SOURCE: "Patterns and Trends in Israeli Drama and Theater, 1948 to Present," in Theater in Israel, edited by Linda Ben-Zvi, The University of Michigan Press, 1996, pp. 9-50.

[In the following excerpt, Avigal surveys developments in Israeli theater from the beginning of statehood in 1948 to the mid-1990s.]

One evening in 1985, about three years after the Lebanon War, I sat in the Rovina Hall of the Habima National Theater and witnessed a revolution, revolutionary only in Israeli terms, since what seemed so unusual here would have been routine for a Broadway or West End stage. For the very first time in Israeli theater a Yuppie couple, the same age as the playwright and I, dealt with entirely personal problems: the breakdown of a marriage, midlife crisis, personal fulfillment, and self-analysis. Traditionally, Israeli drama had concerned itself with themes of national identity. Individual problems were seen as only a reflection of collective values, too petty and unimportant for a national theater to present.

The play, Hillel Mittelpunkt's Temporary Separation,¹ presents a couple in their late thirties who spend a weekend at a beachside hotel trying to rehabilitate their shaky relationship. The husband is a playwright, the wife a university lecturer dedicated to the Palestinian issue. She brings with her to the hotel the reels she recorded on the West Bank, regarding Palestinian hardships, perhaps as refuge from the heart-to-heart talks she is expecting to hold with her husband. In response to her indifference about visiting his friend in the hospital, he chides her: " Take your tape recorder when you go on Sunday. You can find two or three Hebronites in the oncology ward, too. It isn't just the occupation that's killing them, sometimes it's the liver or the spleen .. . or the expectation" (11).

I attended the play with a friend, a former Israeli, who had left the country on a Palestinian passport in 1947, before the state was founded. On hearing the dramatic text he was surprised and whispered: "Funny, in Europe, in a similar situation, they would have said the exact opposite, that there are places where people don't just die of strokes, cancer, or liver problems, but of wars, oppression, occupation."

An outsider, unfamiliar with the Israeli experience, would find it difficult to understand this quirk of Israeli drama, prevailing even in autobiographical-realistic plays. What seems ordinary from the local Israeli point of view seems extraordinary from the outside, and vice versa. It is private life that is considered shocking fodder for theater; the political is the norm. Israeli theater treats the anomaly of Israeli existence as accepted material and uses it to produce realistic dramas, bourgeois plays and entertainment. And even exceptional human situations, of the kind portrayed in the stylized classical tragedies, can be perceived, through analogy, as mimetic reflections of current reality.²

All theater is a reflection of society, and the Israeli theater expresses this to an extreme degree: it not only reflects the sociocultural and political developments in Israel but also participates, quite actively and articulately, in their shaping. The not-too-long history of the Israeli theater offers a reflection of the tumultuous story of the Zionistic ideology in contemporary Israel: a painful process of secularization, turning from a sacred-mythological era of ideological visionaries to a secular reality of disillusionment and ennui. The Hebrew theater, from its beginnings in 1917 in Moscow with the Habima, perceived itself as being ideologically committed to the Jewish national movement and to the growth of a new national and cultural identity, and it bore this weighty national message.³ Until recently, it had never been considered "just entertainment" or "merely an aesthetic experience." Each opening of a new theater became cause for a national celebration, and until the 1960s theater reviews referred almost exclusively to the ideological content or to the moral and national message of the plays. Aesthetics and theatrical craftsmanship came last, if at all. Adherence to reality and reference to the here and now were ideological imperatives that, over the years, acquired formal-aesthetic values. Theatergoers referred to plays whose content conformed with their expectations as "good theater."

Plays written in Israel after the War of Independence tended to copy bourgeois realism, paying tribute to the solid national consensus. This was the apprenticeship stage of a young theater, not yet familiar with the tools of the trade. Thereafter, in the 1950s and 1960s, the "promotion of original drama," in the sense of Hebrew plays treating local themes, became a national value in its own right. Original plays enjoyed state subsidies and were praised for their adherence to reality—even when they could not meet artistic standards. Up until the 1970s, most of the repertoire played in Israeli theater consisted of translated European classics or modern Western plays. In the 1970s, when the theatrical tools had improved, Hebrew drama no longer needed artificial encouragement. It awakened and began to flourish in its own right, discovered the here and now along with self-criticism, in the form of documentary, journalistic drama. In fact, only at this point did Israeli drama assume the role expected of theater as an art in a civilized society: it became society's watchdog as well as its prophet of doom.

The 1970s were years of awakening. Israeli theater started to express doubts about the Zionist dream and the means of its realization. These were the sobering years of self-awareness, both for the arts and for Israeli society as a whole. It was in this period that the dreams of the romantic founding fathers faded away, albeit slowly. The wars, the continuous bloodshed, financial and economic difficulties, and day-to-day worries took over. Instead of classic Zionism, Israelis adopted a local version of the American dream, a myth of individual success in an efficient technologically oriented consumer society. This new myth triumphed over the old collective dreams.

Early in the 1980s the Lebanon War broke out, and the national consensus was shattered. For the first time many Israelis spoke of the lack of justification for war and saw that there could be another way. This crack in the national consensus was immediately expressed in the theater, both in original drama and in local interpretations of classic and translated plays. The early 1980s, the time following Lebanon, were characterized by protest theater, with a good deal of self-flagellation. It was a theater of disillusionment, with a strong undercurrent of nostalgic eulogizing of the Zionist dream and its demise. But all too soon the hue and cry quieted down, and it was back to business as usual. The switch was, in fact, not too sharp, since alongside the "relevant" plays, such as Yehoshua Sobol's Ghetto and The Palestinian Woman, there were the plays of Neil Simon, Henrik Ibsen, and Arthur Miller, which still formed the main part of the repertoire. Political plays as well as others that "enjoyed" censorship scandals, simply enjoyed a greater portion of the public attention.⁴

The time that has passed since then has proved the "revolution" to have been an elusive, pale imitation of the drama of the late 1960s in Europe and the United States. And yet there was a unique authentic Israeli aspect to this theater, which moves theater critics and aficionados to remember it with nostalgic fondness—despite all its faults. Content often overshadowed form and quality. Occasionally it was the very adherence to reality and the immediacy of reaction that precluded aesthetic perspectives and undermined theatrical achievement. After the short wave of the post-Lebanon War protest drama declined, the Israeli theater began to concentrate on form and artistic matters as well as on marketing and the box office. Establishment theater productions—and since the mid 1980s this comprises the majority of theatrical activity in Israel—began to strive for technical professionalism, taking over where the aesthetic quest, in the sense of experimental theater, had left off.

In less provincial countries, having a more developed theatrical tradition, this is known as the development of "production values"—to wit—proper professional performances and forget about the content. Original drama began to recede from political and social relevance and limited itself to individual problems of the Israeli society, especially since the beginning of the Intifada (1987), developing various mechanisms for the denial of reality. While the Likud government was busily paving roads to circumvent the Arab villages on the West Bank and make them invisible, an escapist attitude of "It's all right" and "It'll soon pass" developed in the theatrical arena. Established theater became a production line and marketing mechanism for conservative subscribers, who came to the theater in order to get their dose of entertainment and denial. . . .

Israeli drama went all the way from an ideological theater, committed to a general cause—through different phases of confusion and disillusion—to a new illusion of faked normality. It ran the course, from a theater of values to a production-value theater.⁵

Israeli theater is preoccupied by a number of central themes, recurring in the writing of local playwrights, as well as in local interpretations of translated material. These themes undergo a metamorphosis concurrently with the transformation of the attitude of Israeli theater as a whole, from the collective approach to the personal-individual point of view related to Jewish/Israeli identity and the unique circumstances of Israeli existence.

Early Israeli drama, written before and immediately after the War of Independence, was dominated by a genre of realistic "settlement" plays, which dealt with the Zionist dream. The individual in these plays was a mere tool for the realization of the collective dream, which included the establishment of a state, conquest of lands, rural and urban settlement, kibbutz life, coping with setting up the groundwork for the state-to-be, absorption of Aliya, and the making of a melting pot of Jewish immigrants.⁶ During the 1950s and 1960s this theme was translated into an existentialist context: the myth of national fulfillment became a myth of existential fulfillment, under the clear stylistic inspiration of the European Theater of the Absurd. The settlement play reemerged during the 1970s with a twist. Now it evoked the problem of the individual versus the collective, questioning the sacrifices and compromises the individual has to make for the sake of the society.

Many Israeli plays deal with the price of survival, in terms of the Jewish people's Massada complex: What are the limits of sacrifice an individual or a nation should make for a cause, while its very existence is endangered? What is the lesser evil—heroic suicide, which zealously maintains the national identity while forsaking physical well-being, or compromise and survival? A more personal version of this dilemma places the individual's happiness and unique identity in contrast to the common benefit of the national collective. Throughout the years the historical circumstances vary, but the dilemma remains intact. The enemy changes from era to era: from the Romans, during the fall of the Second Temple (Sobol's The Jerusalem Syndrome), through the Germans, during the Holocaust (Aharon Meged's Hanna Senesh or Sobol's Ghetto), including the mythical Arab foe (Yigal Mossinsohn's In the Plains of the Negev, Natan Shacham's They'll Arrive Tomorrow, and most of the plays written during the War of Independence).

The survival theme is a subtheme of the plays dealing with identity, the early version, in the 1940s and 1950s, concerned with the survival of collective existence, threatened by an external menace and commending the sacrifice of individual life and privacy in favor of the supreme value—the life of the people. After 1967 these values were questioned, and a new motif emerges: the idea that war is negative and that survival and peace are paramount. The value of self-sacrifice began to be doubted and the value of life itself was finally acknowledged. From here the way was paved for playwrights to discuss not only life itself bu: also the quality of individual life.

Doubt, in Israeli drama, is mostly connected to the norms accepted by the collective, the values of preceding decades, or national myths. Such plays are the flip side of the resurrection plays, which dealt with the realization of the Zionistic dream, bemoaning the shattered dreams. Israeli playwrights touched upon this theme in historical and documentary plays, beginning with Nissim Aloni's Most Cruel the King in 1954, through Sobol's social-historical epics, the satires of Sobol, Hillel Mittelpunkt and Hanoch Levin, and, at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s in a new genre of historical nihilistic parodies, such as Eldad Ziv's Laisse-moi t' aimer and Lucas the Coward and Yonatan Gefen's Lullaby e to My Valley. This last variety of play looks back upon the recent past with an ironical sweet-and-sour gaze and deromanticizes the very content and symbols that were so heroically portrayed during the drama of the Palmach decade.⁷

The Holocaust theme permeates almost all other themes dealt with in Israeli drama. This is the ultimate trauma of the Jewish people, according to which all other themes are measured, as against a severe existential ruler. Israeli theater never portrays the Holocaust directly and probably never can. Nevertheless, Israeli and Jewish playwrights everywhere are obsessed by this difficult subject. The attitude of theater toward the Holocaust reflects the changing attitudes of Israeli society to the problem of the Holocaust in general but also to related existential themes, such as the ethical dilemmas of survival, the Massada complex, and the problem of identity. The first plays to have broached the Holocaust generally expressed the need to emphasize the heroism of the survivors and to commemorate the horror (Meged's Hanna Senesh or Yisrael Hameiri's Ashrei Hagafrur). Other plays considered various aspects of guilt: the guilt of the survivors themselves, for having survived (Ben-Zion Tomer's Children of the Shadow), as well as the confusion and embarrassment of the Eretz-Yisrael population, at the lamblike acceptance of the slaughter by the victims themselves; the very denial of the Holocaust, as part of the "new Israeli Jew's" denial of the Diaspora culture; and the problem of financial compensation made by Germany to survivors (Moshe Shamir's The Heir and Aharon Meged's The Burning Season). . . .

During the 1970s, when Israeli theater started reexamining all value systems of Israeli society, the Holocaust theme became the ultimate metaphor for doubts and existential questions, in their new form. Collaboration with the Nazis in order to save a few Jewish lives was no longer regarded as mortal sin, as life came to be considered the supreme value, explored in Sobol's Ghetto and Motti Lerner's Kastner.

While the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, considered a national cultural icon, still bans the music of Wagner (at this writing), Israeli theater has long since broken the taboo on Holocaust symbols. Swastikas, SS uniforms, yellow Stars of David, or the anti-Semitic Stürmer-style caricature of a Jew appeared here and there on the Israeli stage, although they were mostly in translated plays such as Robert D. McDonald's Summit Meeting, produced in 1982 by the Beersheva Municipal Theater, in which Hitler's and Mussolini's mistresses met against the background of a giant swastika, and Martin Sherman's Bent, in the Haifa Theater, which includes scenes from a concentration camp.

These symbols were sometimes used in the context of a disturbing analogy between the post-1967 Israeli conqueror and the Nazi fascist. This reversal of roles—of the victim becoming the persecutor, an extreme protest against the state of conquest—caused a great deal of anger in the Israeli public. This analogy was in fashion mainly in plays inspired by the Lebanon War (Hanoch Levin's The Patriot; Michael Kahane's The Last Dance of Genghis Cohn, after Romain Gary's novel; Yosef Mundy's The Merry Days of Frankfurt; Shmuel Hasfari's Kiddush; and some stage interpretations of translated plays, such as Holk Freitag's The Trojan Women, by Euripides.) Two extraordinary performances by the Akko Theater, directed by Dudi Ma'ayan, employ the Holocaust as an expression of collective spiritual reckoning of the Israeli identity. These two group works, targeted at a limited audience, deal with the Holocaust and with Jewish history from the personal point of view of young Israelis, who were educated in Israeli schools, where they absorbed the Holocaust mythology as part and parcel of history lessons. Ma'ayan's Second Generation's Memories in the Old City and Arbeit Macht Frei are, at this writing, the two most complex and difficult expressions of the way the Israeli consciousness copes with the memory of the Holocaust. They also combine the thematic struggle with a search for new and daring theatrical language.

Under this heading are plays that relate to varied conflicts, resulting from the heterogeneous nature of Israeli society, which contains Jews of various ethnic extraction as well as Christian, Muslim, and Druse Palestinian Arabs, some of whom are Israeli citizens and some of whom live under military occupation. Conflicts of coexistence persist both within the Jewish society and at the binational level of the Jewish-Arabic conflict. Both levels reflect a gradual shift from the collective stereotypical treatment to the more recent personal, individual approach. An example of plays of the first type, within Jewish society, is Ephraim Kishon's His Name Precedes Him (1953), Yigal Mossinsohn's Kazablan (1954), and Eldorado (1955), Hanoch Bar-Tov's Six Wings for One (1958), Judith Handel's The Alley of Stairs (1958), and The Neighborhood (1956), and Gavriel Ben-Simshon's Moroccan King (1984). Examples of plays relating to the Jewish-Arabic conflict are enumerated in Dan Urian's essay, in this volume.⁸

As noted, the subject that has received the least attention from Israeli dramatists, until recent years, is that of the common person's day-to-day routine, in its psychological, social, and financial aspects. Romantic comedies and melodramatic love stories are hard to find in Israeli drama.⁹ Hanoch Levin deals extensively with the antihero, within the framework of the family and neighborhood (in plays such as Hefetz, Krum, Ya'akobi and Leidental, The Suitcase Packers, and The Craft of Life), but he does it in his unique poetic style, which is very hard to translate, in its use of both Hebrew and theatrical language (see the essays by Yaari and Brown, in this volume).¹⁰

Beginning in the 1970s and thereafter, playwrights tended to relate the private, personal level of their stories with social, national, and even political considerations. This relationship is expressed through a network of symbols, which emerges from the realistic texture of the play, such as in novelist A. B. Yehoshua's plays, A Night in May, Objects, Late Divorce, and the recent Night Babies, and in the plays of Yosef Bar-Yosef: Difficult People, Elka, Butche, The Orchard, and Winter Ceremony. Another instance of such a combination is expressed in the apparent family dramas by Shulamit Lapid, Deserted Property and His Life's Work, and in Shmuel Hasfari's Kiddush.

. . . . .

Hanoch Levin, who was once the black sheep of Israeli theater and is currently one of the best-known Israeli playwrights, wrote a satirical cabaret called You and Me and the Next War (1969), a title that has become an idiom in modern Hebrew. Israelis tend to organize their collective memory according to the wars. When trying to describe the main trends in Israeli theater since the war of 1948, it is almost impossible to avoid grouping them according to the six wars in Israel's history, as each war represents a new phase in the Israeli dynamic of shattering old myths, and another step in constructing the multifaceted Israeli reality.

Each of the Israeli wars carries a nickname—sometimes receiving more than one name—each embodying the ambivalence toward these wars: 1948, the War of Independence, or Sovereignty (Komemiyut), the foundation of the State of Israel; 1956, the Sinai War, or the "Kadesh" (lit. sanctify) Operation, although not seen as a "real war," since it did not endanger the existence of the state and did not leave behind a specific cultural residue; 1967, the Six Day War, which actually lasted much longer, followed by the War of Attrition; 1973, the Yom Kippur War, or the Day of Atonement War because of the day on which the war began; 1981, the Lebanon War, or, by its official name (which, ironically, binds war with peace) "the Peace for the Galilee Operation," the first war which most of the Israeli public felt was not a necessity for survival; 1987, the Intifada, the Palestinian popular uprising in the Occupied Territories, which for some reason is known as neither a war nor an "operation," since Israelis are unused to a prolonged state of battle, which becomes an existential dilemma and can be solved not by force but only by political resolution; 1991, the Gulf War, which, like the Sinai War, is not considered a "real" war, since there was no danger to Israel's very existence and the army did not take active part.

The first period is that of the 1950s (1948-56), the years when the great dream of the founding generation was at its best. In the 1960s (1956-67) came the years of awakening. Sobriety following the 1967 euphoria and facing reality from a new vantage point characterized the country in the 1970s (1967-73) until the 1973 war ushered in doubts, negations, and new perspectives seen in protests during and immediately after the Lebanon War. This period (1981-91), from the Lebanon War through the Intifada, years of middle-class comfort, produced a theater that was detached but professionally competent, escapist entertainment seeking to evade reality. In the early 1990s, we have seen the new political upheaval that brought the Labor Alignment back into power. It is the end of an era and the beginning of a new cycle. The theater is returning to historical, social, and political issues, from a sober but not necessarily bitter vantage point of a young generation, unburdened by nostalgia for the early Palmach years.¹¹

The division of theatrical periods according to wars is convenient in terms of overviews and titles, but is not, of course, precise. Israeli theater reflects reality and often foresees processes before they occur. Thus, for example, Hanoch Levin wrote satires against the Military Government and Israel's new army of masters while he still was a student at the Tel Aviv University, in the mid-1960s, before the Six Day War. In 1970 he wrote Queen of the Bathtub, a bitter satire about the empire and bereavement, wherein he first dared question the myth and necessity of self-sacrifice. The play was written in 1970, three years before the Yom Kippur War. It caused a public outcry, mainly due to the scene in which a bereaved father stands on the fresh grave of his son, fallen in the war, and is reproached by the dead young man:

Father dear, when you stand at my grave,
Old and tired and very alone [. . . ]
Do not stand so proud,
Don't lift up your head, father
We are left flesh to flesh
And now is the time to weep, father.

During one of the performances at the Cameri Theater, the well-known and respected Cameri actor, Yosef Yadin (whose brother, Yigal Yadin, discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls and was leading archaeologist at Massada, also a former chief of staff of the army), stood up and protested. In 1984, fourteen years later and only two years after the Lebanon War, the very same Yosef Yadin appeared in the Akko Fringe Festival, cast as a bereaved father in a play entitled Akeda (Sacrifice of the Son). The play questioned the need for sacrificing young lives in preventable wars but not as harshly as in Levin's play. This time not one member of the audience protested. Some may have shed a private tear.

The 1950s were the first years after establishment of the state. All social, political, and cultural frameworks were in their first stages of organization, as was the theater. Playwrights wrote mainly current, sociorealistic, amateurish, stereotyping plays. They were photographing, via the theater, a heroic victory album, in a theatrical language that was only just beginning to make its way upon the stage and had little or no theatrical heritage (Shoham 19). The primary playwrights were Moshe Shamir (He Walked in the Fields [1949]), Yigal Mossinsohn (In the Plains of the Negev [1949]), Natan Shacham (They'll Arrive Tomorrow [1949]), Nissim Aloni (Most Cruel the King [1954]), Aharon Meged (Hedva and I [1954]), and Ephraim Kishon (His Name Precedes Him [1953]). Most of them were of the same age group, most grew up with a socialist pioneer background (Chalutzim), with a liberal-socialist orientation, served in the Palmach and Hagana military undergrounds before the establishment of the state, and fought in the War of Independence. Although some of the playwrights have turned rightwing over the years (e.g., Shamir and Kishon), they still draw from the same ideological background and employ a similar imagery (Shoham 19). Because most of the plays were written and directed in a realistic style and made much use of the current slang idiom, they dated very quickly. They now have a primarily historical value, as their dramatic and theatrical value is negligible. Most playwrights of the period abandoned theatrical writing over the years and focused on prose. Occasionally, they would write a play or have others adapt their works to the theater, but of all playwrights of the time only Nissim Aloni remained first and foremost a theatrical artist.

In these plays Arab characters are entirely missing. An Arab figure shimmers into Shacham's They'll Arrive Tomorrow as an anonymous, faceless enemy, whose life is entirely worthless. During this period there was no satire at all and almost no open criticism of the establishment and accepted values. Conversely, deviations and misfits were denigrated. The exception to this rule is Most Cruel the King, Aloni's first great play, which was the most interesting of a series of historical plays, written employing a historical perspective and analogies in order to refer to the present (Shoham 160-200; Ofrat 48-58). Theaters of the period produced many translated plays; original plays were by far the minority.¹²

In the second decade of its existence the new state stabilized and discovered a daily routine. The short Sinai Operation, which erupted in 1956, had no significant impact on this routine. These were years for settling down and a relative improvement in material comforts, a tendency for "provincial" imitation of American and European fashions, in all facets of life, a tendency expressed in the theater by an eclectic imitation of formal models of Western cultures, without internalization of the spiritual and thematic contexts that engendered such forms. Imitation served as a useful exercise for artistic expression and accelerated the local process of becoming acquainted with the theatrical medium. One of the strongest influences was that of Bertolt Brecht, mostly in the Haifa Theater, whose head, Yosef Milo, mounted Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle, with Chaim Topol in the leading role and a set by Brecht's original designer, Theo Otto.¹³ This was a time of enthusiastic experimentation and apprenticeship, of absorbing important models to the verge of imitation, be it by translating and producing foreign plays or through the writing of local dramatists. Besides the Brechtian model, Israeli drama at the time was influenced by Pirandello's play-within-a-play structure as well as its French counterpart, as in the plays of Giraudoux and Anouilh, and the theatrical expression of European existentialism, as expressed in what is called the Theater of the Absurd: Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet. This last philosophical trend was very influential on the writing of Nissim Aloni as well as on the writings of other dramatists of the period.¹⁴ Aloni linked the existential search for the self, hiding behind a variety of misleading masks, with the public and social identity and developed an ironic and detached outlook on Israel: "Small country in Africa, on its way to independence. Very fanatic. Lots of folklore." (The American Princess, 12).

The importing of culture also had ideological significance. In this period, with Israeli industry and culture still in their infancy, anything "foreign" was considered perforce better than the local equivalent. "Homegrown" needed a sales promotion. In this way the struggle for "promotion of original plays" took on a local aspect: defending the national patriotic values.

This struggle was a direct continuation of the value-laden patterns that prevailed during the establishment of the state, when the cultural, political, and geographical separation of Israel led to a unique idealization of all things foreign. The concept of "the outside world" in the 1960s became the idiom for an unreachable dream. It is difficult to grasp the sense of isolation and enclosure of Israel at the time, surrounded by seven enemy Arab countries and without even television broadcasting to connect it to the Western world. Trips abroad were a great luxury; the idealized concept of "abroad" became a submyth of the Israeli unattainable dream, a contrasting mythology to the ideal of settlement and national reestablishment of the Jewish homeland in Eretz-Yisrael. Whereas the first years after the establishment of the state were characterized by an attempt to create an authentic Israeli culture that would turn its back on the ghetto psychology and negate it, in later years Israeli artists, who were mainly the product of Western culture, sought means to break the boundaries of the cultural isolation that had developed. They found themselves virtually imprisoned in an ambivalent island of Western culture within the Middle East, physically rooted in the East while spiritually focused on the West. The cultural import brought about new styles and themes in the theater. The more theater was exposed to external forms, the more it absorbed the systems of values expressed by these foreign, formal patterns.

Israeli theater gradually departed from the Habima and Cameri's original naturalistic tradition, and the stylistic and formal changes were accompanied by a metamorphosis of values as well. Gone was the committed ideological basis, on which the Habima had been founded. It was no longer considered shameful to concentrate upon the artistic aspect in its own right; art was admitted to have a right of existence beyond serving the ideal of national renaissance (Ofrat 185-88).

The Israeli theatrical scene of the period was a hectic field of creation. It was even called "the Explosion of the Sixties" by the Jerusalem Post's theater critic, Mendel Kohansky. Many small theaters, some old and some new, worked beside the large institutionalized theaters. They were considered avant-garde and daring. Along with Do-Re-Mi, Zuta, and Zavit, founded in the 1950s, Theatron Haonot was established, with Nissim Aloni as its central figure; the Actor's Stage, with Oded Kotier and a group of actors; and Yaakov Agmon's Bimot. The innovations introduced in the small theaters began to be reflected by the larger institutions. Writing and translating for the theater were considered to be highly respected professions, and some of Israel's greatest poets, writers, and playwrights took to translating plays, thus creating a new reservoir of world drama, both classic and modern, in Hebrew. In this manner they added an additional dimension to the process of cultural rebirth and to the development of modern Hebrew, binding it to the sources of Western culture. Among the translators were poets Avraham Shlonsky and Natan Alterman as well as Natan Zach, Yaakov Orland, Raphael Eliaz, Yaakov Shabtai, T. Karmi, Nissim Aloni, and others, who translated Shakespeare, Molière and Chekhov.

The Six Day War (1967) was the most critical turning point in Israeli history to date, and it brought about a great change in the country, not only a wave of nationalistic fervor and a euphoria of victory (which died down all too soon, during the long and difficult War of Attrition), but also television broadcasting, thus opening the Israeli ghetto to the world. Until the 1970s, Israel was traditionally a few years behind European and American fashions. As playwright Eldad Ziv put it about the preceding decade: 'The 1960s reached our country shortly before their formal demise in Europe. Here and there we'd hear about long hair, miniskirts and elephant pants. Israel collected photos of IDF [Israel Defense Forces] generals in uniform, General Bar-Lev continued to build his lines" (Laisse moi t'aimer [1991]). The time gap began to close only after the Israeli Television Broadcasting Service was established and television sets became widely available, during the 1970s.

Unlike the escapist drama of the 1960s, dreaming of other worlds, in the years following the Six Day War theater woke up to the immediate Israeli society, to naturalistic styles, and even to satire. It seemed to return to documenting reality and the style that characterized the first decade after the War of Independence. Actually, it used a similar style to achieve different aims. This was not heroic drama, meant to glorify reality, but, rather, here-and-now drama, seeking means to cope with the complex dilemmas of the Israeli people and with the heavy price the society must pay for its existence, a price stated in terms of the number of casualties in the 1967 and 1973 wars. These were the young sons of the former Palmach fighters, who had created the state and now sacrificed their sons on the altar of national survival and continued wars. A modern version of the national myth, the myth of sacrificing the first-born sons (akeda), was brought forth as the penalty paid for survival despite doubts engendered by pain and bereavement.

Bitter doubt first surfaced in intellectuals and artists, and the theater was a leading voice in legitimizing this doubt. Sacrificing the life of the individual for the collective, which was an absolute value not subject to discussion during the formative years of the state—as expressed in Shamir's He Walked in the Fields—lost its absolute status. In 1969, only two years after the war, still within the euphoric period, Hanoch Levin produced his poignant satirical revue, against war and establishment. You and Me and the Next War was largely seen to be spitting in the eye of the nation, but it happened in a fringe theater, the student Bar-Barim jazz bar, in southern Tel Aviv. In 1970 Hanoch Levin dared to cope with the sacrifice myth in the institutional Cameri Theater, with Queen of the Bathtub, arousing a national outcry that forced the Cameri to close down the play.¹⁵

After 1973 the doubt that Levin was audacious enough to express, shared only by a minority after 1967, became a powerful and legitimate sentiment, shared by many.¹⁶ The 1973 war was the antidote to the Six Day War euphoria. It was perceived as an inevitable retribution for the hubristic faith in the concept of power as an omnipotent guarantee of existence. This mythical shield of "security" was cracked, and many Israelis began to cultivate another solution. The results of this war gave rise to protest movements, including Peace Now, which eventually brought down Golda Meir's Labor government, put the Likud into power in 1977, and soon thereafter led to a peace agreement with Egypt.

Ideologically speaking, this decade is characterized by crisis and soul-searching by a generation that still clung to the old value systems but no longer found existential justification therein. The Yom Kippur War, and the feeling of near extermination, dramatically raised the level of skepticism of Israeli theater regarding the solid value systems typical of the state's formative years. Israeli society and theater in the mid-1970s were preoccupied by soul searching. The means of theatrical expression became more sophisticated, due to imitation of artistic models from previous periods, enriching the theater's capacity to cope with the new complexity of local reality.

Original drama flourished in the many styles exercised during the previous decade. Two primary trends characterized the dramatic writing of this period: a direct response to the current scene via the naturalistic docudrama of Nola Chilton of the Haifa Municipal Theater, and a more aesthetically ambitious personal poetic response by Nissim Aloni and Hanoch Levin. These were the years of Aloni's spectacular tragicomedies, in Habima, and of Levin's comparatively intimate family neighborhood, in the Haifa Theater and later in the Cameri. Hanoch Levin was the man people loved to hate: critics praised him, the conservative audience was ideologically appalled and disgusted by his dirty language, and the attacks launched against him by right-wing politicians served to advance his fame or at least his notoriety.

Levin's plays of the period paint a grotesque portrait of the Israeli society of the fat years before the Yom Kippur War. It is an absurd tragicomic universe, populated by a repulsive Jewish-Israeli family, with a spineless father devoid of values, a monstrous, powerful mother, a selfish materialistic daughter—all racist, fascist, and living off the war. If they happen to have a son, he would usually be a shlimazel, or "loser," as are all other young men—creatures having no chance whatsoever to achieve anything in their lives but to be potential mates for the daughters. The mates are destined to be killed in wars, the lovers never to realize their passion. It is a cynical, materialistic world, in which people's strength is measured only in terms of their financial worth, in petit bourgeois terms of the old Jewish shtetl and by their capacity to realize the dream of traveling abroad. Levin created a closed system of social hierarchy, a chain of the weak pecking the even weaker beneath them, all sharing the same dreams, which are destined never to be realized.¹⁷

Some other dramatists and adaptors of the period coped with the contemporary scene in stylized, indirect forms, thus developing a poetic-realistic drama, which crossed the boundaries of the realistic convention and borrowed from the Theater of the Absurd as well as from symbolistic and expressionistic European theater. Playwright Yosef Mundy, for example, directed his political satire The Governor of Jericho in the Cameri, in 1975, using techniques from European models, but his topics were drawn from the immediate reality and portrayed the new Israeli soldier as a fascist tyrant. The play caused a great deal of anger and was closed after thirty-seven nights. Amos Kenan, who followed the French Theater of the Absurd in the 1960s, razed the heroic mythology of the Palmach generation and ironically lamented the murder of the dream of the early period of the state in his bitter satires (Maybe an Earthquake [1970], Friends Discuss Jesus [1972], and As I Still Believe in You [1974]). Playwright Danny Horowitz examined the myth of the Sabra in Cherli Ka Cherli (1977); Yosef Bar-Yosef did so in The Wedding (1974); and playwright Avraham Raz in Mr. Shefi's Night of Independence (1972), each developing his own personal style of poetical realism.

The theater that contributed most to the takeover of local drama was the Haifa Municipal Theater, in the period from 1975 to 1980, under the management of Oded Kotier and the social and artistic leadership of director Nola Chilton. . . . American-born Chilton, known first as an excellent actors' coach, found her place in the Haifa theater and began to edit, adapt, and direct plays on social and political issues, beginning in 1970. Most of the plays had no literary value and were based on texts borrowed directly from everyday life. Many critics were not enthusiastic about the artistic aspect of this kind of theater, with its excessive proximity to the daily scene and the lack of aesthetic distance; and they referred to it sarcastically as "the tape recorder theater."

The Haifa Theater of the time legitimized the far reaches of Israeli life. This was the first appearance on stage of characters from "the other Israel": Oriental Jews, Arabs, residents of development towns, the underdogs whose frustration would bring about the political upheaval of 1977, which overthrew the Labor administration and put the right-wing national camp in power for fifteen years. Nola Chilton brought her former students, from her acting studio and the theater department of Tel Aviv University, to the Haifa Theater. The students, devoted to her method, joined her in group work projects that involved live-in research in deprived communities, which resulted in docudramas. These documentaries, which started on the second experimental stage of the Haifa Theater, gradually found their way to the main stage and aroused disapproval among the local conservative and bourgeois subscribers and led to an exodus of the artistic leadership of the theater, back to Tel Aviv, where they tried to found another pioneering project in Neve Tzedek. Yet, the work of Chilton at the Haifa Theater gave rise to a whole school of new writers and actors, such as Yehoshua Sobol, Itzik Weingarten, and Hillel Mittelpunkt as well as Hanoch Levin and Yosef Bar-Yosef. Apart from semidocumentary dramas, such as Sylvester 72 (1974), The Joker (1915), and Cold Turkey (1976), Sobol, at the time virtually apprenticed to Chilton, wrote one of his most important plays, The Night of the Twentieth.

The Haifa Theater was not alone in dealing with sociopolitical issues. Some other playwrights in the Tel Aviv theaters also touched upon delicate topics, and especially the subject of Jewish-Arabic coexistence. These were not docudramas. Such plays are Miriam Kainy's The Homecoming (1972), Arab playwright Rateb Av'auda's A Sub-tenant (1978), and Gavriel Ben-Simshon's A Moroccan King (1984), a poetical-musical eulogy for the Jewish community of Morocco.

The 1980s started with a bang: the Lebanon War broke out and the national consensus broke down. The process that had taken form in the 1970s was vindicated historically. For the first time in Israel people spoke openly of an unjustified war and acknowledged other options. The war split Israeli society into two opposite camps: the right-wing camp, which saw itself as "the National Camp," and the left-wing camp, which defined itself as "the Peace Camp." A giant demonstration held in a central piazza in Tel Aviv in the midst of the war, an unprecedented event in the history of Israeli wars, protested the army's shut-eye policy during the slaughter of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon. This crack in general agreement was immediately expressed in the theater, both in original drama and in local interpretations of translated classics (such as The Trojan Women, Jean-Paul Sartre's adaptation of Euripides, directed by Holk Freitag in Habima and Yehoshua Sobol's adaptation of The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, by Jean Giraudoux). Censorship attempts to block presentation of Hanoch Levin's antiwar satire, The Patriot, at Neve Tzedek were met by active support for the play from theater groups and intellectuals, unlike the position taken by the very same public during the presentation of Queen of the Bathtub in 1970.

The theater of the first part of the decade, in the years following the Lebanon War, was a theater of protest, with a generous amount of self-flagellation. It was a theater of disillusionment, with a strong undercurrent of nostalgic eulogizing of the Zionist dream and its demise. Such plays as Shmuel Hasfari's Tashmad, on a Jewish terrorist underground of suicidal fanatics in Samaria, and Ira Dvir's The Sacrifice, which dealt with bereaved parents who lost their faith in the justification for their sons' deaths, found their place in the new framework of the Akko Festival of Fringe Theater, which was initiated by Oded Kotler in 1980. Before long the Akko Festival became the showcase for young Israeli theater and a fine sensor of the mood in Israeli theater at the time.

As of 1985, all public repertory theaters were managed by Israeli-born directors, who more or less shared a world view. The Haifa Theater, under Noam Semel, Gedalia Besser, and Yehoshua Sobol—who took over after Kotier's demise—was still the leader, in its preoccupation with such delicate subjects as the Holocaust, orthodox versus secular tensions, and the Jewish-Arabic conflict. Arab actors found their way into this theater, expressing their conflict of identities in plays such as Fugard's The Island, produced both in Hebrew and Arabic versions (1983), Waiting for Godot, in a joint Arabic and Hebrew version (1984); The Optimist, by Palestinian writer Emil Habibi (1986); and Sobol's The Palestinian Woman (1985).

This was the heyday of the Haifa Theater. Under the new management the theater continued the docurealistic drama, with Yossi Hadar's Shell Shock, and became entangled in censorship by the orthodox establishment with Martin Sherman's Messiah (1983) and with the Board of Censorship over Yosef Mundy's The Gay Nights of Frankfurt and Yitzchak Laor's Ephraim Returns to the Army (1985), a play that was entirely rejected by the censors. Both plays suggested an analogy between Israelis and Nazis. The Haifa Theater also won international acclaim, with Sobol's historical epic dramas, which dealt with the moral and ideological issues of the survival of the Jewish people.

But all too soon the hue and cry quieted down. The emotional after-effect of the Lebanon War was as intensive as it was short-lived, and it actually started dying out as early as the mid-1980s. Sobol's famous international hits Soul of a Jew, on Otto Weininger (1982), Ghetto (1984), and The Palestinian Woman (1985) were already produced, although not consciously or intentionally, with an eye for the larger audience and for export. They were understood in different ways in Israel and abroad. What had locally been interpreted as a critique of Israeli identity, the need to choose between Judaism and Israeli-ism, and the evaluation of the moral price of survival were understood abroad as a historical monument for the Holocaust (Ghetto) or a tribute to the early days of Zionism in Vienna at the turn of the century (Soul of a Jew).¹⁸ The Holocaust theme was also employed metaphorically by other playwrights. Motti Lerner's Kastner (1985) and Shmuel Hasfari's Kiddush (1988) were not actually meant to be dramatic monuments to the Jewish tragedy of the Holocaust but, rather, to give voice to the very here-and-now ideological confusion and split identity of the new Israeli.¹⁹

On 9 January 1988, during the celebrations in honor of the fortieth anniversary of the state, Sobol and Besser presented The Jerusalem Syndrome, their swan song as managers of the Haifa Theater. Sobol had long since become a negative political symbol for the extreme right wing, which was not at all interested in the artistic theatrical merit of the play. What was meant to become a festive theatrical event at Habima became a nightmare. The Jerusalem Syndrome, which blamed the fall of the Second Temple upon the Jewish zealots of the period, aroused the wrath of the right wing even before it opened. The audience that arrived at the festive occasion was greeted by a violent right-wing demonstrating mob, who picketed the Habima entrance bearing banners with hostile slogans, terming Sobol and his colleagues "anti-Semites." Several dozen picketers found their way into the performance and disrupted the play with noisy protest and firecrackers. The show could not go on.

I was present at the Habima hall on that evening, and this was an event I will not forget. It was terrifying. The prevalent feeling was that the fascists had won and that we had lost our membership in the community of civilized nations. The performance made front-page headlines in the following day's press. The Israeli media unanimously condemned the intolerance and the violent attempt to curtail the freedom of expression. Unfortunately, the critics condemned the play's artistic merit as well. Sobol and Besser, who confused their personal professional frustration with ideological and social disappointment, resigned from management of the Haifa Theater, and that act was the official end of the period of protest in the 1980s.

The end of the Sobol-Besser era also marked the end of involved theater in Israel and the beginning of the business-as-usual phase. Sobol and Besser liked to portray this change as a result of their resignation, but it was actually the peak of a process that had begun much earlier. The unfortunate events at the premiere of The Jerusalem Syndrome were the last nail in the coffin of experimentation, which started after 1973, reached its peak during the Lebanon War, and came to a close in the mid-1980s. Both the audience and the artists were tired of protesting in vain. Visionary Hanoch Levin aptly expressed this mood in the title of his 1985 play, Everybody Wants to Live.

In July 1987 the Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv presented the glitzy musical Les Miserables after the London model. In December 1987 the Intifada broke out. A month later, while the Haifa Theater cast of The Jerusalem Syndrome stood onstage in horrified silence, the Tel Aviv audience in the Cameri was already applauding the new wave of glittering musicals and professionalism and quality productions for their own sake. Within a period of six months, July 1987 to January 1988, Israeli theater switched directions. It turned its back on the embarrassing political situation and voted for song and dance. This tendency had been felt in Israeli theater for a few years; The Jerusalem Syndrome was actually an anachronistic relic of the theater of the early 1980s. Israeli society now sunk into the escapist attitude of the first Intifada years.

Les Miserables marked a turning point in the annals of Israeli theater. The extravaganza was produced according to European standards, using highly sophisticated lighting and sound equipment, formerly unseen and unheard of in Israel. Financially and technically, such a production would have been more appropriate to a private commercial producer, but in Israel at the time, only a government-subsidized theater could handle an investment so huge. Each night, when the two sections of the set mechanically rolled toward each other from the two sides of the stage, in time with the music—and actually fit—the audience brought the house down. For the first time, audiences and critics alike applauded the technical achievement of the production in its own right, thus applauding what was termed by Michael Handelsaltz, the theater critic for the daily Haaretz, as "production value." Technical smoothness took priority over thematic content, in contrast to the traditional Hebrew theater since its infancy. Les Miserables was the first production in Israel so enthusiastically accepted for its sheer professionalism, though it bore no social message and was completely detached from the local scene. Critics who praised it in the Cameri applied the very opposite criteria from those they used when appreciating the committed here-and-now theater of the 1970s, which was far from meeting the professional standards of advanced theatrical technology.

This change of climate had constructive as well as disturbing aspects. It did mark the technical maturation of Israeli theater. Once this high professional standard was obtained neither audience nor critics were willing to tolerate amateurism. At the same time, good intentions and an important ideological message were no longer enough, and repertory theaters began to produce more and more entertainment and commercially oriented plays. Among these were musicals, which until then had posed too great a professional challenge and required too many professionally grounded actors. Les Miserables was not only the most expensive production in Israeli history, it was also one of its greatest box office successes. The public repertory theater, which tried to repeat this success in order to meet the audience's demand, was drawn into the"entertainment loop." The public theater became more and more populistic, both in its repertory choices and in staging concept, increasingly compromising artistic considerations for box office receipts. Commercial theatrical entrepreneurship shrank and almost disappeared. The subsidized professional public theater took its place.

The left wing, and with it the theater, which had been largely identified with the Peace camp, took a few years of siesta. Peace Now demonstrations became as rare as protest plays. Playwright Hillel Mittelpunkt, who made an unusual attempt to present an almost-protest play (Marni), did it in the Tzavta Club, which is fringe theater identified with the Left rather than the mainstream, and did so within the genre of a rock musical, coating the ideological message with both a musical and tempting rock hits to appeal to the young audience. This was one of the only means of feeding the indifferent audience with a portion of criticism against racism, discrimination, and military occupation.

Yosef Mundy, the eternal rebel, wrote an impressionistic drama about eccentric characters in a Tel Aviv pub (Closing the Night [1989]). Controversial Hanoch Levin repeated himself, and even he tended more and more toward light entertainment, returning to humoristic entertainment cabaret (The Gigolo from Congo [1989]). These productions were played on the Cameri's second stage. The main stage was reserved for well-made West End and Broadway hits. All the public theaters tried to balance their budgets with imported "moneymakers," detached from Israeli reality. Even the daring Akko Festival began to become commercialized. Artists working within it used it mainly as a launching pad to the establishment and not as a testing ground for audacious artistic experimentation. Young acting school graduates, recruited to established theaters straight from school, first asked how much they would be paid. This may sound perfectly reasonable and normal in any Western country, but in Israel it reflected new standards. Where theatrical work had previously been considered a privileged pioneering mission, this new opportunistic and self-centered approach seemed odd.

Many people began to find the theater boring and stopped attending it, particularly the younger audiences. Israeli drama went all the way from an ideological theater, committed to a general cause—through different phases of confusion and disillusion—to a new illusion of faked normality.

In June 1992 a political upheaval occurred: the Likud was voted out of government, and the Labor Alignment took its place. As always in Israel, the theater sensed the changes before they were expressed in the polls.

Not unexpectedly, the change was first felt in the fringe theater, rather than in the well-oiled institutional theater. At the eleventh Akko Festival in October 1990, the first prize was awarded to the play Reulim (Masked-Faced Terrorists), the first play by the young playwright Ilan Hatzor. This was the first Israeli play to deal entirely with the Intifada. The play tells the story of three Palestinian brothers in a village on the West Bank. One brother is suspected of having cooperated with Israeli authorities, another is a wanted terrorist, living as an outlaw in hiding, and the third is an innocent young boy. Three Jewish actors were cast as three Palestinians in a realistic play, not experimental in any respect, but simply well done, maintaining a high level of tension and emotional intensity throughout. The play's special power and its ideological impact were derived directly from its artistic achievement: the Jewish spectator simply could not help but relate to the three dramatic characters, on an emotional and human level. This was theater at its best, as it enabled not only actors but also the audience to empathize with the "other," whose existence they preferred to deny. But in order to achieve such a level of realistic and nonstereotypic character design, Israeli theater had to undergo all the apprenticeship processes and development it had gone through over the years. Ilan Hatzor, a twenty-six-year-old freshman at the Tel Aviv University Theater Department, had been born into a theater whose professional standards were taken for granted.

Reulim was immediately embraced by the theatrical establishment and was performed for two years on the second stage of the Cameri Theater, as part of its subscribers' program. In other words, the play and its subject were given an instant legitimation from the bourgeois Tel Aviv subscriber, who was probably fed up with the populistic menu set before it and was ripe for a change.

Following the success of Reulim, the repertory of the Cameri Theater offered to its subscribers more and more plays based on immediate topical subjects or the recent historical past. Its greatest success to the present has been Hillel Mittelpunkt's Gorodish, more a séance than a dramatic work, which presented traumatic scenes from the collective Israeli memory of the 1967 and 1973 wars. Demythologizing General Gorodish became cathartic theater, and it was soon followed by other topical plays, with much less success and power: Fleisher by Yigal Even-Or (1993), Shaindele by Rami Danon and Amnon Levy (1993), and Pollard by Motti Lerner (1995).

The 1990 Akko Festival offered some other signals of the forthcoming change. A marathon of documentary theatrical readings was held, presenting the minutes of the Givati Corp trials (some Givati soldiers were tried for inappropriate conduct against civilians in the Occupied Territories during the Intifada). The reading went on continuously throughout the festival. This was a dubious documentary theatrical manifestation but a straightforward political statement that went to the core of a national wound, in a style reminiscent of the theater of the 1970s and early 1980s. In another performance Arab actor Haled Abu-Ali, a member of the regular Akko Theater Company, devised a one-man show that dealt with his own confused identity, as a Palestinian Israeli. These shows were performed with no undue disturbance, no special demonstrations of support or dismay, no censorship. It seemed that the audience was ripe for something new.

In the winter of 1991 the Gulf War broke out. It heightened the sense of the absurd and helplessness of Israelis regarding their individual existence, within an impossible political context that was no longer under control. This may have had an effect on a certain style of humor and outlook: the world as we knew it turned upside down. In this war, unlike the previous ones, it was the civilians who were endangered; the army did not fight, and holding fire was considered a great achievement and an act of maturity. This war did not produce any victory albums or protest plays; its main artistic products were in the form of ironic graphic expressions. The Gulf War took away what was left of the myth of Israeli power and heroism. It added to the sense of disgust with empty nationalistic slogans. In the long run it may have contributed to the process that gave rise to the political upheaval of June 1992 and to the peace process.

In the twelfth Akko Festival, held in 1991, plays drawn from Jewish and Israeli history reappeared. They discussed problems of essence and identity, but not in the documentary epic style of Sobol or Lerner. Young theater people returned to difficult and painful subjects—Israeli and Jewish identity, the effect of the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict on this identity, the here and now—but from a somewhat detached point of view: stylized, careful, without committing themselves to a clear statement, and with many external gimmicks. The most important show in the 1991 Akko Festival was undoubtedly Arbeit Macht Frei in Teutland Europa, the five-and-a-half-hour show by the Akko Theater Company, directed by Dudi Ma'ayan.

During the early 1990s Israeli movement theater and modern dance joined the theater in dealing with social ideological issues. This was mostly evident in the repertoire of the Kibbutz Dance Company, which devoted an entire program to the story of a reserve soldier during the Intifada; in the work of choreographers such as Arye Burstein and Nir Ben Gall and Liat Dror, and in abstract creations of Ohad Naharin, with the Batsheva company; as well as movement-theater directors such as Ruth Ziv-Eyal and Nava Zuckerman, dealing with images of Zionistic mythology and the broken dreams. What Pina Bausch does in abstract-existential images becomes localized and politicized in Israel.

A new genre of theater, actually bordering on stand-up comedy, has become popular in the 1990s. It does what political satire does: present topical situations using zany an archistic comedy laced with black humor and nonsense jokes. Este van von Gottfried, in Ziona Halo Tishali (Ziona, Won't You Ask?), wrote a crazy parody on anti-Semitism and the cynical rhetorical use made of it for nationalistic purposes. In terms of genre and style this directly followed from The Gospel According to Christine, a play he created for the 1990 Akko Festival, which stingingly attacked the matters of compulsory orthodox tyranny and its influence on the Israeli identity. In his 1991 play he plants a fictional Third Temple Israel in Uruguay. Here the Jews nostalgically reminisce about how "every day, in civic studies, we'd go out and kill a Palestinian," missing the times they were persecuted victims, and the persecutions added flavor to their lives and helped them forge their Jewish identity. In The Last Game of Ping-Pong, by young playwrights Tal Friedman and Moshe Frester (who held a long-running success in student clubs in Tel Aviv, two years previously, with their nonsense play The Tales of Moshe in the Big City), one can see a form of ironic nostalgia for the Israel of the 1970s, actually a parody of nostalgia for the Palmach generation dream. What blunted the sting of these satires was their tendency toward light entertainment, sometimes quite vulgar, and their lack of commitment to an alternative system of values.²⁰

These new "relevant" plays were nonrealistic. They applied a variety of theatrical means of expression, with a special stress on the visual aspect, on design and movement. For instance, in Dancing Tonight, a dance and movement theater and a poetic eulogy by Sinai Peter, directed by Yigal Ezrati and choreographer Gabi Eldor, echoes of the Intifada join the Gulf War. This play portrays, in movement and music, the history of a Yaffo coffeehouse, over eight stops along the history of Israel between 1919 and 1991, beginning with the onset of the British mandate to the Gulf War. The years dance by, each period in its own dance. As the play continues, its message becomes more political and clearer. There is no need for words in order to understand the significance of the time bomb that explodes at the end.

One of the strongest scenes in the play is the one showing the night of the declaration of the Jewish state, in 1948. Everyone is excitedly huddled around the radio set, and only the Arab and his daughter, when they realize what is happening, bow their heads, and with their bundles on their shoulders make their way into exile. At the end a Schwarzkopf-like U.S. general in uniform stands on the bar, in a macho stance of the new master. They all dance for him like remote-controlled mechanical puppets who have lost their volition. The cycle is complete.

A few months before the June 1992 elections, a wave of stand-up comedy swept over the fringe theaters of Tel Aviv, appealing mainly to younger audiences. Stand-up had long since become an accepted form of entertainment for young audiences, thus taking the place once held by satire, which had all but disappeared. Young stand-up artists generally abstained from making direct political statements about the situation in Israel and preferred to deal with personal situations, drawn from everyday life. One month before the elections, in the small Tzavta-2 fringe club, the "How It Really Works" trio presented a parody of two yuppies who are sick and tired of the Likud regime and decide to liquidate Prime Minister Shamir. They open their diaries and go over them, day by day, but are unable to find the time to realize this plan—one's daughter has a dance class, another simply cannot give up an appointment with a shrink—until the year is over and the elections have come and gone. "This sort of humor does not overturn a government," I wrote at the time, after an investigation into the stand-up scene of Tel Aviv. Indeed, but it may be a small step toward normalcy, which would finally lead to some peace. Then it would finally be possible to spend an afternoon at the shrink's with a clear conscience, without having to feel guilty for not sacrificing one's individuality for the collective needs, and quietly to snore in front of a television showing soap commercials instead of air raid announcements.

In November 1991 I published an article in Politica, referring to the new trends apparent in the Israeli atmosphere, as expressed in the 1991 Akko Festival. I wrote then:

If my intuition is correct, and the 91 Akko Festival reflects the beginning of a change of attitude towards reality, maybe something is about to change in Israeli reality itself. The Israeli theater has been known for an almost frightening prophetic power and if it has risen from its pleasantly drowsy illusion of normality, maybe our fossilized social and political establishment is finally about to wake up, as well. Let me remind you: If the theater is the mirror of society, the Akko Festival is the seismograph of Israeli theater.²¹

The 1991 Akko Fringe Festival was probably the last time for some years that Israeli theater preceded reality; in the 1992 Festival the two merged. In June 1992 elections were held in Israel. The fifteen-year-old Likud regime was replaced by a new labor government headed by Yitzchak Rabin, and Israel entered a new era—the era of the peacemaking process. The 1992 Akko Festival held in October already reflected the ripeness of Israeli society for the changes that were taking place in secretive diplomatic channels. For the first time in the thirteen-year history of the festival, one could sense the crumbling of the unseen barrier that had stood between the local Arab population of this old Arab city and the young and exuberant Jewish Israeli theater-goers who attended the Festival. Also for the first time some plays were performed in Arabic by Arab actors, which attracted Arab audiences. Um Rubabika, a one-woman play performed by Bushra Qaraman, was written by the famous Palestinian author Emil Habibi, who later that year was awarded the Israel Prize for Literature, the first Israeli Arab to receive the distinguished medal that the state reserves for its best talents in all fields. Such an award could never have happened in the previous administration.

The female presence was also strongly felt in 1992, linked to a new, more liberal approach to minorities in general (see my essay on "The Liberated Woman on the Israeli Stage," in this volume). Another major theme in the Festival was, not surprisingly, Jewish-Palestinian coexistence. One of the most interesting plays—which also won a special prize—was The Coexistence Bus by Pablo Salzmann and the Akko Theater Center, which took place in an actual bus as it traveled along a guided "tour" of Arab villages in the Lower Galilee, overseen by Jewish and Palestinian actors, some of whom were authentic inhabitants of the villages visited. Hagit Yaari's play Abir represented the most successful merger between the two themes: women's emancipation and Palestinian identity. Five Jewish actors play five Palestinian women during the Intifada, struggling for both female and national independence.

If theater and reality merged in 1992, at the 1993 Akko Festival reality outstripped theater. The Festival, held a month after the unforgettable handshake on the White House lawn, caught Akko with its pants down. In light of the Oslo Agreement most plays presented that year seemed anachronistic or irrelevant. The most outdated productions were the ones that protested against Israeli occupation and portrayed images of corrupted Israeli soldiers, themes that had been regarded as poignant and daring only a few months earlier. Political events had occurred so fast that what had seemed like science fiction the day before—Israelis and Palestinians signing a peace agreement—had become history, leaving Israeli theater for once lagging behind the reality of the times.

One example of a play that had become instantly outdated was Sinai Peter's adaptation of Poets Will Not Write Poems, based on a book by Roli Rosen and llana Hammerman documenting testimonies of the moral dissolution of IDF reserve soldiers on duty during the Intifada. Seen even two months earlier, that very play would have been moving: seen two years later it could have provided a historical reminder of what had been and should not be forgotten. In autumn 1993 the play seemed an aesthetic and intellectual regurgitation of the already known.

In general the 1993 Akko Festival revealed the danger of a too-close documentary style. In the past it had fostered plays about self-assessment of the Israeli situation during the Intifada but had not offered a "futuristic" depiction of what the next step might be: not more of the same, as in the above plays, but perhaps a possibility of dialogue between two peace partners in an actual exchange. Instead there were a growing number of works on personal relations and problems of the individual self, perhaps a reaction to the years when the political situation was the primary topic.

The 1994 Akko Festival presented a theater in a state of embarrassment, still not able to catch up with the changing world around it. Plays dealt more than before with down-to-earth topics that now did not stand for a fake normality but represented a legitimate orientation of a younger and perhaps healthier generation than Mittelpunkt's Temporary Separation couple who were unable to have a juicy family fight without dragging the Palestinian problem into the matrimonial bed. Topics such as feminism (Heidi, Daughter of a Bitch by Ayelet Ron) and ecology were presented; experiments in form and language for their own sake were staged (Hanoch, an environmental event, and the Jerusalem Zik group performance of fire and water); and materials were taken either from famous Israeli authors (Agnon, A. B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman) or from international writers (Gabriel García Márquez, Jean Genet, or Eugene Ionesco). The Palestinian El-Hakawati theater, which resumed work in East Jerusalem and made its comeback in the 1994 Festival (after having spent most of the Intifada in Europe), presented a confused play about an Intifada hero who comes back home to Jericho from an Israeli prison and does not find his place in the new reality of "autonomy."

In a way, what happened to Israeli theater at Akko in 1994 was similar to the situation in the Russian theater right after Perestroika when there was no longer censorship that could be used to justify symbolic revolt and subversive theatrical language. Despite the poetically euphoric words with which the mayor of Akko greeted the crowds who attended, the general euphoria that accompanied the first months after the basic peace agreement had started fading away. Both Israelis and Palestinians realized that peace was going to be a long, tiresome, and sometimes painful process, and the theater had no way to cope with such undramatic, unexciting, and slowpaced material that it found in the political interim reality. So theater chose to turn its back on politics and mind its own business. Israeli theater, which had been for more than two decades a restless ideological battlefield, relaxed at last and prepared itself for a less exciting and perhaps more ordinary "new" normality, where—like everywhere else—people die naturally of strokes and not of wars.

¹ The play premiered in 1985 in Habima, directed by the playwright, with Natan Datner and Yona Elian in the leading roles. Published by Or-Am, Tel Aviv 1985 (Hebrew).

² See S. Avigal and S. Weitz, "Cultural and Ideological Variables in Audience Response: The Case of The Trojan Women," Assaph 3 (1986): 7-42.

³ For a general historical introduction to the Israeli theater see "Israel," by H. Nagid, in World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theater (London: Routledge, 1994).

⁴ Ever since the British mandate over Israel, censorship of plays and movies has been enforced due to an old colonial regulation. The censorship committee, officially known as "the council for critique of films and plays" has often served to block the freedom of expression and as an ideological and political means to silence unwanted ideas, but very few plays were actually censored in their entirety. After a long struggle against censorship, the council was temporarily disbanded for two years and finally canceled in 1991. The fight against film censorship still continues. A security-based censorship is held separately and does not deal with the dramatic stage.

During the Likud administration, especially in 1980-85, the censorship board had been exceptionally active and often made the headlines. In 1985 it banned poet Yitzchak Laor's play Ephraim Returns to the Army, which caricatured the occupation, entirely, under the pre-text that the play offends the IDF and distorts reality. The prolonged struggle of the playwright, who appealed to the highest court, and the trial that followed Levin's The Patriot (presented in Neve Tzedek in the midst of the Lebanon War) were the last two blows to the censorship and became the legal precedents that led to its annulment. The censorship committee initially vetoed Levin's play and later agreed to a compromise: the offending passages would be cut. The actors found a way to circumvent this intervention and read the forbidden passages to the audience, with the lights on. For this act they were tried and convicted.

⁵ See A. B. Yehoshua's collection of essays In Favor of Normality (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1980) (Hebrew).

⁶ See Chaim Shoham, Challenge and Reality in Israeli Drama (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University, 1975), 9-24 (Hebrew); Gideon Ofrat, Israeli Drama (Jerusalem: Tcherikover and Hebrew University, 1975), 26-83 (Hebrew). See also Gideon Ofrat, Earth, Man, Blood—The Myth of the Pioneer and the Ritual of Earth in Eretz-Israel Settlement Drama (Tel Aviv: Tcherikover, 1980) (Hebrew). All other references will appear in the text.

⁷ See David Alexander, The Jester and the King: Political Satire in Israel, 1948-1984 (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1985) (Hebrew).

⁸ Also see S. Avigal, "Moroccan Dybbuk?" Jerusalem Quarterly 21 (Fall 1981): 48-54.

⁹ In spring 1994 the Khan theater of Jerusalem presented Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet with Jewish and Arab actors, as an analogy of the Jewish-Palestinian problem. The theme of a woman struggling for status and recognition within the family and the society is first legitimized in the Jewish-Arabic political context in Sobol's Palestinian Woman and, only ten year later, in a realistic play that deals with an Israeli woman as a private case, in Miriam Kainy's The End of the Dream Season (see my essay on "Liberated Women in Israeli Theater" and my interview with Kainy, in this volume).

¹⁰ See S. Avigal, "Hanoch Levin, Enfant Terrible of the Israeli Theater," Ariel 63 (1986): 38-57. See also M. Handelsaltz, "The Game of Humiliation in Hanoch Levin's Theater," Theatron 75-76: 28-30.

. . . . .

¹¹ See S. Avigal, "Returning to History", Politica 41 (November 1991): 57-58.

¹² A detailed repertoire of Habima's productions of the period may be found in Habima: The First Seventy Years, ed. Shlomo Shva (Tel Aviv: Keter and the Friends of Habima, 1987) (Hebrew), as well as in Emanuel Levi's The National Theater of Habima (Tel Aviv: Eked, 1981) (Hebrew). A similar list may be found for the Cameri in Forty Years of the Cameri Theater (Tel Aviv: Cameri, 1984) (Hebrew). Details on the repertoire of other theaters may be found in the archives of individual Israeli theaters and the Israeli Documentation Center for the Performing Arts, Tel Aviv University.

¹³ In 1992 Milo again directed this historical production at the Haifa Theater, with Topol and a young company. For more material on the period of Haifa Theater in the 1960s, see Ha Theatron, a theater periodical that was published by the theater during its early years.

¹⁴ See Ben-Ami Feingold, "Pirandello and Israeli Drama," Bamah (1991): 49-61. See also references to Amos Kenan in Martin Esslin, The Theater of the Absurd (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), 190-91. In later editions of this book Kenan was omitted.

¹⁵ Interesting details of the affair, including spectators' letters, may be found in David Alexander's book The Jester and the King.

¹⁶ See Freddie Rokem, "Archetypical Patterns in Israeli Drama," Theatre Research International 13, 2 (1988): 122-31, which deals with the changes to the myth of sacrificing the sons as reflecting the changing attitude toward the values of Zionism in plays such as An-Ski's The Dyybuk; Shamir's He Walked in the Fields; and Hanoch Levin's Shitz

¹⁷ See Avigal, "Hanoch Levin."

¹⁸ See S. Avigal, "Judaism vs. Zionism, on Sobol's Soul of a Jew," Spectrum (October 1984): 9-32.

¹⁹ See S. Avigal, "The Myth of Suicide," Spectrum (December 1985): 22-23.

²⁰ See S. Avigal on stand-up comedy and satire (Hadashot, 24 April 1992) (Hebrew).

²¹ See Politica 41: 57-58 (Hebrew).