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Vienna, Detroit, Jerusalem:
Thought-provoking Jewish theatre conferences on three continents
While driving from Philadelphia to Michigan, I found it difficult
to imagine a conference that could match last year's spectacular
International Theatre Conference in Vienna, Austria. However, the
Association for Jewish Theatre (AJT) and the Jewish Ensemble Theatre’s
(JET) Artistic Director Evelyn Orbach ensured that this year’s
conference in Detroit brought together some of the best Jewish and
pro-Jewish theatre professionals and board members from the US and
Canada, and from as far as Berlin, Sao Paulo, and Tel Aviv, who
conducted many engaging workshops, eye-opening performances,
challenging seminars, and one enlightening discussion after another.
Because of the diversity and caliber of their work, I witnessed a
range of outstanding performances and a depth of discussion that at
times challenged me deeply.
Every morning, some conference participants met to hear Michael
Posnick present texts by Martin Buber and other philosophers, leading
to deep discussions about the spiritual aspect of theatre. Ellen
Schiff’s presentation on how actors and playwrights could draw upon a
collective experience or “racial memory,” forced me to grapple with
issues of race and identity. Her talk challenged me, because whenever
I think about the Jungian notion of the collective unconscious, I
juxtapose it with the possibility that any so-called racial and
cultural identifiers might be little more than social constructs.
I was also intrigued by Rick Stein’s report about the recent
IsraDrama Festival, where many Israeli playwrights tackled the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict head-on. It seems that the opposite takes
place in the United States, where in the absence of large subsidies,
commercial success often dictates the choice of plays, and political
theatre suffers.
However, JET did not shy away from controversy when they presented
one of the conference’s most thought-provoking events: their
performance of a scene from Women’s Minyan by Naomi Ragen, which turned
the small stage in Detroit into a classical Greek theatron—a “watching
place.” Here, the audience witnessed the anguish of one soul after
another, as her plot took us deep into the heart of Orthodox darkness,
showing ten women of all ages who each suffered differently under the
confines of strictly-interpreted and enforced Judaic laws—an
extraordinary play that succeeded in making audiences cry in theatres
as far apart as Jerusalem and Detroit today.
For the conference’s Playwrights’s Forum, I hoped to dramatize
these challenging themes and ideas, tying in notions of race and
ideology in a scene from Mendelssohn Does Not Live Here Anymore. LikeWomen’s Minyan, which Ragen based on real-life incidents, writing about
one’s own family or group presents many difficulties, especially when
their actions are anything but praiseworthy. However, through the use
of documents and other historical sources from the Third Reich,
including letters from my father, I hoped to show that labeling other
people racially—in this case, Jewish people that are considered
“vermin”—can bring about disastrous consequences for both the abusers
and the abused.
I owe a great deal to the many people who made this conference an
extraordinary event, including Norman Fedder, Diane Gilboa, Mira
Hirsch, Ralph Meranto, Rick Stein, Kayla Gordon, and of course, the
staff and many volunteers at JET. Organized by Moti Sandak and Howard
Rypp, next year’s conference will take place in Israel for the first
time. This non-Jewish writer has always wanted to say goodbye with a
famous Jewish farewell. On the last day in Detroit, and for the first
time in my life, I had the opportunity to say to some of the most
extraordinary theatre people one could possibly meet: “Till next year
in Jerusalem.” I felt damn good in saying it. And I felt deeply
connected.
Henrik Eger, Ph.D.
www.henrikeger.com
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