Glenda Frank teaches theatre at FIT SUNY, reviews theatre for Back Stage, and has received two NEH awards. Her articles have been published in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Jewish Women in America, The Eugene O'Neill Review, and Theatre Journal.
(March, 2002) What does Israeli identity mean," asks Noam Semel, the general director of the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv.
"Theatre," he answers, "should be a mirror in front of our society." In many ways, the Cameri Theatre tells the story of Israel and the peace process. For three decades, the Cameri has been daring to confront the uncomfortable underbelly of Israeli life even while it produces some extraordinary and highly polished theatrical events.
The Cameri was founded by immigrants in 1944 as an actors' collective. Its mission, however, was only really forged in 1970, when it staged The Queen of the Bathtub, Hanoch Levin's satire of the administration of Golda Meir. Although The Queen closed after eighteen performances, the government threatened to withdraw its subsidy from the theatre. From then on, the Cameri has focused on awakening the Israeli public to the complexity of policy by packaging it as an evening's entertainment.
For a U.S. audience, the Cameri's willingness to sponsor experimental and provocative work might be surprising, given that since 1971 it has essentially been a government agency. The mayor of Tel Aviv appoints the thirty-one members of the Cameri's board of trustees and chairs the executive committee.
Indeed, with five separate theatre locations in Tel Aviv, an audience of 600,000, and an annual budget of $16 million, the Cameri is the largest theatre in Israel. It employs 220 people each season, and any given night (including Friday!) at least three theatres are performing. In addition, the Cameri sponsors touring companies, which have performed in places like Berlin, London, Buenos Aires, Australia, the Kennedy Center, and most recently, Greece.
Such size and political ties might imply institutional calcification, but the Cameri continues to thrive on the cutting edge. Sometimes the material is provocative as in Hillel Mittlepunkt's Gorodish, which traces the rise and fall of a general from being a hero in the Six Day War of 1967 to becoming a villain in the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
More complex are the issues raised in Murder by Hanoch Levin. The subject is the cycle of Israeli/Palestinian violence: a Palestinian is tortured then and dies in the first scene, a Jewish bridal couple is shot by the boy's father in the next, and the last portrays a mob assault on a construction worker accused of terrorism. Adapting Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's pronouncement at the signing of the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles--"We wish to open a new chapter in the sad book of our lives together ... a new reckoning in relations between peoples"--the Cameri looked beyond the conflicts to an uneasy peace. It brought Palestinian and Israeli audiences, primarily students, together to view and to discuss "a play that's like a blow on the head," according to an Israeli TV newscaster. The discussions were led by Israeli and Arab members of the cast. Some of the participants had never been outside Gaza. One Arab woman who arrived with many reservations responded: "Now I am confused. Can I choos e peace? How can I choose it?" The production won five awards, and became the impetus for the ongoing P.E.A.C.E. Experience: Peace Through Enrichment Activities and Cultural Encounters.
Two years ago the Cameri featured Edna Mazia's Herod, a love story (in contemporary idiom and costumes) that is complicated by politics. Mazia calls King Herod, the son of a convert who built his coalition government by marrying into the ruling political family and courting Rome, a "modern tragic figure who ... did not have the greatness to put aside the personal humiliation of rejection to rule." Even as he built Israel into a great power, his paranoiac need for control destroyed him and his family. Mazia, a novelist who began her playwriting career at forty, says that Herod, the most controversial figure in Jewish history, teaches about Israel today.
Semel has more dreams for the Cameri. He'd like to see plays about the trauma of soldiers in Lebanon and about the four mothers whose demonstrations against Netanyahu's policies created a national controversy. Meanwhile the Cameri continues to challenge hard-line views. It remains "a theatre [reading] the pulse of Israeli society."
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COPYRIGHT 2002 Institute for Labor and Mental Health
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
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