This Wouldn't Be 'Guerrilla Theater' Now, Would It?

Palestinian theatre offers youths a breath of freedom

JENIN, West Bank (AFP) — ...Bisam is among some 200 Palestinian youths who manage to escape the stifling atmosphere of their home in the northern West Bank town of Jenin by taking part in a project called The Freedom Theatre. In addition to an actual theatre that puts on productions for the locals, the project also includes access to computers, books, CDs and DVDs.

"The children love it," says Nabil al-Rai, a 32-year-old actor and director of the theatre that stands at the end of a tiny alley amid the dusty, poverty-plagued streets of the Jenin refugee camp.

"Here, they can feel free."

Feeling free when you live in Jenin is no small feat.

The town of 39,000 lies nestled in the hills of breathtaking beauty that belie the ever-tightening grip of the 42-year Israeli occupation.

Drive just five kilometres (three miles) to the north and you run into an Israeli army checkpoint that prevents West Bankers without special permits from entering Israel. The permits are nearly impossible to get.

Go 10 kilometres west and the way is blocked by Israel's security barrier as it reaches deep inside Palestinian territory walling off a Jewish settlement.

Wander 13 kilometres to the east and the barrier cuts off any access to the flower-dotted hills with majestic views on the Jordan Valley.

The sandy beaches of the Mediterranean are an hour's drive away, but they may as well be on the moon as far as the children of Jenin are concerned..."The children here cannot go to the sea, even to the Dead Sea... They are in a big prison," al-Rai says.

This is so anachronistic, wrong and stupid.

Even before 1967 the Jeninites (?) couldn't go north or west either. South, yes but they had to detour around West Jerusalem.

But let's get back to the theater:

But on the stage, there are no permits and no restrictions. "The whole idea is to have freedom through threatre," says al-Rai. "To think about culture, about how to fight, to keep up resistance and keep the Palestinian identity."

Nice idea. But whose?

The theatre was established by an Israeli woman, Arna Mer-Khamis during the first Palestinian intifada in 1987 and known as "Stone Theatre."...It was rebuilt by Mer-Khamis's actor son Juliano in 2004, with the help of Zakaria Zubeidi, one of the most powerful militants in Jenin who himself is an alumni of the project...

But the theatre is not without domestic critics, including those who resort to violence. A week ago, someone tried to set fire to the building, with the blaze damaging the front door.

"These attacks and threats against the theatre come from small reactionary groups in the camp displaying narrow, racist interests, and who consider theatre, cinema and music as destructive factors in the Palestinian struggle for liberation," the theatre later said in a statement.

Supporters of the project hope that the attack was an isolated incident.

Just make sure that when the gun appears in the first act, it doesn't shoot - not in the third or ever. (*)




(*)

"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." From Gurlyand's Reminiscences of A. P. Chekhov, in Teatr i iskusstvo 1904, No. 28, 11 July, p. 521.’

Contemporary Culturalism's Roots

I did get a subscription to Metal magazine, but I wasn’t a true metalhead. I maybe went to a Bon Jovi concert. I had a Cinderella album, “Long Cold Winter.” It was a weird time to come of age because you have a burgeoning sense of your own sexuality, and your objects of desire are long-haired, permed, lipstick-wearing, Spandexed boys. I had a huge crush on all of those dudes with those pulsing pants and high kicks and beautiful glowing pink mouths.

Sheila Callaghan, Playwright,
whose latest effort, “That Pretty Pretty; or, the Rape Play” is reviewed here.

A New Santa Claus

...Mr. Kotis, a better writer than actor, plays a drunken middle manager who discovers that St. Nick (Bill Coelius) fathered his children. After he confronts his wife, Mary (played by Ayun Halliday, Mr. Kotis’s real wife), she leaves home with her son and daughter, played by the Kotises’ adorable real children, the endearingly jaunty India, 11, and the shyer Milo, 8.

Leaving Dad at home, the rest of the family heads to the North Pole, where they find polygamous elves (Clay Adams, Jeff Gurner) and an angry Mrs. Claus (Lusia Strus) willing to destroy the world to get her revenge.

New Play

Beware of plays that open on trains trundling through Europe in the
1940s. You know where they’re heading. The strength of Candida Cave’s new work, Lotte’s Journey, is that it evades cliché by telling the passengers’ stories in reverse. In particular we focus on Charlotte Saloman, a brilliant Jewish artist haunted by the suicide of her mother and grandmother. The script is technically ambitious and takes us from Berlin to Rome and Nice, and covers Saloman’s life from the age of eight when her father explained the cause of her mother’s death as influenza. These large transitions are skilfully handled by Ninon Jerome’s direction. Lotte Collett’s design is compact and admirably suggestive. In the space of a few years Saloman produced a highly innovative and expressive collection of paintings which remain unjustly neglected. Murdered at Auschwitz aged 26, she would have been 90 this year. The final irony is that she might have survived had her parents let her pursue a love affair that would have taken her beyond danger. Their desire to protect her killed her.

Source.

Theater of the Really Absurd

There's a new theater production afoot, "Jihad - The Musical".

The Plot:-

JIHAD THE MUSICAL tells the story of a young Afghan peasant, Sayid. Coming from the desert, Sayid dreams of proving himself to his bossy sister Shazzia and to the world, by making it as a flower farmer. Enchanted by a mysterious veiled woman, he leaps at her offer to work for a company that ‘exports poppies’ to the West. Unfortunately, Sayid soon discovers that the woman is a terrorist, and the company a front for a jihadi cell seeking to blow up targets in the West, most particularly one known as the Unidentified, Very Prestigious Landmark.

Farce ensues as Sayid is brainwashed by the all-singing, all-dancing jihadis, vowing to fight for their cause. Meanwhile, a sinister reporter, Foxy Redstate, uncovers the plot, encouraging Sayid to keep her in the loop in the hope that such an exclusive will propel her to media stardom. Sayid finds himself caught between the terrorists on one hand and the media on the other, driven to share in their enthusiasm for the impending terrorist spectacular. Fortunately help is on the way in the form of his no-nonsense sister, who teams up with a surrender-prone Frenchman to come to the rescue. Everything comes to a head on the night of the attack, where, caught between his sister, the bloodthirsty global media, and the jihadis he has come to see as a new family, Sayid has to decide whose side he is really on.

Kippah tip: AtlasShrugs)

Mercy, How Prescient of Percy

Here's a brief description of a play never performed:-

Percy’s work is unusual in claiming contact with the Koran and unique in its sustained dramatic depiction of the Prophet. Given the current interest in Early Modern depictions of the East, this publication will undoubtedly open new avenues of inquiry. In part, that inquiry will focus simply on the nature of anti-Islamic propaganda. Mahomet and His Heaven begins with the Prophet’s judgement on a sinful Arabia, a place he wishes to punish through a divine drought. Angels and spirits are sent to investigate, but at the end of the play they bring only corruption to Muhammad’s already dubious heavenly rule. In Act Five the Queen of the Desert, the object of the play’s numerous sexual quests, has the Prophet himself in her thrall. In common with many of his contemporaries, Percy associates the East with luxury and sexual licence; by manipulating elements in the Islamic tradition, he eventually takes those ideas to caricature the Muslim heaven itself.

The picture, however, is not quite so simple. Percy’s play is also a tragicomedy, with Muhammad as a kind of Prospero conducting symbolic masques, blessing marriages, and turning away from vengeance at the last. The vision of union at the close of Act Five brings the reconciliation of Shia and Sunni factions – a recovery from schism for which Percy, as member of a famous Catholic family, must have hoped in the Christian West. Some of the fascination of Mahomet and His Heaven lies in these interlocking religious conflicts: Christian against Muslim and Catholic against Protestant. Muhammad, dispensing judgement and forgiveness, is an object of satire for his presumption, but he is also a kind of proxy for the unifying power of Christ. That doubleness is also there in the depiction of Arabia: at one point a corrupt “Dervish” is transformed into a Christian “Fryar” simply through an authorial slip of the pen. Dimmock’s edition is good at identifying such points of contact. In a world where theatrical reference to religion was strictly controlled, the allusive safety of Islam was no doubt part of its appeal.

And when was this written?

The answer, here, is - 1601!

It's called "MAHOMET AND HIS HEAVEN" by William Percy.

Ah, New York's Jewish (?) Milieu

New play out.

Twice the holidays! Twice the hollering! Twice the guilt!..."My Mother's Italian, My Father's Jewish & I'm in Therapy!" features funny man Steve Solomon in a 90 minute show inspired by his hilarious family and all the people in his life whose sole purpose is to drive him into therapy...and they succeeded. One part lasagna, one part kreplach and two parts prozac, you don't have to be Jewish or Italian to see this show. All you need is to know what it feels like to leave Thanksgiving dinner with heartburn and a headache.

Steve Solomon's one-man show explains the basis of his humor: When Solomon's Italian mother and Jewish-American father fell in love during World War II, they couldn't realize all the cultural misunderstandings to come. The Brooklyn-born comedy writer fills the stage with his extended family and explains how he moved from a successful career as a school administrator to a performer telling stories about his unique—and uniquely funny—clan.

But one reviewer was upset:

If this show HAD an intermission, I would have LEFT. Presented as "autobiographical," this show is a pathetic attempt to weave an assortment of shopworn and completely cliche jokes (you will mouth the punchline before the actor does) into a not-so-thrilling life. There is not one shred of warmth in this play. The characters are insensitively portrayed by Solomon through a smattering of silly, over-the-top voices, facial expressions and accents. I had a very hard time believing that any of the stories are true; they are exaggerated beyond the point of interest. This is one of the most dissappointing pieces of theatre I have seen in a long time. It's barely a stand-up act and has no right calling itself an off-broadway play. Boo!

Shylock in...Tzitzit

Yep, that's F. Murray Abraham in tzitzit.

He's performing as Shylock in a new production of The Merchant of Venice produced by the Theatre for a New Audience.

Here's one reviewer's opinion:-

Mr. Abraham’s sure theatrical instincts have created the most authentic Shylock I’ve seen. Quite simply, you believe he exists in all his complexity. This is a Shylock who’s no longer a dramatic myth, but flesh and blood. So complete is Mr. Abraham’s rigorously intelligent, passionate performance—and Shylock is nothing if not a man governed by unruly passion—that even the hackneyed “Hath not a Jew eyes?” is delivered freshly in burning, despairing indignation, as if for the first time.

It troubled me initially that the admirable director, Darko Tresnjak, had set his minimalist production in modern dress, as though we were on Wall Street. (Shakespeare’s Venice is at best token, and the word ghetto is mentioned only once.) In any case, Mr. Abraham, dressed in a business suit and yarmulke [and tzitzit], brings an entire world onstage with him—the world history of the persecution of the Jews.

Shylock is many things, but not a hypocrite. The hypocrites are the double-dealing, “virtuous” Christian elites, with “fair” Portia, the idealized symbol of Christian virtue, the racist. (“The villainy you teach me I will execute,” goes Shylock’s infamous self-justification, not without cause). Mr. Abraham conveys a Jew who’s cultivated, pious, pedantic, loving, contemptuous, convulsive and merciless. Shylock, the usurer, is no sweetheart. But among the good things about this conflicted man are his religious faith, learning, sobriety, respect for the law, love of his daughter, reverence for his adored late wife, and blind belief in the very thing he can never have: justice.