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THEATER
REVIEWS
Los
Angeles Times,
Friday, July 5, 2002
The Voices of Palestine
A Ramallah theater troupe visits with a show that shares what
it describes as "Stories Under Occupation."
By ALLAN M. JALON, Special to The Times
Shortly
before arriving in this country last month, Palestinian actor Imad
Farajin saw a newspaper photograph of a Palestinian boy sleeping
as he sat on a large, sun-splashed rock near an Israeli checkpoint
he was not allowed to cross.
Behind
him stood an Israeli soldier, holding a gun.
Farajin
says he imagined the boy to be "dreaming of a better life in which
he could go where he wants, do what he wants," adding, "I wondered
what Americans would think of this boy."
Palestinian
dreams and Palestinian despair are what Farajin and nine of his
colleagues with the Ramallah-based Al Kasaba Theatre have put into
"Alive From Palestine," a series of monologues and scenes the actors
have drawn from their daily experiences during recent waves of conflict.
They will present the show, subtitled "Stories Under Occupation,"
Friday evening at the La Mirada Theatre, before heading north for
another one-time showing Sunday, at San Francisco's Palace of Fine
Arts. The performers enact their dreamlike narratives--they bear
overtones of Isaac Babel short stories and the political theater
of Bertolt Brecht--in Arabic, but English translations appear on
screens at the side of the stage.
The
actors arrived in Los Angeles this week after a run of five performances
at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., where the production
was part of the seventh International Festival of Arts and Ideas,
an 18-day, state-funded offering of dance, music and theater from
around the world. The Palestinians' appearance there provoked debate
and drew high praise.
Well
before Al Kasaba arrived in the United States, members of New Haven's
Jewish community divided over the very idea of a production that
they worried depicted a purely Palestinian point of view. Others
called it superb art. Festival managers combined the show with panel
discussions and lectures describing Jewish perspectives. The New
York Times ultimately ran a review that fervently recommended "a
plaintive, almost supplicating" production showing "a terrible helplessness
and sadness and an anger that is provoked by what feels like oppression."
The
group's California trip is being paid for by several Arab American
and Palestinian-oriented organizations: American Friends of Palestine,
the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and Humanity on
Hold. Humanity on Hold's Web site depicts events in the Middle East
from a Palestinian point of view, including an image of an Israeli
soldier with the words "Born to Kill" etched on his helmet. The
site includes a Web memorial, a list of hundreds of names, including
Jewish ones, of people who have died in the last 22 months.
Nicole
Ballivian, a film producer in Hollywood who conceived of the visit,
says she raised $24,000 for it because her husband, Bashar Daas,
has acted with the group and because "it is important to put a human
face on what everybody is seeing in the news. Americans don't know
what living under occupation is."
Several
of the actors gathered in the enveloping coolness of the bar area
of the Holiday Inn in Hollywood this week to talk about the intimately
painful connections between their lives and their art. The production,
which consists of material the actors wrote themselves, is unlike
anything Al Kasaba had done in its more than three decades as a
leading Palestinian theater. Over a nine-month period, starting
after the second intifada erupted on Sept. 28, 2000, they created
hundreds of pieces about life under siege, from which they selected
the 13 in the show.
In
addition to Farajin, 26, other actors from the group who gathered
for a collective interview about its tale of war and art included
Georgina Asfour, 25; Khalifa Natour, 37; and Hasam Abu Eisheh, 43.
They were joined by Amir Nizar Zuabi, 25, the director and designer
of the show, and George Ibrahim, general director of the Al Kasaba
Theatre. Most of them live on the West Bank or in Jerusalem.
Al
Kasaba, which has a 400-seat theater in Ramallah, and another with
100 seats in Jerusalem, traditionally works as a conventional repertory
theater, putting on productions of Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Max
Frisch and other writers. After the uprising started nearly two
years ago, the theater became the site for readings of poems and
stories in honor of the rapidly increasing number of dead.
At
first, residents of Ramallah came to express their grief and anger,
butthe evenings slowly turned into encounters between an audience
and performers from the theater. The actors began writing their
own stories of people who filled the theater and those beyond it,
stories in which human grief often mixed with bleak humor: lovers
trying to meet despite checkpoints, giving each other poison-gas
canisters and bullets as romantic gifts; parents separated from
children, sometimes at the funerals of children.
One
sketch inspired during that time tells of a woman who buys a tin
of olives, only to find they are rubber bullets. Another is about
a woman on a telephone who panics at seeing a missile come in one
window, only to sigh with relief at watching it go out another.
"We
added on layer after layer," says Zuabi. "We added a thematic layer,
and the dramaturgy of the inner piece got better and better." Asfour
wrote about her brother, shot as he drove the family through an
Israeli checkpoint.
Her
brother, driving Asfour and her sister, had just passed through
an Israeli checkpoint on the way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. "The
bullet entered through the trunk, through the back seat and through
him."
Though he had been hit in what is generally considered a resilient
part of the anatomy, it was a pretty serious injury. He had to go
to the hospital. Asfour says her sister, next to her in the backseat,
would have been hit had Asfour not been holding her close because
it was cold. "Who shot him? We don't know. But we saw other cars
that had all been shot at the checkpoint." In one of the play's
monologues, she tells how such things have become normal.
During
the interview, she recited the section in Arabic, in a lilting voice:
a song of resignation. "Death has become normal, and / bleeding
has become normal too. Fear and despair are normal / The checkpoints
are closed? It's normal, we'll go round the back, what do we care..../
My brother had a bullet in his behind? Normal...."
One
day, in the old city of Jerusalem, Eisheh overheard an exchange
between a woman on a cell phone with an older son calling from London--just
after the funeral of her younger son. The woman put on a bright
face to sustain her own faith and give courage to her son. She does
so, performed by Eisheh, in the play. Each time she relates more
bad news--that the caller's uncle is in jail, that her brother has
been shot, that his sister has been divorced--she repeats the phrase
"praise God."
"Your
Uncle Jawad, I didn't tell you. / Your Uncle Jawad was martyred
/ but praise God his kids are all right. / The little one was shot
/ in the eye but he's all right...."
"I
heard this woman in the old city, and there was a power in her,"
Eisheh said in the interview. "There was a power to survive."
Some
of the stories are fables. An Arab pleads with King Solomon, the
biblical King of the Jews, to take his people away from the embattled
land of modern Israel. The actor pleads: "Don't return my white
donkey / King Solomon. Just take / your people away from here. /
We don't want anything from them. Just take them away and relieve
us."
Clearly,
this show insists on the Palestinian perspective. There is no direct
mention of suicide bombers. One piece talks of an explosion, a person
who declares, "they've hollowed me out ... wow, a big hole, if you
look inside / you'll see I have become a red waterfall. I traveled
tick-tick-tick / from the world. Bye-bye me." The reference could
be to a suicide bomber--or it might be the bloody explosiveness
of the whole Middle East.
When
the New Haven festival was being planned, its director, Mary Miller,
responded to the first rumblings of controversy by bringing the
script to local Rabbi Herbert Brockman. Says Brockman: "My first
reaction was, 'They're making theater in Ramallah! How wonderful!'
It is better to be expressing oneself through art than violence.
I read the script and I came away thinking that this was fine art."
Others
reacted more fiercely, sensing that the play portrayed Israelis
as the enemy and because Palestinians who die from Israeli weapons
are depicted as "martyrs." In the end, the festival combined the
play with the presentations that put it into a larger context of
Jewish views and history. About 40 sign-carrying protesters showed
up at the performances.
"It
is painful to watch for anyone who identifies with Israel," Professor
Steven Fraade, who teaches ancient Jewish history at Yale, says
of the production. He had heard rumors that it was anti-Israel but
concluded that the piece was "not propaganda."
Sitting
in Hollywood, members of the troupe were divided about what happened
in New Haven. "It was a circus," says Zuabi, the director. The play,
he says, was swallowed by the Jewish community's determination to
turn a human statement into a political debate. "The play is art.
It is shaped by political circumstances, yes, but it is art." Ibrahim
takes a mellower view. "We came to the heart of the lion. We came
to America, and we brought this to where the American Jewish people
live. We had to accept that."
From
San Francisco, the troupe will take "Alive From Palestine" to London
for 11 performances, then to Sweden. But they probably will not
perform at home for quite a while. The region is in turmoil. It
is hard for people to get to the theater amid the curfews and checkpoints.
The future of the Al Kasaba Theatre, like the rest of the Mideast,
is uncertain. Ibrahim has long hoped to start a theater school,
but can't see it happening soon.
"The
truth," he says, "is that no matter what dramas we put on the stage,
what happens in real life is much more dramatic."
"Alive
From Palestine," La Mirada Theatre, 14900 La Mirada Blvd., La Mirada.
Tonight at 8. $25. (562) 944-9801. Also, San Francisco's Palace
of Fine Arts, Sunday at 7 p.m. $35. (415) 392-4400.
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Palestinians'
Play Offers 'A Message Of Hope' From Their Homeland
June
30, 2002
By FRANK RIZZO, Hartford Courant
You
could feel the tension build as the panel members shared their thoughts
on what they had just seen on stage at Long Wharf Theatre in New
Haven last Tuesday night. They - and the more than 450 members of
the packed audience - witnessed the American premiere of "Alive
from Palestine: Stories Under Occupation," performed by members
of the Al-Kasaba Theatre, now based in Ramallah.
American
actress Kathleen Chalfant ("Wit," "Angels in America") spoke on
the power of art to reach into audiences' hearts and minds. The
Palestinian theater's artistic director, George Ibrahim, spoke about
his goal to have the world, through art, see Palestinians as real
human beings and to witness the stories of their lives. But backs
were straightened, heads were cocked and breaths were held when
the microphone was handed to Stuart Schoffman, senior writer for
the Jerusalem Report.
What
he said popped the balloon of protest surrounding this theater company's
being part of the seventh annual International Festival of Arts
& Ideas.
"This
is a terrific piece of theater, powerful and complex. ... What you
have here is the poetry of pain."
There.
If
a Jewish journalist living in Jerusalem with his family can welcome
the 70-minute play by a Palestinian theater company, one would hope
that Connecticut audiences would as well. Don't misunderstand. There
are parts of the work Schoffman would disagree with. But as a work
of art by theater professionals telling compelling stories of people
desperate to be listened to, this was something that should be seen
by all, including Israelis, he said.
Such
bold statements from someone living in the midst of "The Situation"
put to shame some in the audience who sat on their hands at the
end of the play, not even having the graciousness to politely welcome
foreign artists who work under near-impossible conditions. Their
protest of coldness is their right. But even during the worst theater
experience - and a Goodspeed musical horror some years back leaps
to mind - I have managed to offer polite response to the efforts
of the artists who have toiled honorably.
Fortunately,
these people were in the minority and the audience - which had to
go through street protests, several checkpoints and a metal detector
- warmly applauded the six actors, and even some in the audience
gave the company a standing ovation.
Schoffman
echoed what I heard from others in the audience: identification.
There were elements of the stories from the Palestine people that
Schoffman, as a Jew, related to in their "intimate tragedy" with
each other. The stories of refugees, of being occupied, of feeling
that no one is listening to you are all themes that find chords
with many people, many cultures, many countries. "As a Jew and Israeli,"
said Schoffman, "the extent I can empathize [with the play] is tremendous.
... There is a mirroring effect."
While
it is well and good to find the universality in art, we should not
deny the ownership of these Palestinian stories, of people aching
to be "normal" within "The Catastrophe."
"These
are our stories," said the play's director Amir Nizar Zuanbi. "We're
here to talk about the Palestinian point of view." Just as artists
ranging from August Wilson to Athol Fugard might welcome a large
embracing audience, the primary source for the work is clear. Though
we find similar chords in our own hearts with the Palestinian play,
we should not appropriate the little personal identity the Palestine
people have to share to the world.
Predictably,
there were several in the talk-back who wanted to re-examine the
2,000 years of Mideastern political strife and the blame game, but
Yale chaplain Dr. Jerry Streets, who moderated the post-show discussion,
tried to kept the focus on the art.
"We
didn't come here to talk politics," said Ibrahim. "Please just imagine
yourself [as us.] We are talking about our lives. The image of Palestinians,
especially in the U.S., is that of terrorists. We are human beings.
We are artists. And this is our life. What you have seen [on stage
in the play] is a little of much."
In
the play, lovers meet at a cafˇ, intertwine fingers and exchange
love tokens from the trash of war: a bullet and a gas canister.
A comic piece has a man's suitcase bemoaning its his nomadic existence,
longing for the kind of luxury travel that other pieces of luggage
have.
A
son discovers that his father's world as an impoverished tinsmith,
which he loathes, has become a cottage industry among the destroyed
homes.
A
father goes through a school knapsack, talking to his dead son as
he itemizes the sack's belongings. He says he will pass them along
to the boy's younger brother until he stops: "I'm sorry, my son,
forgive me," he says. "I forgot you were my only child."
A
boy infatuated with Jean-Claude Van Damme action films suddenly
sees his own life as more real than anything he could see in the
movies, burying his friend in a pile of crumpled newspapers.
A
young man caught in an Israeli helicopter's spotlight is stricken
with fear, anger, humiliation until he gives a primal yell: "You
don't know me!"
This
cry to be seen, heard and finally known is one that echoes now for
those who have experienced the work in New Haven.
"The function of art is to illuminate and transport an audience,"
said Chalfant. "It is up to us to decide what to do with that experience."
Is there a message of hope in the play, someone asked Ibrahim at
the end of the discussion?
"The
message of hope for Palestinians is that the theater is
open and there is a show on the stage." he said. "The hope is in
the event.
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'ALIVE
FROM PALESTINE'
A Plea for Recognizing Humanity Everywhere
By BRUCE WEBER, New York Times
NEW
HAVEN, June
26 -- Newspapers almost smother the seven performers in "Alive From
Palestine: Stories Under Occupation," a plaintive, almost supplicating
new work at the Long Wharf Theater here. The show is a presentation
of Al Kasaba Theater, a Palestinian troupe from Ramallah making
its timely American debut through Saturday. And the news is not
just in the air, but on the stage. The set consists of mounds of
crumpled newspapers -- newspaper igloos, almost -- and the actors,
for their monologues and sketches, emerge from beneath and behind
them. This is a fragile and rickety village, hardly protective,
hardly safe, hardly a haven for people who live there.
But the metaphor is more complex than that. The villagers are also
prone to snatching broadsheets from the mounds, reading them and
passing them along. In the final moments of the show they level
the mounds, grabbing handfuls of newspapers and tossing them in
the air, until the stage is awash in a sea of crumpled papers. It's
awfully effective stage language, an eloquently wordless lament
that for most of the world -- for Americans in particular -- the
Palestinians are living and dying only in the newspapers.
It's
certainly true that the news-flavored view of the Palestinians in
this country is largely unsympathetic, yielding a uniform impression
of a vengeful, intractably angry population. That this portrait
is unfairly reductive is Al Kasaba's reasonable and morally forceful
argument. And the show's series of monologues and sketches, deftly
knitted together by the director and designer Amir Nizar Zubi, constitute
a plea for recognition of the humanity behind this simple facade;
to that end, the show is meant to illustrate the daily strain of
living under a constant threat of harm, the agonizingly preposterous
alterations affected in quotidian existence by the perpetual presence
of an enemy.
The show is part of the Seventh International Festival of Arts and
Ideas here, and predictably it has touched off a squall; demonstrators
at the show's opening on Tuesday held up signs protesting the group's
appearance and passed out fliers presenting "an alternate view"
of the conflict in the Middle East.
Pro-Israeli
theatergoers will undoubtedly feel an occasional finger in the eye;
Palestinians killed by Israelis are referred to as martyrs, and
at one point a Palestinian confronting an Israeli pilot describes
looking into the face of evil. And though the show is not blatantly
political, it does refer to Ariel Sharon's inflammatory visit to
Temple Mount in September 2000. But the company has chosen not to
make any reference to Yasir Arafat or to suicide bombers; that seems
politically prudent, if not chicken hearted.
Still,
there is little in the show that is likely to inflame anyone in
any new way. Instead, what we hear from the stage is a terrible
helplessness and sadness and an anger that is provoked by what feels
like oppression. Whether you think they are oppressed or not, the
stories they tell are those of legitimate experience; this is what
it feels like to be an ordinary Palestinian now. And with that in
mind, "Alive from Palestine" is valuable theater.
Given
its news-from-the-front quality, it is also poignant and occasionally
quite touching. It isn't, however, particularly surprising theater;
the use of the newspapers is by far the most intriguing element
of stagecraft implemented here. Otherwise the stories told by the
actors -- all of whom are professional and for the most part admirably
understated in their anguished roles -- are full of the irony and
pathos you would expect.
In
one story a young man whose father was an impoverished tinsmith
and for whom tin is the symbol of everything that holds him back
unloads the family business only to realize that bombs are demolishing
so many houses that quickly erected tin homes will be in demand.
In another story a couple exchange war detritus -- a bullet, a gas
canister -- as love tokens. In a third story a man addresses the
book bag of his son who has been killed by a bomb; going through
his son's belongings, he says he will pass them along to the boy's
younger brother.
"I'm sorry, my son, forgive me," the man concludes. "I forgot you
were my only child."
The
show is performed in Arabic, and the subtitle translation is occasionally
suspect, making one wonder whether the several moments, like this
one, that slip into heavy-handedness are being attenuated. In any
case, the show is at its most effective when it is not being ponderous,
but clever and even humorous, as in a skit in which a suitcase is
personified and speaks lamentingly to its owner.
"Why
can't I be like a normal suitcase?" asks the actor who is wearing
a case on his head with a cutout for his face. (The program does
not distinguish the identities of the performers.) "Arriving at
a clean airport, being put on a cart by a perfumed lady." This dream,
which includes a delightful unpacking in a luxury hotel, stands
in opposition to the suitcase's actual existence, which it describes
as "eviction, expulsion, sun, dust, soldiers pointing guns at me."
By
the end of this 70-minute show, what has become painfully evident
is the quality of a life that Palestinians have come to accept as
normal. It will move even an audience hostile to the Palestinian
cause -- or at least it should -- because it reminds us that no
one should have to live this way.
"Believe
me, what you have seen, it is a little of much," said George Ibrahim,
Al Kasaba's general director during a panel discussion after the
performance. "We want people to listen to us differently," he said.
"The image of Palestinians in the United States is of terrorists.
It is not like the newspapers you are reading. Imagine yourself
being news, and you will understand the rest."
ALIVE
FROM PALESTINE
Stories Under Occupation
Director and designer, Amir Nizar Zuabi; lighting by Mu'az Jubeh;
general director, George Ibrahim. Al Kasaba Theater. Presented by
the Seventh International Festival of Arts and Ideas, New Haven.
At the Long Wharf Theater, 222 Sargent Drive, New Haven.
WITH:
Georgina Asfour, Khalifa Natour, Imad Farajin, Kamel El Basha, Husam
Abu Eisheh and Mahmoud Awad. Forum: Join a Discussion on Theater
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Palestinian
Play Sparks Concern Jewish Leaders Question Inclusion In New Haven's
Arts Festival
May 23, 2002
By FRANK RIZZO, Hartford Courant Staff Writer
"Alive
From Palestine: Stories Under Occupation" scheduled to be presented
next month by a Palestinian theater company at New Haven's International
Festival of Arts & Ideas is the subject of growing concern among
some Jewish leaders in the community, who feel the piece "demonizes"
and "stereotypes" Israelis, "especially at this time."
In
the work, seven members of the Al-Kasaba Theatre present a series
of monologues depicting stories from everyday life - suggested and
developed by the actors - focusing on various areas of frustration,
pain, anger and loss. The show will be performed June 25 to 29 at
Long Wharf Theatre, one of the festival's venues throughout the
city.
The
festival booked the Palestinian company after it performed the piece,
which is presented in Arabic with English subtitles, in London last
summer as part of the London International Theater Festival. According
to the New Haven festival promotion, the work depicts an "intimate
glimpse into ordinary lives lived in a war zone - the anger, despair,
love, loss and frustration." The Times of London said the piece
enables audiences "to glimpse something of the day-to-day experience
of life in this shattered land." The Guardian, another London paper,
called the one-hour play, "necessary theater."
The
theater company, led by George Ibrahim, was established in Jerusalem
in 1970 and now is based in Ramallah on the West Bank.
"We
don't object that the Palestinians are presenting stories from their
lives," says David Waren, regional director of the Anti-Defamation
League in New Haven. "But under the umbrella of an arts festival
which receives $1 million from the state, the show should provoke
a productive exchange of ideas. This is not a dialogue-builder in
our view. But there's no balance in the play or in the entire festival
as a counterweight to this and that really is the rub."
Waren says, pointing to three short excerpts from the script, that
the play depicts Israelis in a way "that surely would not be tolerated
as part of a community arts festival."
Mary
Miller, executive director of the festival, said she felt the piece
had artistic integrity. "We are bringing this piece of theater here,"
she says, "because it is an interesting piece of theater, because
it's a fine piece of work, not because it was Palestinian, but that
it expressed voices from a country whose voices are not often heard
in the theater." She says many of those who have seen a video of
the entire play were moved and understood the totality of the work.
Miller says it is unfair to base a judgment on excerpts that may
be interpreted out of context.
Waren
characterized the objections to the production as "informal." "I've
seen no organized formal protests," he says. "There's just been
an ad hoc outpouring of concern across the community," says Waren,
who points out he has received more calls on this issue than any
other he has dealt with in his seven-year tenure. He says his organization
has a policy opposing organized boycotts."
"We're
disturbed that this play was included in the arts festival and there
wasn't a better vetting or review process," says Waren. "But we
certainly didn't mean to suggest there was any intended malice on
the part of the arts festival organizers."
Miller
says she has met with Jewish community leaders over the past few
months regarding the Palestinian play, "and we are continuing those
discussions."
Waren
will join Jewish community and festival leaders at a meeting today.
"I would like to find cooperative ways to address those concerns
we have given that the play is scheduled to take place in June,"
he says.
Says
Miller: "The festival is about giving a platform to artists of all
nationalities in order to share their creativity and to share their
experiences. The festival has no stand-point or belief other than
presenting good art."
The
New Haven engagement will mark the Palestinian troupe's only U.S.
engagement. The festival will also feature the Inbal Pinto Dance
Company, an Israeli group which will present its "darkly mirthful"
piece, "Oyster," June 26 to 29 at the University Theater.
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