REORIENT 2007-08
REORIENT 2007-08
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
The Magic Theatre of San Francisco is currently hosting Golden Thread Productions and their annual festival of plays exploring the Middle East.
Before attending a Middle East themed play festival, many reasonable people might mistakenly leap to the conclusion that a stage depiction of an Arab-Moslem culture might focus on such inconvenient traditions as the stoning women for adultery, honor killings, sentencing rape victims to 90 lashes for admitting to leaving home unescorted and thereby inviting rape, the flogging of school teachers who allowed their students to call a Teddy Bear: Mohammed, the flagellation of women caught in public without head coverings, the awarding of death sentences to religious converts, the ban against the operation of motor vehicles by women, and the issuing fatwas, with zillion dollar bounties, against writers deemed heretical.
Then too many people might blithely expect that playwrights would coddle a democratic nation state embedded within this aforementioned morass. The public might even expect positive recognition for a nation that swaps out old governments for new governments without the rattle of machine gun fire, a government that has real ballot boxes, equal rights for women, religious freedom, has a burgeoning economy yet is socialist enough to have universal free medical coverage and has a secular legal system that works.
Neither of these two preconceptions could be further from the unfortunate truth. The five playwrights who have carefully crafted the propaganda pieces for this festival of castigation and vilification have scrupulously avoided any objectivity and have carefully sidestepped any political or historical realities in the process of forging these fantasy skits. Not once are the words suicide bomber, katyusha missile, kassam missile, terrorism, Kalashnikov rifle, jihad, martyrdom, kleptocracy, patriarchy, shariah law, hostages or atavistic ever uttered; even though they define both life and sociopolitical realities of the Middle East.
Out of the starting chute is Igancio Zulueta's play: 22 MINUTES REMAINING. Gilad, a Lieutenant for the Israel Defense Force (IDF), has the thankless job of calling residents in Gaza and Southern Lebanon to provide them with advance warning of imminent Israeli air strikes against their villages a.k.a. launch sites. Gilad (played by Ali Eli-Gassier) has the misfortune to call Myriam (played by Lynne Soffer). Myriam should be playing a Jewish mother. She makes Gilad feel guilty for warning people about impending attacks and thereby saving their lives. Carefully selected omissions are what give this play its misguided and misplaced sentimentality. Never is there any mention of the 200 Katyusha missiles a day—sent by the Hezbollah—that target civilians in northern Israel. The audience is led to assume that the subject air strikes are either unprovoked or are a necessary prequel to an urban renewal project funded by Israel. Imagine a play, set in the Israel-Lebanon War of 2006, with mention of neither the initial abduction of two Israeli soldiers nor the thousands of Katyushas that rained down on Israel from Lebanon. This is either the playwright exercising amazing restraint and political correctness, or a revised version of anti Semitism masquerading as anti Zionism. Zulueta's script, while focusing on the 22 minutes of advanced warning that Israel provides, never mentions exactly how many minutes of warning terrorists gave subway riders in London, railroad passengers in Spain, office workers in the World Trade Centers or the Pentagon, or revelers in Tel Aviv Discos. How do we account for the omission?
Next in the offering is the poetic: I SELL SOULS by Simin Behbehani. The title is reminiscent of Gogol's book DEAD SOULS and one would hope that it is there that the similarities would end. I SELL SOULS, one might assume, is about the many countries that have sold Jewish souls to the Jewish homeland. Mother Russia, in the tradition of Gogol, could appropriately recite the play's refrain, "I sell souls." In1972 the USSR imposed the so-called "diploma tax" on would-be Jewish emigrants to Israel. Russian thugs claimed that Jewish emigres received an education in the USSR (ironic, given that Jews were often precluded from or given lowest priority for attending universities) and that Jews should pay for their education before leaving the USSR. In some cases, the fee to leave the USSR was as high as twenty annual salaries. With the utter collapse of Ethiopia in 1990, Ethiopian bureaucrats were paid millions by Israeli diplomats to see wisdom of letting Falashas (Ethiopian Jews) immigrate to Israel. Operation Moses and Operation Solomon airlifted, at Israeli expense, those Jews who could reach the clandestine embarkation airstrips from which to leave for a new life of religious freedom in Israel. Once Ethiopian bureaucrats had pocketed the money for the souls they had sold, thousands of Jewish women and children perished scurrying, unaided, across the desert to the airlifts. Currently Iranian Jews are attempting to leave for Israel. These souls too are being sold for the price of their homes, which are ultimately confiscated by the Iranian government, and for all their liquid assets. Jews departing Iran are not allowed to take money with them. Essentially they are sold to Israel for the privilege of looting and confiscating every shekel of their wealth prior to departure. Israel reimburses new arrivals for their losses up to a maximum of $10,000 per capita. Of all the festival's offerings, I SELL SOULS, seems to be the commiserative of the Jewish plight in the world. This compact, pithy play, is not kowtowing to pro-Arab intimidation.
PISTACHIO STORIES by Laura Shamas is an excellent depiction of the dilemma that the U.S. intelligence community finds itself. Just after 911, U.S. intelligence was faulted for not having sufficient information to foil the 911 attacks. When intelligence geared up, they were faulted for violations of privacy, encroachments into constitutional rights and KGB tactics. MS Shamas illustrates the impossibility of assuaging or mollifying all the critics and at the same time gathering the necessary intelligence to provide a modicum of domestic security. If our government spies on Americans who tune in to al Jazeera then it is accused of profiling. If it puts people, whom get packages and cryptic notes from Syria, under surveillance, this too is profiling. MS Shamas is subtle, what she may be advocating is that national security spy on people who watch Ozzie and Harriet and those people who get packages from L.L. Bean in Freeport, Maine. One wonders if MS Shamas would approve of snitching on suspected terrorist cells. Perhaps MS Shamas is suggesting that potential terrorists should report themselves to counter terrorist agencies. "You have reached the terrorist hotline. If you are suicide bomber press one. If you are an airplane hijacker press two."
THE MONOLOGIST SUFFERS HER MONOLOGUE is a witty and vibrant piece by Yussef El Guindi; performed brilliantly by the ebullient Sara Razavi in the role of Hoda. When Hoda speaks of "a nasty boot on our neck" her reference is ambiguous. Historically, the Palestine she speaks of has had many boots on its neck. Is she referring to the Roman sandal that was lifted and replaced by the Ottomans flip-flop? Or is she speaking of more recent history when the Hashemite King of Jordan put the West Bank and two-thirds of what was once labeled Palestine under his boot. Or is she speaking of the Gaza Strip having been under the boot Egypt up until 1967? Or is she speaking about the boots of the militias that have repeatedly derailed the peace processes of Camp David and Helsinki, and have continuously hi-jacked what could have been a nation of Palestine, and made Gaza into a launch pad for missile attacks on Israel, a staging area for suicide bombers and a hostel for al Qaeda. With such boots on one's neck, the economy can only spiral downward until the only job in town is toting a Kalashnikov, intimidating moderates, fecklessly firing bullets in the air, lobbing missiles and convincing rubes to tuck roofing nails into their cummerbunds and blow themselves up. MR Guindi too should be commended for criticizing the fetid mess that Palestinian militias have foisted onto the moderate peoples of the Gaza and the West Bank. Regrettably, plays such as MR Guindi's are not performed in either place: the only free press in Gaza is the one they make olive oil with.
Naomi Wallace presents the festival with what could have arguably been the finest skit of the evening: BETWEEN THIS BREATH AND YOU. While the plot line is sewn with the usual anti-Israeli propaganda and standard vituperations, the play, for inexplicable reasons, does achieve some poignancy. Perhaps most of the credit should go to the superb cast: Julian Lopez-Morillas, Danielle Levin and Ali El-Gassier. Tanya Langer—played by Danielle—is a want-to-be nurse poser at a private clinic; she gets an unexpected visit from a Palestinian man. The visitor, Mourid Khatib, seems to know all the details of Nurse Tanya. It seems Nurse Tanya has taken possession of a set of lungs that once belonged to Mourid's sone: Akmed. Having been inculcated with a hatred for Israelis, Akmed made the fatal mistake of pointing a toy gun at Israeli soldiers. Akmed was only twelve, and the jumpy IDF did not ask him for proof of age before opening fire. Akmed's organs are harvested, presumably by Israeli's, and his lungs find their way to Nurse Tanya. Miss Tanya has cystic fibrosis. Instead of getting the lungs of a Jewish car crash victim, Tanya gets a pair of Palestinian lungs. Mourid hops the security fence to talk to the lungs i.e. his son. As the world seemingly gets more sophisticated so too does our anti-Semitism. Since anti-Semitism is religious based and it is no longer fashionable to be religious, we have transitioned to a more secular brand of Jew baiting: anti-Zionism. Wallace's play is a thinly veiled rehash one of the most tenacious myths cast upon the Jews: the blood libel. The first recorded instance of a blood libel against Jews was in the writings of Apion, he argued that the Jews sacrificed Greek victims in thier Temple in Jerusalem. In the 12th, Willian of Norwich resuscitated the Jewish Blood Libel for the Peterborough Chronicle. William's aspersion caught on and the libel became an increasingly common accusation. Anti-Semitic blood libels serve as the basis for a blood libel cult, in which the alleged victim of human sacrifice was venerated as is Akmed in this story. MS Wallace has recycled all the elements of the original blood libel in an updated scenario: a Jew needs non-Jewish flesh or blood to stay alive: Nurse Tanya needed Akmed's lungs to survive a deadly lung disease. Unfortunately this ludicrous tale of organ harvesters working the battlefield held the house spell bound. Should we expect a staging of THE SECRET PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION at next year's show?
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