From the Artistic Director

Welcome to the warning bell; the wake up call; our Israeli writer’s fever dream and clear-eyed chronicle of what might happen if peace were to break out and everything else were to go wrong in his Holy Land; a land he fears he is losing to extremists. The family members we meet in Pangs of the Messiah hardly feel like over-heated zealots and, to our author’s credit, they are not caricatures. They are our brothers and sisters. They love the land of Israel no less (and no more) than many others, and they’ve fought for that land just as our playwright has; just as our director has; just as our three female Israeli designers have. This unique collaboration between the artists of Theater J and the Israeli creative team assembled here—with generous support from the Embassy of Israel—represents a unified cry to the heavens, and to those sitting in theater seats, that we do everything in our power to ensure that the events of this powerful play not come to pass.

Israel is a land built by pioneers and that pioneering spirit, evinced earlier in the century by Labor Zionists, is still alive and pulsating in the settlement movement that dwells on the West Bank and, as of 22 months ago, no longer in Gaza. Our company has been moved by the trauma of displacement as we’ve watched any number of new documentaries about the forced evacuation of settlers from their homes by the Israeli Defense Force in the summer of 2005. That drama of disengagement was prefigured by our playwright when he first wrote Pangs of the Messiah 22 years ago. Commissioned by the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv, Motti Lerner and members of the original cast went to live with the Gush Emunim settlers of Ophra for three months. And then they fashioned a play that contemplated what might happen if Israel were to sign a peace treaty with its Jordanian neighbor. In an early draft of his 1986 script, the playwright imagined that the Prime Minister might be assassinated, but the cast prevailed on the playwright to change that ending for fear that it would seem far-fetched. Alas, history has taught us otherwise. We know that the unutterable can happen. 

A year and a half ago, Motti Lerner was in our area for the American premiere of his play The Murder of Isaac at Baltimore’s Centerstage, a play for which we commissioned the English language translation in 2000 and workshopped twice at Theater J. On a day off from rehearsals for Isaac, Motti came to our JCC library for a reading of the 1986 version of Pangs and we were struck by how prescient it was. Though it had a very different ending and the politics of the play did feel 22 years old, Shmuel’s tragedy seared our consciousness. We charged Motti with the challenge of updating his play—rethinking it from top to bottom—as we contemplated moving it forward in time. Motti has set this brand new version in the year 2012 and has imagined a peace accord fashioned after the 2000 Taba Agreement negotiated during the last days of the Clinton administration. A peace treaty like this really could happen, even as Israel continues to search for a partner with which to negotiate. That partner could emerge tomorrow. And a great majority of Israelis stand ready to trade land for peace. But there remain many who are morally committed to scuttling any peace accord. Hence, a recipe for civil strife and, if we’re not careful, much worse. 

Motti Lerner has returned to material that burns with urgency. A country killed its own Prime Minister more than a decade ago. The movement that encouraged that assassin has still not been purged of its most radical elements. The Murder of Isaac was a play of high style that posed a metaphor to explain a country’s sickness; Israel was a nation of war veterans incarcerated in a V.A. hospital, everyone suffering from post-traumatic stress from one bombing or another. A nation so traumatized by war couldn’t help but go to war with itself. In this brand new version of Pangs of the Messiah, our playwright chisels out a well-made tragedy that hues to the logic of realism but is informed by a prophet’s dread. We welcome the soul-searching that we hope this play occasions. And we invite you to continue the dialogue with us as we present our “Voices From a Changing Middle East” Festival July 19–29.    

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