Dispatches From Israel 10

by Helen Kaye

[Here’s the latest installment of Helen’s “Dispatches from Israel.”  One review’s of a Hebrew translation of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus; the other  covers a stage adaptation of a World War II novel.  Both productions were presented by the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv, the national theater of Israel.  Helen’s remarks are, as usual, pithy and astute, and the range of theater represented by the two productions demonstrates how broad the taste and interests of the Israeli theatergoers are.  Once again, I feel fortunate to be able to share Helen’s theatrical insights with ROT readers and to offer a viewpoint and a voice I wouldn’t otherwise be able to present.]

Alone in Berlin

By Shahar Pinkas

Based on the novel by Hans Fallada

Directed by Ilan Ronen

Habima, Tel Aviv; 11 September 2016

What if? Fraught words. What if the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 had not been so vengeful towards Germany? What if Adolf Hitler had been accepted to Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts? What if? We’ll never know because it was, and he wasn’t, which brings us to Habima’s very powerful, very moving, almost transcendent production of Alone in Berlin, Shahar Pinkas’ unsentimental adaptation of Hans Fallada’s best-seller novel.

The production (and of course the novel), expose the inexorable a-human tramp of history, expose in all its obscenity the pitiless human construct that was Nazi Germany.

Opposition to it was a deadly option that few dared. This is the story of two who did, based on true events, and told in narrative and dialogue.

Like the rest, working-class couple Otto and Anna Quangel (Norman Issa, Osnat Fishman) keep their heads down, do their duty, hail the Führer. Then, just after the fall of France, Otto and Anna receive the news of their son’s death in combat, and are devastated, but what now?

Then grief and fear-addled Frau Rosenthal (Shulamit Adar), their Jewish neighbor whom retired Judge Fromm (Michael Koresh) is bravely hiding in his apartment, jumps to her death from four floors up.

That does it. Otto and Anna start writing and distributing postcards encouraging Germans to resist Herr Hitler, but most of them end up in the hands of the Gestapo, quickly handed in by their finders, terrified lest they be implicated.

Gestapo Obergruppenfuhrer Prall (Uri Hochman) bullies and threatens with annihilation (as he can) Kommissar Escherich (Tomer Sharon) who bullies, threatens and annihilates (as he can) others, in particular petty thief Enno Kluge (Ami Smolarchik) in order to expedite and effect the capture of the unknown post-card senders.

The Quangels are caught, of course, tortured, given a travesty of a trial, and sentenced to murder.

Ilan Ronen, taking a leaf from the book of expressionist theater, presents the tale in a grave, often stately choreography of people, music, chairs, stairs and sliding panels against a grey backdrop, a breathtakingly ironic counterpoint to the story’s snarling edginess, leaving judgment to us. All honor to the exquisitely perceptive Mr. Ronen and his designers: Niv Manor (set & video), Ula Shevchov (costumes),  Ziv Voloshin (lights), and Miri Lazar (music ed. and movement).

What makes Mr. Issa and Ms. Fishman so extraordinary as Otto and Anna is that they never betray their characters, they’re never more than ordinary people caught up in a grotesque world, and they let us see that, that they’re afraid, alone, each of them together. Thus ‘alone in Berlin’.

Another extraordinary performance is that of Uri Hochman as predator Prall. His is a deliberate, disciplined, depersonalized viciousness, epitomizing the regime that has made him. He projects terror. We shudder.

Other notable performances – and there’s not one that’s less than very good - include Ms. Adar’s tremulous, dwindling Frau Rosenthal, Mr. Koresh’s decent, old-school Judge Fromm, and Mr. Smolarchik’s out-of-his-depth, increasingly desperate Enno Kluge.  As Escherich, Mr. Sharon veers in the blink of an eye from arrogance to cowering servility; his Escherich eats himself from within.

Totalitarian regimes breed hyenas and Pini Kidron’s obsequious, on-the-make perpetual loser Borkhausen is one such prowling scavenger whose character provides the little humor there is.

We here have gone from beleaguered little hero state to one reviled, even (and most monstrously) compared to Nazi Germany – does anyone remember the 1995 poster depicting the late Yitzhak Rabin as an SS officer? – but such is not the purpose of Alone in Berlin. No.

“Don’t think. Just obey!” snaps a Gestapo (either Prall or Escherich), and that is the point this production makes. We cannot, may not, must not allow ourselves to “just obey”. To think, to think for ourselves is mandatory. If we want to survive as a nation it is.

*  *  *  *

Coriolanus

By William Shakespeare

Translated by Dori Parnes

Directed by Irad Rubinstein

Habima, Tel Aviv; 13 April 2016

What drives Greek tragedy is the hubris, or overweening arrogance toward, and/or defiance of the gods, that inevitably leads to the hero’s destruction. So it is with Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Add that to Irad Rubinstein’s Political Agenda driven interpretation of Coriolanus, already a very political play, its deliberately coarse language nimbly translated by Dori Parnes, and you get an interesting, but not always effective, production.

It’s playing in the little Bertonov theater; a nod to the “smoke-filled back rooms” of political tradition.

Front and center here is not Caius Martius’ aka Coriolanus’ (Gil Frank) neurotic arrogance –though on abundant display - but his relationship with his mother, the ambitious, domineering Volumnia played by Gila Almagor with a deliberate and vulgar gracelessness that is chillingly effective.

Did she live in the 1930s, Volumnia would have been one of those ghastly Hollywood mothers, intent on pushing their little darlings to stardom, as Coriolanus has been driven to excel since before his birth. Face to face with Mum, Coriolanus becomes a little boy again, pleading for Mama’s approval.

Also front and center is our own body politic, corrupt and self-serving, represented by Sicinia Micki Peleg Rothstein) and Brutus (Rotem Keynan), a couple of envious tribunes whose chief attribute is that they’re experts when it comes to mob manipulation, and to a lesser extent by Menenius (Uri Hochman), a veteran pol who’s also Coriolanus’ friend and backer, and whom Hochman portrays with genial ruthlessness.

It’s an involved story. Power is in the hands of a few – sound familiar? – and the populace is hungry, rebellious, and – sound familiar? – looking for someone to blame. It doesn’t help when Caius Martius (CM) tells them in no uncertain terms to mind their betters, of whom he’s one.

Meanwhile salvation appears as renewed conflict with the Volsci, traditional enemies to Rome. When it comes to guns or butter – sound familiar? – guns win hands down “Give me war over peace anytime,” happily says a Volsci soldier.

Volsci general Aufidius (Alex Krol) and CM are old and bitter enemies. They even dress a lot the same, unkempt and nearly bare-chested!

When CM batters the Volsci capital Coriolis into submission, he comes back to Rome an unwilling Hero, unwilling because battle, violence and blood are his natural habitat, and is persuaded to run for Consul. To get their votes, Coriolanus has to pander to the people – these scenes are dirty politics glorified, and are marvelous – which he performs with near open contempt.

Grabbing their opportunity the Tribunes get him expelled from Rome on a trumped up charge. Humiliated, furious, Coriolanus throws in his lot with Aufidius and they march on Rome. But when Mum begs him to spare his native city, Coriolanus buckles (as he always has), and for his betrayal, is promptly dispatched by Aufidius.

Gil Frank plays Coriolanus with demonic glee, an actor playing to the hilt a man who’s obliged to act out his mother’s vision of who he is, and for the most part it’s awesome. There’s a bit of unease in the scenes with Aufidius, but perhaps that’s because both actors’ characters are playacting and they’re not sure what ends where.

Shahar Raz and Ben Yusipovitch bounce energetically and well in and out of multiple roles.

This Coriolanus bounces in and out as well between amazingly good and somewhat tedious. But one item on Rubinstein’s agenda is crystal clear. Forget peace. Violence works.

[For readers new to ROT, Helen’s past contributions are well worth looking back at.  Previous “Dispatches,” numbers 1 through 9, have been posted  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, 13 July 2016, and 2 October 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; and “A Trip to Poland,” 7 August 2015.]

Time & Place; Concept & Style

[Back in 1988, I made a point for the fall to see as many different Shakespearean productions as I could find. Most were in small, often out-of-the-way spaces, frequently converted storefronts, by companies that didn’t last very long or had been formed just to present this one production. A few were major Off-Broadway productions, like the New York Shakespeare Festival, in the early months of its multi-year marathon of all 37 of the Bard’s plays (1987-97), and a couple were even out-of-town shows, such as an Antony and Cleopatra I saw at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger (the predecessor of today’s Shakespeare Theatre Company).

[The purpose of the exercise was to keep a journal of the impressions I got from the performances—not reviews or even the kinds of reports I’m now posting on ROT, but little prose pieces, no more than 500 words long, discussing the treatment of Shakespeare in stage performances. Focusing on the directorial or production concept, I described the performances principally in terms of their visual design (i.e., set, costumes, and lighting) and acting style. I spotlighted one aspect of the production—or several productions together—that made some kind of impact on me, for good or ill. Some of my observations pertained only to Shakespearean productions, others applied to the classics in general, and a few were valid for all theater work. Nonetheless, they were all expressed in the journal as commentary on American (essentially New York) Shakespearean theater.

[I’ve used bits of the journal, occasionally whole entries, as the basis of ROT articles over the 3½ years I’ve published the blog—a testimony, I think, to how fascinating the overall experience was in the end. Now I’m going to compile four separate entries with related themes and present them pretty much as I wrote them 24 years ago. I’ve included the original production information to give you an idea who I saw doing what, when I saw it, and where.]

TIME & PLACE

[On Wednesday, 21 September 1988, in the first week of my Shakespeare theater project, I saw the RAPP Theater Company’s Romeo and Juliet at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, 423 W. 46th Street in Manhattan’s mid-town Theater District. On Saturday, 24 September, in the second week, I attended another Romeo and Juliet, this one presented by the Independent Theatre Company at the House of Candles (formerly an actual candle shop) at 99 Stanton Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I wrote this entry on Sunday.]

Both the Independent Theatre Company and the RAPP Theater Company attempted to transpose Romeo and Juliet to American milieus. The rationale for this seems to have been that the directors didn’t trust either the audiences to accept and understand the play or Shakespeare to communicate with modern American audiences unless the play is moved to immediately recognizable and accessible places and times. Neither company seemed to have relocated the story in order to say something unconventional about or through the play. (The RAPP Romeo and Juliet did present a new interpretation, but the change of venue didn’t bear on this.)

Not only is this reason patently mistaken—the play’s a classic precisely because it transcends its time and place to communicate to all cultures—but such transpositions, unless they’re very carefully thought through and combined with changes in the text, usually cause incongruities in the language and actions of the plays. Insignificant by themselves, together they can jolt the spectator out of the world of the play often enough to destroy the essential connection between the audience and the play. A few cases in point:

The RAPP company wanted so much to make Romeo and Juliet American that rock music played throughout, the Capulet party was a backyard barbecue and Benvolio and Mercutio played baseball. With such a strong American environment established, references to Verona and Mantua became disconcerting. So did the presence of a Prince, since American cities don’t have princes. Moreover, I couldn’t believe that a modern, middle-class, American girl like this Juliet could ever fear ghosts to the extent that her Act IV soliloquy requires. I also wondered why Friar Laurence didn’t just pick up a telephone and call Romeo instead of trusting his explanation of Juliet’s “death” to a hand-delivered letter.

The Independent Theatre Company Americanized its production by making the characters Italian-American in the Mafia vein. This inspired particularly those playing the lower-class characters to affect Hollywood hood accents. Somehow, “What light t’rough yonda winda breaks? It is de east, and Juliet is de sun!” just doesn’t ring right. I kept flashing on the hoods in Kiss Me Kate singing “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” There was also a good deal of knife fighting—a suitable substitute for sword play, certainly, except that the general impression of mobsters is that they tend to duel with guns, not knives.

Often such transportations of Shakespeare to another time or place can be illuminating as well as theatrically innovative. Half measures such as these, however, don’t usually accomplish much. When Orson Welles staged his striking fascist Julius Caesar in the ’30s, he was making a comment on the times. The same director’s production of Macbeth set in a Haitian voodoo world was a carefully worked-out adjustment to make the play accessible not to black audiences but to black actors. Arthur Laurent’s transposition of Romeo and Juliet to a ’50s urban jungle for West Side Story was, of course, a complete adaptation of both language and story. None of these simply recostumed the characters and plunked them down in an alien world. And none was conceived because the producers felt that American audiences couldn’t enter Shakespeare’s world without their help. We should resent the implication that we do.

WEIRD SISTERS, GOOD IDEAS

[I saw two R&J’s during my Shakespearean journey, and two Midsummer Night’s Dream’s, but the one production of Macbeth was presented by the New Rude Mechanicals at the Pelican Studio, 750 Eighth Avenue, in the Theater District. I saw the show on Thursday, 3 November 1988, during Week 8 of my Shakespearean exploration, and wrote the journal entry on Thursday, 10 November.]

Because of his popularity and flexibility, Shakespeare may be the world’s most manipulated playwright. In addition, because of limited space, budget and technology, small companies producing him must make decisions which affect casting, too. Ideally, practicality marries art in a concept which accommodates the company’s needs while opening the play to new perceptions, uncovering buried ones, or strengthening neglected ones.

A wonderful example of this alliance occurred in the New Rude Mechanicals’ production of Macbeth. An all-around good production with strong acting and an obvious and deep respect for the material, its use and treatment of the witches was especially remarkable for its economy and sagacity.

You can’t do Macbeth without the witches, but you can do without some of its many messengers and servants. Since few Off-Off-Broadway companies can afford extras, directors simply cut these roles, give their lines to other characters, or send out actors playing other roles to perform their duties in disguise. Director John Pynchon Holms avoided all these and said something interesting at the same time. The witches—undisguised and unabashed, but unrecognized as witches by the others—were the messengers, servants, and extras.

There were three levels on which this scheme worked. First, as the messengers, the witches seeded and nurtured the plot. As the bleeding Captain, for instance, one witch reported Macbeth’s valor, putting the notion of the thane’s promotion in the King’s head. After Macbeth murders Duncan, a witch played the Old Man who relates the occult happenings surrounding the death, planting the idea that the events may not have been altogether natural.

The second level was less directly involved in the events of the play. As the various servants, such as the Porter who greets Macduff and Lennox when the murders are discovered and the waiters at the banquet where Banquo’s ghost appears, the witches’ presence suggested their control over Macbeth’s life and fate. They were always there, keeping an eye on things.

All this was simply well-planned doubling. In the third level, Holms put the witches “invisibly” on stage in portentous scenes. For instance, they watched as Lady Macbeth reads her husband’s letter about the predictions and Duncan’s arrival and when she soliloquizes while Macbeth is murdering Duncan. They hovered on the fringes of the action, staring at the focal character as if willing her or his actions. They didn’t enter into the action, though they sometimes echoed lines such as Malcolm’s “shift away” when he flees the castle after his father’s death is discovered, or made sound effects such as the knocking that unnerves Macbeth just as he’s about to murder his king.

This strategy implied that an external force had taken control of Macbeth’s life. Whether wittingly or unwittingly and whether the force was the Devil—whose putative servants witches are—or some abstract evil such as greed or ambition, we were left to choose. Still, the text, enhanced by a few unintrusive production decisions, can support this interpretation. Holms and his company didn’t merely solve some troublesome practical problems; they gave their audience something to ponder.
 

 WHAT IS PERIOD COSTUME?

[I returned to the New Rude Mechanicals’ Macbeth for another journal entry in the ninth week of my Shakespearean excursion (I kind of liked this production), composing this observation on Sunday, 13 November.]

Shakespeare’s 400-year-old locales are inevitably remote from us, but some, like Caesar’s Rome, Cleopatra’s Egypt, and Lear’s ancient Britain, were “period” settings even in Elizabethan theaters. Historians know little about the performances of that era, but they believe that the costumes were mostly 16th- or 17th-century clothing, with a few antiquarian touches for the more exotic characters. Not until the 18th century did theaters attend to historical accuracy in clothing.

So what is “period dress” for Shakespeare? Ancient Greek or Roman, or Italian Renaissance? Elizabethan? Jacobean? Take your pick.

Bigger question: Is it even necessary? Clearly not, since revealing productions of Shakespeare in this century have been mounted in modern dress, 19th- and 18th-century costume and fantasy clothing of every description, including those of Peter Brook’s now-classic circus-inspired A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If Shakespeare’s own King’s Men put no great store in period accuracy, dressing the 14th-century Richard III as a 16th-century monarch, why should we? Clothes don’t make the man; costumes don’t make the show.

So why worry? Because a bad decision can send the production down an unproductive track. Updating for the sake of superficial relevancy is a potentially fatal trap.

Other possibilities, however, can be liberating. This was the case with the recent New Rude Mechanicals’ Macbeth, whose costume design, credited simply to “deBolt,” included contemporary elements with allusions to “ancientness” and “Scottishness.” Though doubtlessly in part budgetary, the decision was made with at least a corner of an eye on artistic interpretation. Theater, after all, often makes virtues of necessity.

The basic costume for the mortal males—the witches were far more fanciful—was a foundation of modern attire draped with rough wool- or burlap-like tunics or sashes. The colors were muted, mostly charcoals, browns, or blacks, except for the almost blood-red royal sash worn first by King Duncan, then by Macbeth, and finally by Malcolm. The modern under-costume suggested general character: the more soldierly wore combat boots and bloused trousers; the more administrative, including Duncan, wore civvies. Other modern accouterments included contemporary haircuts, military field jackets, bayonets, turtlenecks, eyeglasses, and flashlights.

Because of their nondescript coloring, I paid little attention to the costumes after first remarking them. They did make their point at the outset, though. The lack of period specificity asserted that to Director John Pynchon Holms this play isn’t just about an 11th-century Scottish king; it’s relevant to today, not lost in some past era, and to all cultures, not only ancient Scotland or modern America. Simply transposing the play to contemporary America narrows it as much as some directors fear leaving it in its own period—whatever you think that is—would.

COLD WARRIORS

[On Tuesday, 6 December 1988, in my 15th week of seeing plays by the Bard, I caught the New York Shakespeare Festival’s presentation of Coriolanus, part of the company’s on-going Shakespeare Marathon. The play was staged at the Public Theater’s Anspacher Theater at 425 Lafayette Street in the East Village, and I composed the entry on Sunday, 11 December.]

Attempting the whole Shakespearean canon, some of which are overfamiliar and others not very good, probably necessitates occasionally straying from the conventional stagings of the plays. Steven Berkoff’s production of Coriolanus, New York Shakespeare Festival’s sixth in its Shakespeare Marathon, is its farthest stretch yet.

While I had mixed reactions overall, I found much of the highly stylized work theatrically very interesting. I was particularly taken with the combat scenes which seem emblematic of the overall production concept. There were three fight scenes, not counting Coriolanus’s murder at the end. One was the individual combat between Coriolanus and his Volscian adversary, Tullus Aufidius. This was followed by the victorious Roman assault on Corioli. While these were both interesting moments, the clearest example of Berkoff’s stylization came in the first battle, the initial Roman attack on the Volscian stronghold.

Berkoff’s ensemble, dressed in black shirts and trousers with high, black boots, were arrayed apparently at random around the playing area. Having been established as the Roman army, though the same nine men also played the Volscian army and the Roman citizens, the group fought an invisible enemy with mimed weapons. In moderate slow motion, much like the speed of T’ai Chi, the Chinese martial art-cum-exercise which it very closely resembles, the struggle was more like a dance than a choreographed battle in the usual sense. The movements, performed expressionlessly by the actors and different for each combatant, were repetitious and carefully controlled. They resembled fighting actions but abstracted, as if only the essence of each stroke or blow was performed. Each soldier, fighting his unseen opponent, moved very little from one spot on the stage, as if there were a nail through the sole of his boot. A few fighters did cover small amounts of space, but even this was mostly with the upper parts of their bodies; they didn’t move their feet very much except to keep their balance.

The battle was accompanied by drumming from the on-stage percussion group on a platform over the stage-right entrance. The drum for this fight was predominantly a snare-like instrument with a sharp, high-pitched thwack-thwack-thwack. The rhythmic beating, somewhat faster I think than the rhythm in which the fighters moved, not imitative of battle sounds, was also an abstraction. It might have recalled horses’ hoof beats or a volley of musket fire or even the beat of a battle drum—or perhaps a rapid, adrenaline-driven heartbeat.

The abstractness of the sound and movements, the lack of a personified enemy and the coolness of the execution created a fascinating theatrical moment. It was almost a brutal ballet, the kind of battle scene common in Kabuki or Beijing Opera whose aesthetic beauty belies the underlying violent and deadly reality. In line with the rest of Berkoff’s production, this depiction removed the heat and threat from the scene for me. There was no blood, not just because the production shunned its use, but because the warriors were bloodless. This was a true cold war, in the literal sense of the word.