"We have to create a picture of
the future," said former military personality Ami Ayalon
in
Here is theatre for the future -- Palestinian
and Jewish Israelis, side by side, telling their own and one another's stories.
To audiences largely familiar with, and fond of, only
their own narratives -- pain, self-righteousness, dreams.
To people who, having been touched by these daring
artists, return home a bit closer to compassion and to the "other."
PLONTER --
a new kind of drama on
PLONTER has opened this June, 2005 at the Cameri Theatre, in the tradition of BLOOD RELATIVE -- http://traubman.igc.org/bloodrel.htm
-- the ground-breaking
The story was first wired June 8,
2005 by JTA and published right away by newspapers and online by VirtualJerusalem:
By June 10 it was printed by MIFTAH.ORG, The
Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy
Today, an original Independent article re-printed
June 12 in Arab News was summarized and passed on by the invaluable,
leading-edge news service of Search for Common Ground in the Middle East -- http://www.commongroundnews.org
:
Donald Macintyre, columnist for the Independent, writes about the play, Plonter. [T]his play set against the dark background of occupation and intifada repeatedly challenges its audience to realize that the others are individuals tooWithout an initial script, Plonter is the outcome of an intense and extraordinary collaboration between [Yael] Ronen [the director], 29, and a talented cast of young professional Israeli Arab and Jewish actors, who improvised, argued and finally bonded for seven months to create a work which confronts, often painfully but sometimes with savage humor, its audiences with the human realities on both sides.
Add
this to the growing list of credits to the arts -- http://traubman.igc.org/messages/424.htm
-- for deepening and accelerating this precious,long-awaited public peace process.
The fact of this story being reported with enthusiasm
in both Arab and Jewish press could not be a stronger message.
When both people's narratives are told together, both
people feel heard.
Both people begin to listen.
This becomes "our story," to be told by both
peoples with appreciation, affection, and reason for hope.
This could not create a clearer picture of the future,
as Ayalon prescribes.
Please encourage and support these kinds of activities
however you possibly can.
Life depends on it, and on you.
Published in ARAB NEWS, The Middle East's Leading English
Language Daily -- 12 June 2005
On the Web at http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=65262&d=12&m=6&y=2005
Israelis, Palestinians See Life on the Other
Side
Donald Macintyre, The Independent
LONDON, 12 June 2005 There’s a telling moment in the
discussion after the performance of Plonter. A man
asks the cast crossly why the settler women depicted in the play in long dresses
and hats of the sort worn by many religious Jewish women, all look the same.
No more so, the Jewish director, Yael
Ronen, points out, than the mourning Palestinian
women grieving over the death of an 11-year-old boy. Or, says one of actors, Asaf Pariente, the equally
stereotyped keffiyeh-clad Hamas
gunmen who promise eternal vengeance after an Israeli soldier shoots the child
dead.
Caught out, the audience member lets a rueful half
smile, in what just might be sudden self-awareness, flit across his face.
In fact, this play set against the dark background of
occupation and intifada repeatedly challenges its
audience to realize that the others are individuals too.
At the climax of the piece Imbroglio in English
the haunted Israeli soldier who has helped to cover up the killing, suddenly
sees the Palestinian mother and her child in his living room. Cant you see there are people there? he
asks his uncomprehending, and of course, unseeing wife. Its
one of the oldest of all dramatic devices.
But the line has a double meaning, half of which is a
resonant appeal to understand the suffering on the other side of the
psychological, as well as increasingly the physical, wall separating Israelis
from Palestinians.
Without an initial script, Plonter
is the outcome of an intense and extraordinary collaboration between Ronen, 29, and a talented cast of young professional
Israeli Arab and Jewish actors, who improvised, argued and finally bonded for
seven months to create a work which confronts, often painfully but sometimes
with savage humor, its audiences with the human realities on both sides.
The sketches weaving together the lives of an
Israeli and Palestinian family, each tormented in its own way by the conflict,
linger in the memory long after the performance at Tel Avivs
Cameri Theater ends: The Palestinian husband goaded
by his wife over his apparent passivity in the face of their sons death; the
young Israeli woman trying to reach out to her soldier husband after her own
stridently left-wing activist sister has accused him of being a war criminal;
the Palestinian man on a bus who angrily confronts his suddenly terrified
fellow passengers by stripping down to his underpants.
The versatile cast set out to confront the complexities
of the conflict. For the mainly left-wing Jewish actors, for example, this
meant, says Ronen, understanding soldiers and
settlers as well as Palestinians.
The first thing we had to do was to destroy every opinion
we had about the conflict, she says. We wanted to expose our own ignorance and
prejudice, our lack of knowledge of ourselves and others.
We had to try and be neutral and not emotional, says Ashraf Barhoim,
an Arab actor who, in one of several cross-overs,
plays an Israeli soldier as well as the suspected suicide bomber.
Thus, a settler couple whose child is killed in a
Palestinian attack are treated with sympathy; on the other hand a group of
settler women evading a soldier trying to evacuate them by throwing a baby like
a frisbee from hand to hand until he is, shockingly,
dropped, makes a highly charged point about the involuntary exposure of
children to the conflict. As does one of the most disturbing scenes: A group of
Palestinian children vying, as if in a game, for a suicide vest to avenge their
dead 11-year-old school friend.
Ronen says the cast did not,
as they worked on the play, think much about the audience or whether people
would be angry with it. But she agrees that it is Israelis who have the most to
learn from Plonter.
Unlike for Palestinians what’s happening is not a
matter of everyday life for them. They have the privilege of behaving as if
(the occupation) didn’t exist every moment of the day, until, that is, a terror
attack comes to their doorstep and then they say What
do you want from us, why are you trying to kill us.
For a symbolic taste of Palestinian life,
theater-goers arriving at the play have to submit their ID to two aggressive
actors in soldiers uniforms.
It has already been shown to Arab and Jewish
schoolchildren, in an experiment which the Cameri is
busily seeking sponsorship to expand.
The play doesnt seek to
come up with a detailed peace plan. But the cast is united by an
anti-occupation ethos; they are of a generation marked as teenagers by the
rising hopes and then the crushing disappointments of the
Despite the darkness of much of the work, and her own admission that the audience probably only come
half-way with us, Ronen suggests there are some grounds
for optimism in the mutual understanding the cast built among themselves
through real honesty and real dialogue in rehearsal.
Of course if we can do it, and the audience
get involved, they will be able to do it too. She cites one minor
example. In one scene, the dead Palestinian child’s distraught mother
compellingly played by Raida Adon, composes herself for
the TV cameras to say how happy and proud she was to have a martyred son before
lapsing back into inconsolable grief.
Ronen says that in the
discussion after one performance a Jewish high school pupil said she had seen
this so often before, but now she understood what the mother was really feeling.