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Nov. 24, 2006
Spotlights on conflict
Theatre-goers see very different experiences.
BASYA LAYE
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has generated a breadth of media
coverage and countless reams of opinion and editorial. Two off-Broadway
one-woman plays about the conflict opened on stage recently in New
York City and both have drawn a great deal of publicity.
Iris Bahr, playwright, actor, neuroscientist and writer, is performing
her play Dai (Enough) at the Culture Project in Lower
Manhattan, a venue known for its social and political dramatic works.
In a program note, Bahr writes that, "Dai is an attempt
to investigate and vocalize the human manifestation of the splintered
Israeli psyche as I have come to know and live it, as embodied by
the vast spectrum of people and beliefs that make up Israeli society
and its critics."
She opens the play as a reporter who is visiting a Tel-Aviv café
to interview patrons, in an effort to give voice to the "other
side," having recently spent time in Gaza and the West Bank,
presenting the Palestinian view of the intifada. In the course of
the production, Bahr plays more than 10 characters, with each interview
cut short by the sounds of a suicide bomb blast that rips through
the café.
Among others, there is a Latina actress from Los Angeles, in Israel
to research her role in a film about the intifada, a gay German
in Israel to recapture the affection of an Israeli who was once
his lover, a Russian prostitute in Israel on forged papers, a settler
who has her children shout slogans at the café's patrons,
a well-to-do Israeli woman from New York, visiting Israel after
a 15-year absence, a Christian evangelist planning to build a "Rapture
Centre," a young woman who smuggles the drug Ecstasy into Israel
in an attempt to hold a party for peace and a young Israel Defence
Forces volunteer from Manhattan. Bahr plays each character with
affection, humor and depth. Each grapples with the conflict in his
or her own way: bewildered, optimistic, angry and sad about the
situation in Israel, her past and her future.
Another one-woman show that has generated even more buzz is the
off-Broadway production of My Name is Rachel Corrie. The
play chronicles the journey of Rachel Corrie, the young student
activist from Washington state who was killed while protesting the
destruction of a Palestinian home in 2003. Evening performances
featured Megan Dodds in the title role.
Directed by Alan Rickman and edited by Rickman and Katherine Viner,
the production is comprised entirely of Corrie's journal entries,
e-mails and letters to friends and family, and Corrie spends much
of the play speaking directly to the audience. Rather than being
directly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or about politics
at all, the play seeks to present Corrie as a young woman caught
up in her quest to save the world and live her life passionately,
with meaning.
The play has generated much controversy, having had its original
run cancelled due to public outcry, much of it from the Jewish community.
This was the American première of London's Royal Court Theatre
production.
The audience gets to know Corrie and I wanted to like her. In the
first half of the play, I admired her for the courage of her convictions;
for her personal journey of self-discovery. By the second half,
with Gaza as the setting, I found her self-aggrandizing and her
political lecturing not only annoying but foolish. There were some
sniffles when the lights went down and hearty applause, but I felt
angry and disappointed.
I have always disagreed with the attempt to keep this production
off the stage, but I felt angry when I left the theatre, as though
I had just endured a 90-minute lecture from someone who had only
10 days before found out that there was someplace called the Middle
East. The lack of apology, questions or qualms that Corrie had toward
the conflict was tough to absorb and was in direct contrast to the
carefully nuanced, skillfully acted and intelligent range of perspectives
presented by Bahr's many characters.
Dai runs through Jan. 6, 2007, at the Culture Project in
Manhattan (www.cultureproject.org).
My Name is Rachel Corrie ended its run Nov. 19.
Basya Laye is interim director at the Foundation for Ethnic
Understanding in New York City.
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