I Interview Israeli Stage's Guy Ben-Aharon in The Arts Fuse

In The Arts Fuse, I interview Israeli Stage's Producing Artistic Director, Guy Ben-Aharon on Israeli theatre and his work bringing it to American audiences:

I started Israeli Stage to shed light on Israeli culture and to provoke conversations about Israel that might not happen outside of the cultural sphere. Too often are people’s views of Israel over-simplified and solely focused on politics. It is not their fault; it’s the only thing they hear on the news. Israeli Stage goes beyond the political implications of Israel in the Middle East and beyond the “hummus culture,” and introduces our audiences to the vivacious cultural force that is taking place in cities across Israel.

As well as the differences between American and Israeli theatre:

A big difference between American and Israeli theater is that Israeli theaters employ playwrights as “playwrights-in-residence,” so those who are successful/produced can actually make a living off of writing for the theater. Savyon Liebrecht, for example, is one of Beit Lessin’s playwrights, along with Hillel Mittelpunkt, and others.

We also discuss Apples From The Desert the Savyon Liebrecht play that Israeli Stage is currently presenting to Boston area universities. I've previously written about Israeli Stage's presentations of Liebrecht's The Banality of Love and Motti Lerner's At Night's End.

Savyon Liebrecht's "The Banality of Love"

The Arts Fuse has published my essay on Israeli playwright Savyon Liebrecht's The Banality of Love a play about the romance between German philosopher (and card carrying Nazi) Martin Heidegger and his Jewish student, the political theorist Hannah Arendt. I attended a reading of the play last month at the Goethe Institut as part of Israeli Stage's series of readings of contemporary Israeli plays in Boston.

[...]Liebrecht does not address Arendt’s rationalizations or the reasons for her dedication to Heidegger, though the dramatist’s title suggests that it is the banal truth of the irrationality of love. This neglects both Arendt the theorist and Arendt the public intellectual. Is her portrait of an innocently banal Heidegger merely the flip side of her portrait of Adolf Eichmann as a ghostly bureaucrat?[...]

Read the rest on The Arts Fuse.