Theresia Walser's A Little Calm Before the Storm

(Part of a series in which I make up for not updating my blog recently.)

In December, I attended German Stage's presentation of a staged reading of Theresia Walser's A Little Calm Before the Storm featuring Johnny Lee Davenport, Jeremiah Kissel, and Ted Hewlett, playing three actors waiting to be ushered before the camera of a television talk show.

As I wrote in The Arts Fuse:

In Theresia Walser’s A Little Calm Before the Storm, three actors sit in the green room waiting to be part of a televised discussion on the challenges of playing Hitler. The 2006 play has been both popular in Germany (reportedly a five-year run) and controversial. Consul General Rolf Schütte, who was in attendance at the staged reading, said that he could not imagine such play being produced in Germany 15 years prior.

[...]On one level, A Little Calm Before the Storm is only a prelude to a discussion about how evil can be portrayed in art. During the one-act play Prächtel, Söst, and Lerch talk about this difficult topic and then dance away from it. Walser provides plenty of comic distraction: Prächtel becomes exasperated that he cannot get a glass of tap water in the television studio; Söst attempts to coach Lerch on how to pull off irrelevant talk show banter. Waiting for the television host who never comes, the impatient actors begin to taunt each other, appraising each other’s performances, questioning if the other actor can do justice to such a hated historical figure as Hitler.

Gilad Evron's Ulysses on Bottles

(Part of a series in which I make up for not updating my blog recently.)

Back in November I attended Israeli Stage's presentation of a staged reading of Gilad Evron's play Ulysses
on Bottles. It's a powerful piece that explores the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with some subtlety and moral complexity. Hopefully, director Guy Ben-Aharon will be able to give it a fully-mounted production sometime soon.

As I wrote in The Arts Fuse:

At first, no one quite knows what to make of the prisoner (played by Johnny Lee Davenport). Neither the Defense Ministry, prosecutors, nor defense attorney Saul Izakov (Jeremiah Kissel) can make sense of his actions. He offers no political argument, expresses no sympathy for the Hamas regime in charge of Gaza, no animosity towards Israel (he seems wholly content with his life as an Arab citizen of Israel). Of course, Ulysses’s actions would make sense if his cargo had been food or medical supplies or even if he were a terrorist sympathizer. However, Ulysses only asserts his conviction that “the Gazans are dying to study Russian literature. It’s a breeze that rises higher than the kites they fly on the shore.” Psychiatrists determine that, however quixotic his mission, the man is quite sane.

The issue of food and medicine is central to Izakov’s other client: the Defense Ministry. Izakov meets with an official named Seinfeld (Will Lyman) to sort out the latter’s legal conundrum: how to legally contend with the population of a Gaza governed by a de facto state-within-a-state constitutionally sworn to Israel’s destruction? Despite the hostilities, the blockade makes the government “responsible for their food, their drink, their sewage, their literature,their security, their iron, their contraceptives, their toys, their pots and pans, their spices, their flowers, their meat, their electricity, their paper, their medications, their engines [. . .] even their anti-diarrheal pills!” Seinfeld wants to make sure that no one under his command can be charged with crimes, but he also understands that, given the political stalemate, abiding by the law will not ward off armed conflict, such as the one that began just days before the November 18th reading. Izakov grasps that the law to which he is dedicated is not sufficient to help his most powerful client.