January 2008
Satellite Theater
By Shamrock McShane

Finger on the Pulse

"What happens," asks Orna Akad, fluent in Hebrew, English, and Arabic, "when a playwright protests in her own country against the authorities? Now, what if that country is not a democracy? How do plays of ideas connect with an audience in an Arab world, amid regimes and dictatorships?"

The playwright then sets out to explore the differences in contemporary theater between western and oriental aesthetics, particularly in Egypt and Syria. Can Arabic theater, specifically Palestinian, exist in democratic Israel, and can that theater protest politically against oppression?

During the Cold War, a liberal admirer asked the great Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht if he would consider joining a seemingly ameliorative confederation of artists called the Theater of All Nations.

"Thatıs too many," Brecht retorted.

Orna Akad, the prize–winning and provocative Israeli playwright, moved to Gainesville last spring when her husband got an offer to complete his post doc in the Plant Pathology department of UF as a virologist.

"As for me," the playwright explains modestly, "I took some time off after an extremely busy year in Israel, directing my play in the Arabic Theatre and also working on my project in Ireland."

It was in Belfast that a collaboration among Queen's University, Haifa University and the Al Midan Theatre brought together theatre artists from Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine. They focused on two incidents of state violence thirty years apart, 'Bloody Sunday' in Derry/Londonderry in 1972 and 'Black October' in 2000 in Israel/Palestine. Both resulted in the deaths of civilians as a direct result of state violence during large-scale political protests.

In Norman Mailer's novel The Gospel According to the Son, the devil informs Jesus with tempting logic: "Where there is truth there will never be peace, and where there is peace there will never be truth."

That aptly sums up the land, where that dialogue might have taken place, now contested by Israelis and Palestinians, each in possession of their truths. A more war–torn land there has never been, and the jagged truths of its hostilities stare us plainly in the face across the seas.

Sole Purpose, a professional theatre company in Derry, Northern Ireland which uses the discourse of theatre and imagination to investigate and illuminate social and public issues, will stage Akadıs Clouds on Mountain Road in 2008. The play premiered a year ago when it was performed in both Arabic and Hebrew at the Al Midan Theater, Haifa, Israel.

Akad's work is starkly contemporary. While plays always happen in the present tense, Akad's work seems somehow more directly to place its finger on our world's pulse.

In Clouds, two women search for meaning in what the modern world has made of the Holy Land. Inshira tells Fadwa: "You could say I am an expert at sorting out rubble."

Fadwa has written a poem called "Scenes of the Zionist Occupation".

"They've slain all the goodness in me," the voice of the poem proclaims.

Innocence is the first casualty. Cynicism follows naturally.

"Change out of my school uniform? What for — to look nice for the tanks?"

"My mother," Fadwa recalls, "was the first of her generation to remove her veil — two years after the Palestinian disaster. From then on she began to breathe the spirit of freedom."

Inshira's fury boils over. "Life here leaves us no hope. They have lit the fuse of hatred. Prison and torture have turned me into a different Inshira. I feel the revolution bubbling endlessly inside me like lava. I often sense this strong wish to kill someone."

But in the end, "It is only a poem."

Here is the way history works its way through the generations. "Born under the Turks, raised under the British, hatched you under the Jews. I havenıt yet decided who was the worst."

History presents this riddle to those who know its darkest secrets.

"I must commit myself to the Jewish people. One simply cannot ignore the suffering they have known."

"So why do they treat us the same way?"

When war rages, one conclusion is inescapable.

"It is a violation of any religion."

The Palestinian cause is not anti–Semitic. For one thing, the Palestinians are Semitic, which is a language distinction, not a racial one. More than that however is the simple statement Akad's play makes from the heart.

"I donıt hate you as Jews, I hate you as occupiers."

Euripides was brave enough to challenge his Greek brethren with his tragedy The Trojan Women, to view war from the point of view of the vanquished. It is astonishing to learn then what a Palestinian can feel.

"Pity — for the most intelligent people on earth. Look what has become of them."

There is never going to be a solution anywhere in the world, let alone in Israel, along sectarian lines because logic ceases to operate there.

That the Jews are a chosen people is undeniable, the question being by whom? In the end, whether it is God or themselves hardly matters, because their being chosen remains regardless.

Say what you like. The Israelis are intractable. But they are not impervious to logic, bless Spinoza.

And thank God for that. Who wants to live in a world without its most intelligent people?

Orna Akad hopes to pursue her playwriting career actively in Gainesville. Our theatrical community has become incalculably richer.