All About Jewish Theatre - 'The Accident' a portrait of individual, national feelings.

Lisa Traiger has been an arts writer since 1985. Currently she contributes to The Washington Post Weekend section On Stage page. She was a freelance dance critic for The Washington Post Style section from 1997-2006. Her pieces on the cultural and performing arts appear regularly in the Washington Jewish Week and on DanceViewTimes.com. She has written for Washingtonian, Moment magazine, The Forward, Dance Magazine, Pointe, Stagebill, Sondheim Review, Asian Week, the Boston Jewish Advocate, the Atlanta Jewish Times, Washington City Paper and Washington Review. A first-place recipient of the 2007 Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association award for arts and entertainment writing, Traiger also received two Simon Rockower Awards for Excellence in Arts Criticism from the American Jewish Press Association. She earned an M.F.A. in choreogr! aphy from the University of Maryland, College Park and holds B.A.s in English and Dance. As a New York Times Fellow, Traiger participated in the Institute for Dance Criticism at the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C. A board member of the Dance Critics Association from 1991-93, she returned to the board from 2005 to 2008, and served as its co-president during the 2006-07 season. Traiger currently serves on the advisory board of the Dance Notation Bureau. e-mail lisatraiger@aol.com

Blinding headlights, tires squealing, a crash, a door slam. Darkness. Then the bickering and questioning, the accusations and counteraccusations tumble out. Tel Aviv-based playwright Hillel Mitelpunkt wrote a small play about an accident. Its ramifications, on those directly involved and on their loved ones, prove ruinous in this indictment of a segment of Israeli society in the American premiere of The Accident at the Theater J at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center.

In a stunning international collaboration bringing together a team of Israeli directors and designers and Washington-based actors, The Accident - the second play in Theater J's three-part series "Voices from a Changing Middle East - is a morality play for our unseemly times, when Ponzi schemes bring down mega-millionaires and the middle class.

Mitelpunkt's play is set in Tel Aviv, yet it deals unflinchingly with universal moral questions of right and wrong, good and evil, selfishness and selflessness. While the play on the surface can be regarded as an excoriating portrait of upper middle-class, left-wing Israelis - those with the right jobs, the right politics, the right clothes, cars and neighborhoods - it's equally, and tellingly, a portrait of the moral failings of the nation as a whole.

The accident in question is a hit-and-run perpetrated by three friends on their way home from a New Year's Eve celebration. The victim: a nameless, faceless, Chinese man, a guest worker. His life is of little interest or consequence to these upright yuppies. "Accidents happen," shrugs Lior, the ad man on the rise, who drove the car. "We are doing the logical thing," reasons his wife, Tami, about their heinous decision. When another says who will know, "we will know," warns Adam, the scruffy put-upon documentary filmmaker.

Two couples, one striving to adopt a baby, the other middle-aged with an adult daughter, wrestle with their marital flaws and moral failings along with the fallout from their inaction and complicity.

Mitelpunkt has fabricated a heightened situation in which to test his characters' moral underpinnings to see who might flinch. Could it be Tami, the military strategist who hungers for a child more than she wants to repair her unraveling marriage? Or Lior, who scorns his wife's calculated coolness and seeks the partnership of younger women? Or Nira, the homebody librarian who aches for love and attention from her daughter, Shiri, and husband, Adam? Or Adam, who in his middle age has lost his moral center?

But The Accident, which takes place on designer Tony Cisek's hunk of heavy, black asphalt with a few moveable pieces of furniture, is more than the sum of its soap opera-ish parts. The petty affairs, the broken marital promises, the inadequate parenting, all expose the darker underbelly of these outwardly upright characters and reflect societal ills left to simmer as much as individual problems.

Director Sinai Peter engages his actors - uptight Becky Peters as Tami, waffling Michael Tolaydo as Adam, high-strung Paul Morella as Lior and a scintillating Jennifer Mendenhall as all-knowing earth mother Nira - in a series of taut character studies. The Accident strives for universality as Mitelpunkt aims to lift the curtain on the tzfonim, or liberal upper middle-class north Tel Avivians, revealing that their preoccupation with their extramarital affairs and moral failings are no different from those of Manhattan's or Cleveland Park's yuppies. And yet, in a larger sense, everything wrong about these individuals and their relationships reflects on their society and government's failings.

In Israel, every play becomes in one way or another a political exercise. Here, aside from the internal strife of these two fragile couples, the great unspoken tragedy is the nameless dead man. It takes the next generation, daughter Shiri (Eliza Bell) to seek expiation without reservation for the sins of her parents.
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The Accident is onstage at Theater J' through March 8. Tickets, $30-$55 (half price for patrons under 25), are available by calling 800-494-TIXS or at www.boxofficetickets.com .
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