All About Jewish Theatre - Experiencing Theatre: Introduction to Drama and the Theatre

Gad Kaynar is Associate Professor at the Theatre Department, Tel Aviv University. Head of the directing, writing and dramaturgy section, and director of the University Theatre. Author of numerous articles on Jewish, Israeli, German and Scandinavian theatre, dramaturgy, performance analysis, theatrical rhetoric and reception theory. His book The Reality Convention in Hebrew Theatre is due to appear in 2006. Edited Revolution and Institutionalization in the Theatre (Assaph 15, 2000), and Bertolt Brecht: Performance and Philosophy (Tel Aviv University: Assaph Book Series, 2005). For the last 25 years he has been the dramaturg of Habimah, Israel’s National Theatre, The Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv, and The Jerusalem Khan Theatre, as well as artistic director of several monodrama festivals. Kaynar is the Secretary of the Israeli branch of the ITI (International Theatre Institute). He is also a drama translator, actor and director. e-mail : gkenar@post.tau.ac.il Web : http://www2.tau.ac.il/person/art/researcher.asp?id=abkdlbjcg

I would like to congratulate the authors of the book, Zmira Heizner and Karin Heskia, their advisory team and the Open University on the occasion of the publication of their book Experiencing Theatre: Introduction to Drama and the Theatre. This is the first reference book in Hebrew that does not attempt to legitimize dealing in this inferior theory, the theory of theatre, by addressing form and meaning aspects of drama and theatre in order to append the work to the respectable spheres of the theory of literature, psychology, historiography or sociology.

The book declares publicly and without blushing that it deals in that elusive and intangible experience - and highly non-theoretical and non-academic about which rivers of ink have already flowed, yet about which ultimately, in the words of the Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin, “I cannot say a thing” - the theatrical experience. On the same note I would like to applaud the actors of Israel that as we speak are performing on stages in the bombarded Northern part of Israel and the threatened center of the country and convening those who for weeks have been experiencing a genuinely morbid reality into the protected and fireproof experiential space of fictional fear and pity, the theatrical experience.

How is this related? This is one of the unique features of this amazing book, whose entering into the covenant of Thespis we are celebrating here. In the prologue of the book the authors say: “we chose to examine the experience and the medium through the component of the text, since the drama exists and stands… compared to a theatre piece that is a one-time and exhaustible work such that no two theatrical performances are identical even in the same production itself. Every theatrical performance is dependent on numerous variables – theatrical and extra-theatrical – including the space in which the performance takes place, the actors’ mood, the audience, the public atmosphere pulsating in nearby streets”. That having been said however, the authors do not fully stand by their word, and deal not only in drama, but also provide meticulous descriptions characteristic of women of the theatre par excellence with an academic background in aspects of production processes and depictions of drama on which they focus. And you marvel at how the authors and their advisors succeed in distinguishing so accurately between the permanent and fixed and the variables that engender the theatrical experience.

After all, what is the theatrical experience of the spectator of a comedy in a Tel Aviv theatre whose mood, one of the factors the authors discuss, is not at its best, to say the least, in light of the events, or what is the experience of an actor portraying a retired pilot in the comedy “House Husband” at the Tel Aviv Cameri Theatre who knows, that the audience knows, that the real people that he is playing are at the moment bombing Lebanon, and that is far from funny, or what is the state of mind of the actors in the environmental play “Hamlet” whose relatives in the North and the South of Israel are playing an entirely different environmental play in another theatre – the theatre of the immense arena of war, a theatre in which the work may in fact be one-time, destructive and perishable, with Katyusha as the devastating Russian leading lady, and that may produce a meeting between people and the spirit of their fathers without an intermediary?… And what about that which the authors define as “the atmosphere pulsating in nearby streets”, in other words, here, where at any minute people may say after we are gone: a sprig [in Hebrew zalzal, similar in sound to the word for a missile known as Zilzal) fell on the hall, and we shall fall silent? [a play on words from a poem by Bialik]. The theatrical experience is so encompassing, always so relevant and immediate, every stage is the entire world, and this book, that takes into account in its analyses such a wealth of theatrical and extra-theatrical aspects that so few reference and textbooks in the world, not only in Israel, address - succeeds in reflecting this full gamut of experiential factors.

And this book has an additional virtue – it dares, and once again almost for the first time in Hebrew, not only to reject the notion of drama as a branch of literature as we were taught by our forefathers Aristotle, Horatious and Boileau, or even as just a score for the play, viewing it in effect as an actual book to be used for directing and for guiding the actors. And it achieves this with the depth and sensitivity of intellectuals acting in the service of the theatre, based on Lars Seeberg’s definition of the dramaturg, or perhaps the other way round, women of the theatre that serve an intellectual goal. And this should not be undervalued. Even a new book published in 2006 by a scholar from York by the name of Mary Luckhurst about dramaturgy shows a cartoon from the New Yorker (1999) in which an usher is seen coming out in front of the curtain before the start of the play and asking the audience: ‘is there a spin doctor in the house?’, as well as another version of the same cartoon with the usher asking: ‘is there a literature doctor in the house?’.

Which comes to shows us that even today, more than one hundred years after a bearded Vienniese playwright by the name of Theodore Herzl (1860-1904) created a phantasmagoric utopia by the name of “The Jewish State” that turned into a farcical horror melodrama, and Max Herman from the Friedrich-Wilhelm-University in Berlin and Hugo Dinger in Jena laid the foundations for the science of theatre, my colleagues and I must still apologize for our profession, justify it, and substantiate what a doctor or a professor of theatre actually do? Thus, I am often asked whether we approve sick days for actors that broke a leg after we wished them at the premier to ‘go break a leg’… And those that doubt the inferior reputation of the theory of theatre, should not only ask the Jewish mother that initially forbid her daughter from marrying an actor because he dealt in “luftgescheften” (air business in German), there was no livelihood to be had and it was not a real profession, and later went to see the actor in the play, came back and gave her daughter her blessing to marry the man because, as she said, “he is not an actor” - they should also ask the management of Tel Aviv University, whether they view theatre as an academic discipline, in other words as something serious. Accordingly, those of us in academia dealing in theatre find ourselves scorned on two counts: first in the eyes of the average theatre person, especially the Israeli one, who is certain that we are insipid and full of balderdash and that our observations have nothing to do with the real work that takes place on the stage; and second in the eyes of arrogant academics that believe that we are not to be taken seriously.

And because of this we built protective walls in the form of theories and concepts that are in most cases incomprehensible to the run of the mill actor, for example semiotics and rhetoric, metonymy and proxemics, stichometry and soliloquy, thus heightening the inaccessibility of the theory that deals in the most communicative art and increasing the difficulty to bridge the gap between the academic endeavor of theatre and the theatre person, who, as the well known song of Arik Einstein goes “did not even know that he was like that”. It is to the credit of this book that it not only chronicles the fascinating historiosophic plot of the play called “theatre” without any shortcuts, using the breathtaking technique of story theatre, but also tells the story in comprehensible language. The book clarifies to students, actors, directors, designers, and even to lecturers on theatre that already forgot what they learned in their undergraduate studies, using simple and clear language, all these obscure terms, demonstrates them with clear examples that do a marvelous job of coupling the history of the theatre with an analysis of drama and theatre, according them an existential logic that is vital not only in seminar rooms but also in rehearsal halls.

Owing to the wonderful and accurate plastic descriptions in the book Experiencing Theatre, I found myself once again experiencing wonderful moments that I experienced in Israeli theatre and, furthermore I found the book to be a loyal friend building a wide hanamichi bridge between the study hall and the theatre hall - turning the learning experience into a theatrical experience and the theatrical experience into a learning experience. Hence I would like to thank the authors as well as the prompters that threw them the text for this book that is an extremely well written drama, with an open ending, and to hope for many open endings in many editions, because this funeral of the theatrical experience that has been eulogized for hundreds of years must not come to an end.

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