 15 January 2016.)  Field Marshal Hermann Goering (or Göring; 1893-1946), was commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, the German air force in the Third Reich.]

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Blood Wedding

By Federico Garcia Lorca

Translated by Rina Litvin

Directed by Kfir Azulay

Beersheva Theater, Beersheba; 3 May 2016

The beginning of Kfir Azulay’s vision for Blood Wedding is so visually dramatic that your breath almost stops; and indeed, where do you go from there? Headlong into a dark tale driven by a culture of blood and death, death, blood, greed, and lust, and played out amid darkness in Yehudit Aharon’s tall black box of a set that’s lit by moveable rows of globe lamps, serried ranks of little moons, and the moon – as we know – is a symbol for lunacy and death. The costumes (also Aharon) are also mostly black.

None of the characters, except one, have names. They’re called by their function; the Bridegroom (Tom Avni), the Bride (Avigail Harari), the Mother (Shiri Golan), and so forth. The exception is Leonardo (Tom Hagi) because seen or unseen, he’s the catalyst for all that follows. Seen or unseen, he is Nemesis; Azulay deliberately draws parallels to classic Greek tragedy: the Young Girls and the Young Men, innocence gone, are here a black-clad chorus. The prescient Woodcutters become the Three Fates.

Symbolism abounds in the songs set to Elad Adar’s marvelous music with its deliberate dissonances, songs to the stallion (rampant masculinity, potency), to being a bride (innocence, desire), to the treacherous moon, the vagaries of fate.

How did Shakespeare put it?

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends/Rough hew them how we will . . . ” (Hamlet).

The hard facts of the tragedy? Approving the unity of their extensive lands, the Mother, and the Father of the Bride (Yonatan Tcherchy) approve the uniting of the Bride and Bridegroom. But the Bride was once engaged to Leonardo, a romance the Father ended because Leonardo was poor. The wedding is celebrated – the reception is brilliantly portrayed by shadows on a sheet like a Javanese puppet play – but before the lustful Bridegroom can consummate the union, the Bride and Leonardo run away together. Inevitably he and the Bridegroom die and the Mother, who has lost both husband and elder son to clan conflict, is now bereft of all her men.

And how many here are in a similar situation? On both sides?

It’s the Mother, bitter, relentless, unforgiving, who is the center of Blood Wedding. She’s a stretch for any actress, but Ms. Golan is more than any actress and she latches onto the Mother like a hungry shark. Hungry also describes Tom Hagi’s restless, powerful and powerfully sensual Leonardo. There’s a viscerally erotic scene between him and the Bride in the forest.

Tom Avni’s neatly nebech Bridegroom tries to project a masculinity he hasn’t got, while Harari’s Bride is beautifully torn between her fear of and her desire for passion aka Leonardo.

The always versatile Tcherchy makes the corrupt Father a work of art – the handkerchief floating from his little finger is inspired while Ora Meirson, though her reading of the Wife (Zohar Meidan) lacks nothing, scales a new summit as Death with her dispassionate, ironic reporting of what has been, and what now is, that the two young men are so uselessly “killed for love . . ./With a knife/that penetrates deep/through the startled flesh . . .” as the Mother says.

Azulay intends, I think, to jolt us, to jerk us into awareness of what we’re doing here, and he nearly succeeds, so very nearly. If only he had let his (and Lorca’s) perceptions do their own talking but he’s so busy signalling ‘Pay Attention, This Is Important’ that the message itself falters.

[Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca, (1898-1936) wrote the poetic tragedy Blood Wedding, based on a true story, in 1933.  (A supporter of leftists in Spain, Lorca was executed in 1936 by Francisco Franco’s right-wing Falangists.)   Helen labels the Bridegroom as played by Tom Avni as a nebech, a Yiddish word that’s often spelled and pronounced as nebbish in English.  According to Leo Rosten (The Joys of Yiddish, McGraw-Hill, 1968), who’s definitions are amazingly complete and delightfully amusing, a nebech is an “innocuous, ineffectual, weak, helpless or hapless unfortunate.  A Sad Sack.  A ‘loser.’”  (I find it droll that Helen uses a Yiddish characterization for a character in a classic Spanish play!  Droll, but not inaccurate.)]

*  *  *  *

The Actress

By Gur Koren

Directed by Gilad Kimchi

Bet Lessin, Tel Aviv; 30 June 2016

“Man proposes, God disposes” is what springs to mind after watching The Actress, Gur Koren’s perceptive, wickedly funny morality play on who we are today in the light of what we were, or might have been, yesterday. Right on p. 1 of the program there’s Koren’s vigorous disclaimer: “the play, based on [some] actual persons now deceased, is an imaginary tale . . . sections of which have no basis in reality.”

That’s fine, because the reality, as happens so often in our little land, might have been even less believable, probably bloodier, and as aspiring actress Shlomit (Neta Garty) tartly says “In this country, if you manage to escape a situation, be assured it’ll catch up with you.”

Let’s start with Orna Smorgonsky’s spot-on period costumes, Eran Atzmon’s admirable Li-La-Lo backstage set of big boxes, some of which open up into things like a bathroom, or jail cell, and with Yoav Cohen’s vibrant video art for which the boxes act as screen. Li-La-Lo (1944-54) was a popular variety stage. Another popular hangout to appear in the play is the then-Café Pilz – with owner Arye Pilz urbanely played by Lior Michaeli – down by the beach and now a McDonald’s.

The action takes place in 1947 marked by a) Etzel and/or Lehi resistance or b) Etzel and/or Lehi terrorism (depending which side you were on) against the British mandatory authorities, the saga of the Exodus and the historic November 29 UN vote approving the establishment of the State.

Shlomit, the not-so-successful aspiring actress, is backup for Shoshana Damari (Eti Vakhnin-Sober) at Li-La-Lo. She is tasked by her brother Aaron (Nadav Nates), a member of the Etzel, to lure to an Etzel safe-house English officer Adam Shinwell (Lior Baranes), son of the then UK Labor minister Emmanuel Shinwell. The aim is prisoner exchange – one Brit for three condemned Etzel men.

But, what with one thing and another, actually quite an entertaining lot of them, one of which is that Adam and Shlomit fall in love, the plan doesn’t work out, and at the end actual reality (more or less) transcends people’s dreams.

Gilad Kimchi’s direction is, and bravo, deliberately, a tad over the top and it works very well. Even better for us English speakers, the English actually speak English, albeit with atrocious Israeli accents (dialogue coach anyone?). Surtitles provide the Hebrew. 

Garty, Baranes, Nates dig with gusto into their roles, as do the other members of the ensemble, mentioning especially Zviki Levin as the very nimble manager of Li-La-Lo, Vakhnin-Sober as the temperamental Damari and Maayan Weissberg as blissfully self-centered Hanna Meierzak, better known to us all as the late and lamented Hanna Meron

Chuckles, giggles, titters punctuate the play throughout, but there’s only one real belly laugh. No, I’m not going to be the spoiler. Have fun. Go see it yourselves.

[Helen writes of Li-La-Lo, which was an Israeli vaudeville or music hall  theater in the middle of the last century; Café Pilz operated from 1938 to 1951 and then reopened in 1982 and operated until 2009.  (Arye Pilz lived from 1908 until 1992.)  She also invokes two paramilitary organizations of the Jewish struggle against the British Mandate in Palestine in the years before World War II and the establishment of the State of Israel: the Etzel and the Lehi.  Etzel was another name for the Irgun, essentially an anti-British guerrilla/terrorist force (of which former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was a member); Lehi was also known as the Stern Gang, a militant Zionist force which split from Irgun in 1940.  The 29 November UN vote to which Helen refers above was, of course, the 1947 United Nations resolution to partition Palestine into Jewish and Muslim states.  (The passage of the UN resolution was the starter’s gun for Israel’s War of Independence.)  Hanna Meron (more often spelled Maron; 1923-2014) was a Berlin-born Israeli actress who held the world’s record for the longest career in theater.  She was much honored and many Israeli actors name her as an inspiration and model.

[Helen’s previous contributions to ROT include “Dispatches” 1 through 7 on 23 January 2013, 6 August 2013, 20 November 2013, 2 June 2015, 22 August 2015 (which also includes an article Helen wrote on the Israel Festival), 6 October 2015, and 13 July 2016.  (I also posted another of Helen’s JP reviews, Molière’s Tartuffe, on 2 November 2014 as a Comment to “Dispatches 3.”) ROTters might also enjoy looking back at ”Help! It’s August: Kid-Friendly Summer Festivals in Israel,” 12 September 2010; ”Acre (Acco) Festival, Israel,” 9 November 2012; “Berlin,” 22 July 2013; “A Trip to Poland,” 7 August 2015.]