A Dance of Hope and Despair
As violence escalates, Israeli theatre reacts with anxiety and self-examination
By Corey Fischer

This article, in a slightly different form, appears in the September issue of American Theatre Magazine, published by Theatre Communications Group.  The author would like to thank Betty Alexander and Marian Sofaer for their generous support.

The marquee of the Cameri

Attendees from China, Taiwan and Kenya

Rami Baruch in Levin's "The Whore from Ohio"

from Yerushalmi's "Hamlet"

Rami Baruch and Yitzchak Hezkiah in Levin's "Krum"

Josef Carmon and Zahafira Hanifai in Levin's "Requiem"

Josef Carmon and Zahafira Hanifai in Levin's "Requiem"

Smadar Ya’aron and Moni Yosef in "Antologia"

Click here to read a profile of Israeli-Arab actor, Makram Khoury

In a Tel Aviv theatre, only a few blocks from the night club that was the site of the June first suicide bombing that killed 21 young Israelis,  I ’m watching a scene in which a grief-maddened Palestinian father shoots a couple of Israeli newlyweds to death. He’s avenging his son who was tortured and murdered by Israeli soldiers. Just before the bride dies, she asks, “Why?” and the father answers, “The question ‘Why’ no longer needs to be asked. The question ‘Why’ belongs to other times.”

Most of us in this audience of Israelis and international guests can barely contain out own grief. as we watch this excerpt from a play called Murder by the late Israeli playwright,  Hanoch Levin. Actors from the Cameri, one of Israel’s three largest theatres, are performing material from Levin’s political plays and cabarets.

In June, 2001, the Institute for Israeli drama, a joint project of the Cameri and the theatre department of the University of Tel Aviv invited a group of theatre artists from around the word to experience Levin’s work. If there were such a thing as a playwright laureate in Israel, there’s no doubt it would have been Levin.  Emerging from the fringe of the late sixties, he gained national attention for a cabaret called Queen of the Bathtub which was produced by the Cameri in 1970 and, like his earlier two cabarets, bitterly attacked the triumphalism that had overtaken Israel in the aftermath of the 1967 “Six-day war.”  He went on to write over fifty plays, thirty-four of which were produced to critical acclaim and popular success before his untimely death from cancer at the age of 56 in 1999.

After writing dozens of plays that did not deal directly with the politics of the middle-east, Levin wrote Murder in 1997, during the optimism of the Oslo Accords. Again taking a contrarian role, he created a searing vision of  Palestinians and Israelis trapped in a violent cycle of revenge.

Reality, unfortunately has surpassed Levin’s grimmest prophesies. For that reason, a number of Israeli theatre people told me,  it’s no longer possible to produce Murder, or any of Levin’s political work.  Many of his non-political plays are alive in the Cameri’s repertory.  But this program of excerpts was a one-time event for the foreign guests and friends of the theatre.  Most Israeli audiences are embracing productions like the Cameri’s witty and luminous version of As You Like It. Yitzhak Hezkiah, the actor who played Jacques, told me that the play lets both actors and audience forget the fear and despair that pervades Israel right now. "It's like a meditation," he said, "for three hours we all go to another place. Then we get in the car, turn on the radio and it’s boom boom boom again."

But everything I knew about the great diversity of opinion in Israel told me that there must be some theatre artists who were responding to the “Situation”—the coded term for the escalating violence of the current Intifada (Arabic for uprising).

So I sought out Rina Yerushalmi, one of Israel’s most respected and innovative directors. Her production, Va Yomer, Va Yelekh (And he said, And he walked) which is one half of an eight-hour theatre piece based entirely on the Hebrew text of the bible, played in San Francisco in the summer of 2000. It was one of the most memorable works I've ever seen. Over a meal of Thai food in a small Tel Aviv restaurant, Yerushalmi told me that after spending years working with the bible in its original language, she found it impossible to return to doing plays. (In the past she's done acclaimed productions of Shakespeare, Chekov, Ibsen, Beckett and Ionesco.) Moreover, in the context of the intifada, she finds most plays irrelevant. “What can you do? You’ll see. You sit in Jerusalem and you see theatre? It’s a joke.   What play can you see in Jerusalem these days? It’s absurd. After the death of these kids [in the June 1 bombing] what are you going to do? Shakespeare?  Othello?” For Yerushalmi, even a play like Levin’s Murder is too literal, and much other self-consciously political theatre too didactic. She has resolved the dilemma by turning to the Greeks because “They handle the basic stones from which we are made.” She's exploring Hebrew translations of parts of the Orestia with a small group of Israeli, Palestinian-Israeli and Ethiopian-Israeli actors. She's not aiming at a production of the cycle in a mid-east setting, but, as she did in her biblical work, she’s mining the language itself for images, tension and counterpoint. Orestes is being played by an Palestinian-Israeli actor, Electra by an Israeli. She’s also incorporating a number of Arabic songs about exile and longing into the work

Yerushalmi finds parallels to Israel’s current condition in the Orestia’s themes of the sacrifice of the young by the older generations and of revenge and honor. Since the current intifada started, she has been hearing, for the first time, people speaking in terms of revenge. She  feels the notion of "honor" is a "Mediterranean" idea that informs the Palestinian response to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. According to her, “The Jews who came from Germany did not fight for their honor.” Rather, they fought for political power in order to never again be vulnerable to an oppressor. “So we build tanks, we build weapons, and we’re still answering Germany. But here it’s a different attack.  And we don’t realize the language of that attack.  It’s about honor, about acknowledging the other, which we never got used to because if you live in Europe for 2000 years and you get pushed from country to country, the other doesn’t exist.  You live in your ghetto and you  just try to get through the market alive, but the other does not count.  Here you want to be neighbors and you can’t do it.” 

Yerushalmi points out that Agamemnon's total annihilation of Troy comes from his personal need to avenge his honor rather than any tactical or strategic necessity. “When [Elektra] makes a ritual at the grave of her father she is also making a ritual for everyone who died in Troy.  Troy is the final destination.  The land is totally burned and as you excavate the story the land turns more and more into blood.”

The next day I found myself standing among teen-age soldiers carrying automatic rifles, Hasidim magically sweatless under layers of black gabardine and secular Israelis in shorts and levis all standing on the platform waiting for the train to Haifa. I was going there to spend some time with Sinai Peter who became the artistic director of the Haifa Municipal Theatre last year. 

I first met Sinai in 1982 when he was working with the innovative Neve Tzedek company. Having traveled from the radical, experimental fringe to leadership of one of Israel’s   major theatres, Sinai still  holds a vision of theatre as a force for change and, at the same time, is keenly aware of the economic pressures that limit what’s possible. While we ate humus and cucumber salad in a small restaurant in the heart of one of Haifa’s old working class neighborhoods, Sinai told me that the proliferation of new theatre facilities in Israel’s smaller towns and cities has changed the nature of Israeli theatre. Built with funds from the national lottery, these “Theatre Malls” as Sinai calls them, produce no work of their own, but rather “buy” productions from the seven major theatres. “The only way I can compete with the Habimah (Israel’s national theatre, based in Tel Aviv) and the Cameri is to do very popular work.  If I do an annoying political piece of theatre, there's no chance that it will cross the lines.”   The Haifa Municipal Theatre is currently producing a play by Joshua Sobol inspired by Israel’s experience during the Gulf War. It’s set in a massive traffic jam during a missile attack from an unspecified country and shows the breakdown of communal values under the threat of attack. Though Sobol is one of Israel’s most successful playwrights, and one of the few to have an international following (thanks to Ghetto), not a single outlying theatre would book this production. On the other hand, HMT’s  production of Irma La Douce was booked for 70 performances all over the country.            

I ask Sinai if there is still a vital fringe, an alternate theatre that remains socially and politically engaged.  “There is,” he answers.  “Even within our next season itself, there is ‘alternate theatre.’”  Under his leadership, the HMT will do Pinter’s The Caretaker, set in a Haifa,  an original piece about an uprising in Haifa’s Moroccan-Jewish neighborhood, and Brecht’s Mann ist Mann with the lead played by Norman Issa, a prominent Palestinian-Israeli actor.  “It’s really about globalization,” Sinai says.  “It’s about Israel and it’s universal.”  Casting Issa as Galy Gay can’t help but send a political message. “But I cast Norman not because he is Arab, but because he is a great comedian. And yet, we can’t avoid the reality.” 

When I returned to Tel Aviv, on Sinai’s suggestion I met with Igal Ezratty director of the Jaffa-based Hebrew-Arabic Theatre of which Norman Issa is a member. This company is one of the few surviving collaborations between Palestinian-Israeli and Jewish artists. They chose the name, Hebrew-Arabic, to emphasize the two languages rather than the two nations or ethnicities.

 “It’s a bad situation now,” Norman  said. “Crazy people. Crazy people  You don’t have…”—he searched for the word—“relax!  In my mobile phone there is internet inside.  I check it all the time for the news.”

“I don’t check,” Igal said.  Norman kept talking. .“You have to run.  If you don’t run you will be killed.”

“You are exaggerating.”

“Igal, Igal, you don’t feel what’s going on.  You don’t feel the people. The people want war.”

“Not all of them.”

“No.” Norman agreed, “Not all of them.” And after a perfectly timed pause: “Most of them.”

Norman and Igal then launched into a contrapuntal description of the Hebrew-Arabic Theatre’s new piece, “Longing,” based on the company members’ family stories of exile and displacement.  They were about to work on Norman’s scene.

Norman’s family has been fighting a long legal battle to get back their land in the Northern Israeli village of Bar Am from which they were displaced in 1948, when the new Israeli government created a security zone along the Lebanon border. “It’s most beautiful.   On a hill.  You can see Lebanon, You can see Israel.  Very good air.” 

The scene, which emerged from an improvisation, takes place in the middle of Norman’s wedding party.  He goes to visit his grandfather’s grave to get his blessing.  The grandfather, who had died before 1948, emerges from his grave, notices the audience and assumes they are wedding guests.  He wonders why they don’t speak Arabic. He’s informed that they’re Jews. “Ah,” he says,  I know Hebrew,   I have a friend, Moishe, he helped me.” Norman then has to explain to his grandfather, in a way he can understand, all the changes that have occurred since 1948.  Finally the grandfather gives Norman a map of the ancestral land as a wedding present.  But Norman can’t tell him that the land is gone.

Just before the current intifada began, the question of the Palestinians’ “Right of return” to their pre-1948 homes inside Israel became a major stumbling block in negotiations. Igal feels this makes the piece even more relevant. According to him, even the most peace-oriented Israelis who are quite willing to accept a Palestinian state in the currently occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, balk at the idea of  millions of Palestinians returning to take up residence within Israel.

“Whenever an Arab raises the question,” Igal says, “ Israelis think they’ll be pushed into sea.  The dream of Oslo was to give back territories and have peace.  But it doesn’t stop there.”  The logical outcome, Igal maintains, would be a secular, democratic state, as opposed to a specifically Jewish state.  “The Jews are not ready for it,” he says.  “I’m ready for it.”

“Who are you.?” Asks Norman.

“Me?” says Igal, “I’m naïve.” 

Not all responses to life in Israel focus on Arab-Jewish relations.  In Jerusalem, I had the good fortune to see a work from the Acco Theatre Company, Antologia,  that was quite astounding. 

A small audience sat around a grand piano while writer/performer Smadar Ya’aron,  playing an elderly Holocaust survivor, held forth with songs and reminiscences that were anything but the cliched and stereotypical stuff we’d been set up to expect. She spoke in  a combination of Yiddish, Hebrew and English, explaining how the Blues, the Waltz and the Tango were invented by Yiddish speaking Jews (the Tango, for example, was stolen in the middle of the night by Argentineans who kayaked into the port of Jaffa). She played and sang examples, interrupting herself to talk about her little boy, Menashe. After completely charming us, she left the space to look for her child.  Suddenly, a middle-aged  man (Moni Yosef, co-creator of the piece) emerged from underneath the piano, terrified and stammering, asking the audience, “Did you see my mother?  Is she gone?” He then proceeded to ask individual audience members a number of embarrassing, politically incorrect questions.  Smadar soon returned and half coaxed, half forced him to perform “The Holocaust” as a song and dance number on top of the piano. “Keep going until they cry,” she exhorted him.  To a medley of Yiddish tunes that she played on the piano, he sang and acted out, at a more and more frantic rate, dogs, Germans, gas, trains, and so on. The mother then started calling out more catastrophes for him to enact: “Kosovo!  Apartheid!” until he collapsed on top of the piano. 

Antologia, which has been performed in Hong Kong, France, Austria and Switzerland, anatomizes, through brilliant and disarming humor, the transmission of survivor trauma from generation to generation. Using self-critical satire to counter the political exploitation of the Holocaust is a relatively new phenomenon, and has a definite relevance in recasting the competing narratives of victimization that so often distort Palestinian-Israeli dialogue. Most of all, the Acco Company’s work captured the careening dance of  laughter, hope and despair that everyone in this tiny country seems swept up in.

During the week of the Levin retrospective, days after the June first bombing, thousands of Israelis braved the threat of more random violence and came to the Cameri. The work they came to see might not have spoken directly to the politics of the moment, but their insistence on partaking of theatre in these times makes a powerful statement of its own.

Though Rina Yerushalmi speaks openly about her feelings of alienation from Israeli society, she manages to create searing and relevant images through unlikely juxtapositions of the ancient and the modern. Sinai Peter sruggles to make bold and challenging theatre while administering a mainstream institution. Visions of theatre as provocative as those of The Acco Theatre Company’s find audiences in spite of increasing commercialization. Igal Ezratty refuses to give up on his dream of cultural  pluralism and galvanizes an artistic community around it. Shortly after the Intifada began last September, The Haifa Municipal Theatre and the Hebrew Arabic Theatre, among others, hosted evenings in their spaces called “Haifa Talks” or “Jaffa Talks,” open forums where Jews and Arabs could express their anger and sorrow.  The Hebrew Arabic Theatre continues to host a “Normal Café” every Friday night where Arab and Jewish performers share an open mike, read poetry, make music and try out works in progress. “People come and sit together and eat together and drink together,” Norman Issa said. “This is peace.”

And yet any peaceful moment in today’s Israel is shadowed by the anxiety born from dense and painful history and a shaky future. Hanoch Levin wrote a song in 1968 that has never lost its sting:

When we go for a walk we’re three

You and me and the next war

When we’re asleep, we’re three

You and me and the next war.

You and me and the next war

And then the war after that.

May you rest in peace forever

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