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.

Live From Somerville!

My friends Amanda and Art Hennessey invited me to appear on their (mostly) live sketch comedy show on Somerville Community Access Television (SCATv).

Dead Air Live presents Somerville Night Live:



I play a number of characters in this episode including Emerson Woodshole, a marine biologist, Busker Moominshantz, a subway musician, myself, Arlecchino, and the guy hiding behind the couch.

Another pleasant surprise was that one of the other guests was my friend, dancer and choreographer, Alice Hunter!

What you can't see is that as the hour progressed I began coming down with a cold, and have vague memories of being quite miserable by the end!

Top row, left to right: Cheryl Singleton, Art Hennessey, Juan Carlos Pinedo, Erik Rodenhiser; Front Row: Busker Moominshantz, producer Brad Kelly, Alice Hunter, Christine Power, Amanda Good Hennessey, and Floyd Richardson.

Five Years of "From The Journals of Ian Thal"

Today marks the fifth anniversary of "From the Journals of Ian Thal" so named because I hadn't a name that could better summarize my diverse interests (I still have not.) The premiere entry being a response to a cartoon by George Tod Slone, editor and lead polemicist for The American Dissident:

It hadn't been my first foray into blogging: I had previously maintained one at Authors' Den but eventually realized that the platform was rapidly becoming technologically out of date and that the site was essentially an internet ghetto.

The Bread & Puppet Affair:

Though Slone and I tangled a few more times, I quickly moved on to more important targets. Only two months later, I posted the opening salvo of what would become the most sustained controversy to which I have ever been a party when I broke off relations with the Vermont-based "radical" puppetry troupe, Bread & Puppet theatre, when I noted that artistic director Peter Schumann's recent work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was flirting with Holocaust trivialization and antisemitism. The controversy would blow up again later that year at an arts festival in Burlington, Vermont. In subsequent years both Schumann and I would be interviewed on the controversy, and as if to eliminate any ambiguity, Schumann would use these interviews as an opportunity to openly espouse anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and notions of post-WWII German victimhood that would demonstrate what at first seemed to me an odd confluence between his brand of leftism and European neo-fascism. Sadly, I discovered that such confluence was not odd at all. This controversy continues (sometimes in the pages of Wikipedia and in university class rooms)and I have addressed it as recently as last month in response to a piece in the Boston Herald.

As a friend of mine noted to me: "Peter's antisemitism has been something of an open secret in puppetry circles. You were just the first person to say it in public."

Shakespeare:

I would also frequently discuss my favorite playwright, William Shakespeare:

I blogged about the rehearsal process behind an aborted production of Macbeth, discussing that it was like to work with original pronunciation, playing multiple supporting characters, and even the "curse" that killed the production in mid-rehearsals.

I discussed the attempt by the local chapter of the Federalist Society to co-opt Henry V as justification for George W. Bush-era's torture policy.

My most sustained engagement with the Bard's works has been regarding The Merchant of Venice: addressing the racial, legal and theological themes, speculation regarding Launcelot Gobbo, and his father Old Gobbo. All of these matters have been reflected in my creative life both regarding what began as an off-the-cuff remark in my one-man-show Arlecchino Am Ravenous but more ambitiously in the play I am currently writing, The Conversos of Venice.

Criticism and Commentary:

From time to time, I've expounded on troubling themes in recent plays such as the odd World War II revisionism in Michael Frayn's Copenhagen or the deicide charge in Stephan Adly Guirgis' The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. I've also become a contributor to the online arts magazine The Arts Fuse, most recently scribing an essay about Israeli playwright, Motti Lerner's At Night's End.

Sometimes my commentary is leveled not at plays but at what goes on behind the scenes, such as last year's IRNE awards in which a handful of theatre companies exerted pressure to remove a critic from the awards panel, or my enthusiasm for such developments as the New Play Map.

Artistic Career:

Of course, I began blogging in order to document my career as an artist. Discussing my explorations of commedia dell'arte (with specific emphasis on Arlecchino) with i Sebastiani, or with my current troupe Teatro delle Maschere:

I've also featured a short history of old mime troupe, Cosmic Spelunker Theatre, and my solo mime work:

Of course, I've been tracking the long process of development for my play, Total War a process that has taken far longer than I ever imagined possible!

Teaching:

I've also taken the time to document some of my work teaching mime, commedia dell'arte, and puppetry at the Somerville youth circus, Open Air Circus, Wheelock Family Theatre, and other such places.

Community:


While I am busy celebrating myself, I also want to thank some of my more sustained interlocutors who have helped make this blog a particularly rewarding endeavor. While there are many I could name, I must single out Thomas Garvey, Art Hennessey, and Bill Marx (my editor at The Arts Fuse) whose arguments and encouragement have helped keep this Quixotic project going for five years!

Commentary: Motti Lerner's "At Night's End"

Israeli playwright, Motti Lerner

In The Arts Fuse I comment on Israeli playwright Motti Lerner's At Night's End which was presented last week at the Goethe Institut by Israeli Stage, a theatre company devoted to presenting Israeli plays in translation. The play is presents a family in Haifa during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War. Because of the subject matter, I could not help but recall another play about Israeli families during wartime that has been making the rounds in recent years, Caryl Chruchill's Seven Jewish Children:

Though this family portrait is less-than-flattering, it is a far cry from the crude caricatures presented by English playwright Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children: A Play For Gaza, a short play that has been received considerable international success in recent years. In Churchill’s play, Israelis are not subject to real threats like daily rocket attacks, invasions, and neighboring states that openly endorse Holocaust denial and genocidal fantasies. Lerner, a critic of Israeli military culture, faces these pressures. But he, unlike Churchill, wrestles with the conundrum of how to integrate traumatized warriors into civilian life.

[...]

In order to inflame hostility towards Israel, Churchill’s play largely portrays Israelis as European interlopers who have been left morally stunted and psychologically infantile because of their experience and understanding of the Holocaust. Lerner’s work exposes the trauma that war places on Israeli families and civil society, but for the purpose of opening up serious dialogue about how to make Israel a better land for his grandchildren. In short, while Lerner’s Israelis are struggling under genuine historical and social pressures, Churchill’s Israelis have no real world context beyond how the dramatist imagines Jews and their approach to childrearing.

Read the rest in The Arts Fuse!

I previously wrote about Israeli Stage's presentation of Savyon Liebrecht's The Banality of Love.

Nota Bene: Meron Langser, who was also in attendance, discusses the importance of presenting Israeli theatre to American audiences as well as the play's portrayal of post-traumatic stress disorder.

"It’s the playwright being tyrannical"

The New York Times recently posted a story about Paula Vogel's "playwriting boot camp." I am not sufficiently familiar with Vogel's work to have an informed opinion on either her playwriting or pedagogy; what stuck me most were the opinions expressed by one of the participants:

[Vogel] encouraged her writers, in their scripts, to consider leaving half a page blank to underscore the importance of wordlessness to directors and actors.

Such a heavy authorial hand drew heated complaints, however, from Nicholas Gray, a young theater director who had been invited by an associate. Mr. Gray railed against lengthy stage directions, saying he crossed them out in scripts before he would begin rehearsals with his actors.

“It’s the playwright being tyrannical over all of the other artists who will ever work on the play,” Mr. Gray said, adding that even “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” would not escape his pen.

His conviction drew out Ms. Vogel’s steely side for a moment — “that idea causes me a great deal of pain,” she said of his editing — before she regained her professorial posture

This passage, which was brought to my attention by Art Hennessey (who notes that both Vogel and Gray misunderstand Eugene O'Neil's authorial intent) was particularly striking-- in particular, Nicholas Gray's notion that he could so cavalierly edit a playwright's work simply because he feels that the script is "tyrannical."

The standard Dramatists' Guild contract prevents a producing company from altering the script without explicit written permission from the playwright or, if deceased, the playwright's estate (public domain works are treated differently.) However, alongside issues of copyright and contracts there is also the matter of artistic integrity and the moral rights of artists over their own work: assuming that the playwright has sufficiently mastered the craft that one sees the script as worthy of production, one should also assume that the playwright wrote those stage directions for a good reason. If the script specifies costumes, props, manipulations, specific actions, offers background information, it is to add to the story. They may relate, in an unspoken manner, to the causal relations that bring the narrative to its end. They might symbolically relate to the themes of the play. They may signify the relationships amongst the characters. They may provide some meaningful context that could prove useful to an inquisitive cast or production staff member.

There is a dramaturgical fashion to say that today's theatre is about "collaboration" (when has it not been?) and that playwrights who incorporate detailed stage directions or notes on settings are working against collaboration. Certainly there can sometimes be a temptation to contain more specificity than the story demands, meaning that the playwright is directing from the written page. However, can one argue that Tennessee Williams was "being tyrannical" he specified props or even the music and sound design for A Streetcar Named Desire? Would Not I be as powerful a play had directors exercised the freedom to ignore Samuel Beckett's stage directions?
Where Gray sees tyranny, a stronger, more confident director sees a challenge. Earlier this season, I saw Whistler in the Dark's production of Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet/Cahoot's Macbeth. During an exchange following Thomas Garvey's review. Stoppard's stage directions are copiously detailed and are a necessary part of the action of the play. However, since Whistler has such a distinctive style and it had been years since I read the script, I mistakenly thought the physical actions of the final minutes had been crafted by director Meg Taintor as opposed to the her staging of Stoppard's directions because once staged it looked like her work. Similarly, when I saw Imaginary Beasts' production of Eugene Ionesco's Macbett the production was in the company's distinctive style, despite Director Matthew Wood mentioning in conversation after the show that his contract with the Ionosco estate strictly forbade him from making cuts to the text. Imagine that: being true to one's own artistic voice while following the script to the letter!

When directors do exercise the freedom to cut, reshuffle, or rearrange plays that are in the public domain (and thus no longer protected by the Guild contract or a playwright or playwright's estate) the play in question is sufficiently familiar that audience members are able to judge for themselves whether the production honored the authorial intent or whether it even matters. For instance, while visiting Washington, D.C. I caught Washington Shakespeare Company Avant Bard's The Mistorical Hystery of Henry (I)V. This production not only compressed Henry IV, Part 1 & 2 into a single two hour and thirty-five minute show (bookended with short excerpts from Richard II and Henry V but staged the scenes of political intrigue and battle as a burlesque show performed by the harlots at Mistress Quickly's Boar's Head Inn. The concept was fairly radical in that it explored the relationship between power and power's parodists in an era where political satire could get the satirists killed once those in power are no longer amused by their caricatures. Director Tom Malin's adaptation was not a reaction against "the playwright being tyrannical" but a reimagining that both stood on its own and gained additional levels of meaning because much of the audience was familiar with the more conventional stagings of the play and so recognized the figures being lampooned by the harlots of Eastcheap. It was easy to imagine that the goings on of the Mistorical Hystery were occuring in the same world as the events in a straight reading of Henry IV 1 & 2. The point is that while Malin had no legal obstacles preventing him from making radical cuts to the original, he also had a strong enough concept to make something new, and the intellectual honesty to not pretend that this adaptation was the same play first performed in the late sixteenth century.

In short, if Mr. Gray feels that he is, as a director, under the yoke of tyrannical playwrights he has a few options:

1.) Stick to plays in the public domain or recent work by playwrights who are not willing to defend the artistic integrity of their scripts should they be notified of alterations.

2.) Find a playwright who has a strong voice yet also has philosophical reasons to allow others to radically rework his or her plays, as is the case with Charles Mee.

3.) Write and direct his own plays.

4.) Switch to film, where directors usually get to decide upon the final cut.

5.) Simply find a playwright who is easily bullied by a director. After all no playwright who cares about the integrity of their work is going to let Nicholas Gray direct their plays after reading his comments in the New York Times.

If Amnesty International Had Its Own Theater Company

Boston Herald theatre critic Jenna Scherer writes:

If Amnesty International had its own theater company, Bread & Puppet would just about fit the bill.

In the course of its nearly 50-year existence, the Vermont-based collective has tackled more human rights issues than any other troupe out there. B&P’s viewpoints are incendiary and its style unorthodox, and attending one of its shows is a totally unique theatrical experience.

I would not dispute the point that Bread & Puppet's style is unorthodox; so at variance with the rest of the theatre world that I regard the rich dramaturgical vocabulary is worthy of study by both theatre artists and scholars, indeed "Bread & Puppet" has become a generic term to refer to a style of protest theatre: any usage of large allegorical papier-mâché puppets. However, I question Scherer's assertion that B&P should be representing any human rights group. After all, how do you square a concern for human rights with public statements by B&P founder and artistic director, Peter Schumann?

I think it’s awful that the Western community does not interfere with what Israel’s doing as an occupation force [in the West Bank]. The Western community does not do anything about it. They don’t even speak up against it. They don’t do anything. They basically serve as the Israeli propaganda for the events there.

In this statement, from a 2008 interview with the New England Journal of Aesthetic Research, Schumann does more than criticize Israeli policies in the West Bank (in this specific instance, it was the the wall that was built to prevent suicide bombers from entering Israel.) He claims that "the Western community" by which he appears to mean the governments and media outlets of the European and North American nations are somehow under Israeli control. How does Israel get the "Western community" to produce propaganda for Israel and obey Israeli interests? Money? Well-placed people in government? If it is the influence of money or well-placed people, how is this substantially different than other forces influencing the "Western community." I have noted this implausibility elsewhere. This "Western community" is either made up of sovereign states or media outlets that reside in sovereign states that have interests other than serving as "Israeli propaganda" organs.

Schumann is not "criticizing" Israel, rather, he is openly propounding an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, using the fuzzy logic of allusion and moralistic pronouncements. This conspiracy theory is not unlike those he would have encountered during his childhood in Nazi Germany. While Schumann often speaks of his childhood in Silesia, often bitterly complaining that it was annexed to Poland after World War II, he rather consistently neglects to mention that Silesia was part of the Third Reich. He has also managed to solicit cooperation from interviewers in misrepresenting his childhood. By Schumann's logic, one could accuse the Vermont press of serving as Schumann propaganda by helping him hide his origins.

Take this cover from a 1942 issue of Fliegende Blätter depicting Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Rosevelt, and Joseph Stalin as puppets of "The Jews.":

Another 1942 cartoon portraying the same world leaders as puppets of a Jewish puppeteer, this time in the Lustuge Blätter:

This 1940 cover to the Lustige Blätter reads "Englands Führung Liegt in Guten Handen!" or "England's leadership is in good hands!" while depicting Winston Churchill being led like a child by a stereotypical Haredi Jew:

While in this 1934 cartoon from Die Brennessel portrays a Jewish controlled press subverting Germany from abroad:

The imagery in these cartoons certainly were incendiary: They had the overall effect of making anti-Jewish legislation, street violence, deportations, and genocide more palatable to the German public-- even to those Germans who did not buy into biological racism. So it is disheartening to find a German artist who grew up during that time period repeating the same canards.

It becomes even more disturbing when we consider the strong semblance between some of these grotesque Jewish caricatures and Schumann's own personification of the evil powers-that-be, Uncle Fatso:

I have been raising these difficult questions since I walked out of a 2007 rehearsal with Bread & Puppet after Schumann made a series of installations comparing the West Bank to the Warsaw Ghetto. I was too knowledgeable about the history to not to realize that this was a misrepresentation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as a form of "soft-core" Holocaust denial, in that it deliberately trivialized and misrepresented the facts of the Holocaust.

The point is that a theatre company whose artistic director creates anti-Semitic propaganda (even thinly disguised anti-Semitic propaganda) and makes anti-Semitic statements in interviews should not be proposed as the theatrical arm of a human rights NGO, as Jenna Scherer does. Not that I believe that Scherer is making a serious proposal, but it is clear that she is also not engaged in serious thought, having succumbed to the notion that theatre criticism amounts to writing blurbs.

Note: I previously took issue with Jenna Scherer when she was still at The Weekly Dig.

Nazi-era cartoons courtesy of Randall Bytwerk's German Propaganda Archive.

Some Thoughts on Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen"

Last night, I caught Flat Earth Theatre's production of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen. It was not my first encounter with the play: I had attended the 2008 production at American Repertory Theater and had read the script a few months ago. Copenhagen, like very few contemporary plays, holds up both as a script for performance and as a literary work. Furthermore, after seeing Flat Earth's production (directed by Jake Scaltreto who shows himself to be more imaginative, thoughtful, and understanding of the text than A.R.T.'s Scott Zigler) I felt vindicated in my 2008 intuition that the play demands both multiple viewings and multiple productions.

However, the more I consider the script and the moral argument that Frayn seems to be making, the more I come to doubt that earlier intuition. What follows is not a review, but a few questions that bother me every time I encounter this play. One of the major themes of Copenhagen is the moral responsibility of scientists during wartime, specifically focussing on Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, and their work on developing the nuclear bomb for America and Germany respectively. Of course, as history tells us, Germany failed to develop nuclear weapons, while America, famously benefiting Germany's racial laws that drove most of the top physicists out of both Germany and German-occupied Europe, succeeded.

Much is made of Heisenberg's moral calculations as to why he chose to work on the bomb. He was relatively apolitical, and showed a sufficient intellectual independence from Nazi ideology to get himself in trouble with SS Reichsfürhrer Heindrich Himmler for his opposition to the Deutsche Physik movement. Heisenberg's own consciousness had been formed during his adolescence, undergoing hardships, as Germany has been defeated in the First World War. Even if he did not personally believe that a nuclear weapon was practical, even if he had distinct misgivings about the ideology of Naziism and the government's policies, he could neither be certain that other minds could not devise a practical nuclear fission weapon, nor consider the possibility that his homeland would be target of an Allied nuclear attack.

Little, by contrast, is made of Niels Bohr's moral calculations. Frayn does not mention Bohr's own humanitarian work during the era: prior to German occupation of Denmark, providing refuge to German-Jewish scientists, nor does it mention Bohr's important role in the rescue of Denmark's Jews: When Bohr escaped to Sweden, he refused to board the plane that would take him to America to work in Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project until the Swedish government agreed to give asylum to Denmark's Jews, most of whom would arrive a few days later, narrowly escaping deportation to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. In other words, Bohr made his contributions to the American bomb dependent on the rescue of eight-thousand people who were otherwise destined for extermination.

Instead, in the voice of Heisenberg, we hear much of German victimhood from Allied bombings and ultimately the horror of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the Manhattan project made possible. Heisenberg complains about the humiliation of former friends, who had developed the American bomb, refusing to shake his hand though he had failed to develop a German bomb, as if these were moral equivalencies. They are not: the scientists at the Manhattan Project were saving the world from fascism and genocide; had Heisenberg succeeded he would have unleashed more genocide and a more muscular fascism.

The point being that when we look at civilian casualties during World War II, they are estimated to amount to roughly 40 to 52 million, or approximately 62% or nearly two-thirds of those killed during the War. However, ~58% of those killed were Allied civilians while only ~4% of the total dead were civilians of the Axis powers. Bohr knew not only of Germany's genocidal intent against European Jewry (his mother was Jewish) but he knew of Germany's strategy of massive bombing campaigns against civilian populations in order to demoralize the enemy. When one looks at the statistics, there really is no comparison: considering the civilian death toll of World War II, both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan got off fairly lightly compared to the countries they invaded.

So, the question that bothers me each time I encounter the play is why is Copenhagen's Heisenberg allowed to draw such moral equivalencies in a situation where the contrast is so stark? Is it merely because the play was written for a British audience that is well aware of the constant bombings that British civilians endured during the War-- and are thus assumed not to accept such equivalencies? Is it because Bohr's own reasoning is deemed so obvious to the British audience that only Heisenberg's need be explored? Is it because it ties in with the play's guiding question of why Heisenberg visited Neils Bohr in his Copenhagen home in 1941? Is it because we, as the victors living in democratic societies, have the luxury of questioning ourselves? Or perhaps, more nefariously, Frayn's own reliance on David Irving's 1967 The Virus House for information on the German bomb program (Irving, rather infamously, has come to be known as a fraudulent historian, Holocaust denier, and Hitler-apologist)?

(I would be remiss not to mention the excellent Copenhagen blog by Flat Earth's dramaturg David Rogers, which explores many of the other themes of the play.)

Nota Bene: Art Hennessey reminded me that he raised similar questions about Frayn's moral and historical relativism during A.R.T.'s production in 2008, though while I noted Frayn's connections with David Irving, he notes Frayn's philosophical writings. I also clarified Bohr's own Nazi-era humanitarian work that Frayn doesn't discuss in the play.