FULL PRESS PAGE FOR SEVEN JEWISH CHILDREN
WASHINGTON POST
"'Seven' Revels In Not Only Acting, but Interacting"
By Peter MarksWashington Post Staff WriterFriday, March 27, 2009
The post-show "talkback" has become a staple of theater around these parts, a way for serious-minded companies to offer a bit of extra value -- and explanation for their work -- to audiences. Now, however, the after-performance discussion has been elevated to something on the order of performance art, courtesy of the sensitive and savvy folks who run Theater J.
The troupe, based at the D.C. Jewish Community Center, decided to make an interactive evening out of the controversy surrounding Caryl Churchill's inflammatory new eight-minute play, "Seven Jewish Children." It would have been easy for Theater J's artistic director, Ari Roth, to have turned the reflection on this piece of agitprop -- which in the aftermath of the Gaza invasion heaps outrage on Israelis' purported moral blindness -- into a posturing focus-group gab-a-thon.
Instead, what transpired Wednesday night in the intimate Aaron and Cecile Goldman Theater amounted to a watershed in the evolution of immediate dialogue between a political play and its audience. The brevity of the piece certainly helped distill to vivid sound bites the attendees' instantaneous reactions. But the way Roth constructed the event, bringing together actors, theatergoers, experts and even, via e-mail, Churchill herself, conferred on it some of the formalized gravity of a symposium and the messy urgency of an emergency meeting.
It was, for this professional spectator, fascinating.
It's not standard form to review the audience. (We're not conditioned to take the measure of art by a show of hands.) On this evening, though, a failure to assess the impact of the engaged, thoughtful crowd -- an audience of young and old, Jews and Gentiles alike -- would be a disservice to the production. Listening to the sharp give-and-take became as integral to the experience, in fact, as listening to the eight fine actors seated around a table, reading from Churchill's script and the scripts of two other playwrights. The additional dramatists -- Robbie Gringras, an Israeli, and the American Deb Margolin -- wrote playlets critical of Churchill's that mimic hers in structure and style.
Theater J sponsored the staged reading in conjunction with Forum Theatre, a smaller company based at the H Street Playhouse in Northeast Washington that has previously mounted Churchill's work. A second reading was held last night by Theater J; tonight, tomorrow and Sunday, the venue changes to H Street, where Forum and its artistic director, Michael Dove, will take over the readings and after-show debate (admission to those performances is free).
The atmosphere will no doubt be altered each time this exercise occurs, and the formula might be difficult to replicate, depending on who leads the talk and who shows up to participate. Not to minimize their cause, but the presence Thursday night outside the Jewish Community Center of a group of demonstrators protesting the reading -- some of them holding placards calling for Roth's ouster -- contributed to the theatrical electricity. During the discussion, an audience member remarked on this added dimension, saying that the little hubbub on the street made her attendance feel "unsafe."
"Seven Jewish Children" (subtitled "A Play for Gaza") is briefer than your average infomercial and 100 times more provocative. Make no mistake, though, it is a commercial, an effort to compress to black-and-white a question of conscience of infinite complexity. Divided into seven chapters, the playlet is structured as a series of staccato demands of one Jewish adult to another, about how to shield from, or explain to, an unseen child the harsh realities of their world.
Although the circumstances are slightly opaque -- this is Churchill, after all -- each chapter appears to refer to a period of modern Jewish history, starting with a section about the persecution of Jews in Europe in the 19th century. It progresses to the Holocaust and ultimately to contemporary Israel, where the tone changes, and the adults' declarations are evoked as more hostile, inhumane. As someone put it Wednesday night, the playlet takes the position that the persecuted have become the persecutors.
Because Churchill is such a compelling dramatist -- she's the author of, among other plays, "Top Girls," "Cloud Nine," "A Number" and "Far Away" -- the presentation is literarily seductive. Ultimately, though, it's so reductive that it can be consigned to the category of beautifully crafted cheap shot, an effort to cast a multifaceted conflict as intractably one-sided.
The range of responses articulated Wednesday night, however, revealed that some were unmoved and others were deeply affected. Roth himself grappled with his own reactions in an opening speech that lasted roughly twice the length of Churchill's play. Skillfully, he took on the job of drawing out audience response, a task he repeated after the readings of Gringas's "One Israeli Child" and "The Eighth Jewish Child," and Margolin's "Seven Palestinian Children."
One of the most intriguing interludes occurred after Roth invited to sit with him on the stage Amitai Etzioni, the German-born sociologist, a professor at George Washington University, who was taken to Palestine in the 1930s to escape the Nazis. After the reading, Etzioni said he was upset that the audience didn't react angrily after an actor -- presumably speaking as an Israeli -- spoke the line, "We deliberately killed babies."
Immediately, a member of the cast jumped forward to point out that there was no such declaration in the play; the line was actually "Tell her we killed the babies by mistake." (Which, actually, among various possibilities could still be interpreted as the adult advising the child of a lie.) Still, an audience member found in Etzioni's reaction an indication of a Rorschach quality of the piece.
"The professor," he declared, "wanted a stronger reaction to a line that wasn't in the play!"
And so it went. Roth gave his audience a chance to digest and puzzle out en masse, in an entirely exhilarating way. Which on the whole seems grounds not for dismissal, but a raise.
'Jewish Children' Comes to D.C. Already Upstaged by Controversy
Caryl Churchill's "Seven" has been criticized as anti-Semitic. By Monica HesseWashington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, March 17, 2009; Page C01
The four-day run of a 10-minute play later this month in Washington has raised a very large philosophical question: Where does the art stop and the politics begin?
The play in question is "Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza," an abstract, free-form work by British playwright Caryl Churchill. In it, seven unnamed characters discuss how to teach their children about complex events in Jewish history, from the Holocaust to the creation of Israel to the recent violence in Gaza.
As a work of art, "Seven Jewish Children" is "deftly constructed, evocative, elusive and provocative," says Ari Roth. He is the artistic director of the Jewish Community Center's Theater J in Northwest Washington, where staged readings of the play will be offered on March 26 and 28. (Collaborator Forum Theatre in Northeast Washington will house the play on March 27 and 29, as Theater J does not have Friday performances and Forum has put on Churchill's works before. )
Some have argued that the play is also something insidious. Consider these lines of dialogue: "Tell her they live in tents. Tell her this wasn't their home." And then, "Tell her they don't understand anything except violence." And then, "Tell her they're filth." And finally, the jarringly brutal, "Tell her I wouldn't care if we wiped them out."
Churchill, who opposed Israel's Gaza offensive, waived her licensing fee for the production, asking instead that theaters collect donations for the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians. (Theater J, which is prohibited from fundraising for outside groups, will offer the play for free. Forum will request donations.)
When the play premiered in London this year, some theater critics called the work anti-Semitic. The Spectator labeled the play "an open incitement to hatred" and a "ten-minute blood-libel."
In British media, Churchill has denied charges of anti-Semitism; Roth wonders whether an American audience will have a reaction so vehemently negative. "The idea is to give the play a hearing, to approach it in the spirit of inquiry," Roth says. "We're not going to take a right-wing British journalist's word that it's blood-libel."
Instead, the two Washington theaters, both of which frequently hold issue-based discussion groups, will present the play as an opportunity for dialogue, holding forums after each performance. Theater J will also follow "Seven Jewish Children" by debuting a response play, "Seven Palestinian Children," which New Jersey playwright Deb Margolin wrote after reading Churchill's work.
Although Margolin's play also features some controversial language -- "Tell him: When old men die, it is expected; when young men die, it is sacred" -- she argues that her play comes from a humanitarian perspective. "What I want to speak to is that moment when one human being is incapable of seeing the humanity in another," Margolin says. She is Jewish and says distress over some of Churchill's generalizations about the Jewish community caused Margolin to write her own play.
In recent weeks, in fact, responses to "Seven Jewish Children" have almost become their own genre. In addition to "Seven Palestinian Children," there is Robbie Gringas's "The Eighth Child" ("Tell her that it's more complicated than that") and Iris Bahr's "Seven English Children" ("Tell her her new medical treatment was developed in Israel").
"My druthers would be to critique this play dramaturgically, not politically," Roth say. But separating art from politics in a work as fraught as "Seven Jewish Children" might be a nearly impossible task, even for sophisticated theatergoers. The play brings up issues that prompt immediate emotional responses, however you perceive Churchill's intent.
Roth believes that there are many rational ways to interpret "Seven Jewish Children." It's a quick play, he says, "that accomplishes an awful lot."
JERUSALEM POST
"'Seven Jewish Children' provokes US debate - among Jews"Mar 29, 2009 0:31 | Updated Mar 29, 2009 7:49 By ALLISON HOFFMAN, JPOST CORRESPONDENT, NEW YORK The first audience member who spoke following a reading of Caryl Churchill's controversial play Seven Jewish Children at the New York Theatre Workshop on Thursday said its cadences reminded him of a heartbeat. "Tell her, don't tell her, systolic, diastolic," the man told the packed house, repeating the dominant trope of the play, which follows seven sets of adults from the time of the Holocaust to the present day arguing over how to explain harsh truths to a never-seen child. From its first staging last month at London's Royal Court Theatre, the 10-minute-long work - subtitled "A Play for Gaza" and written in response to Operation Cast Lead - has drawn charges of anti-Semitism, with critics fixing particularly on lines in which a Jewish, and presumably Israeli, character says she feels no remorse about the Palestinian dead. "Tell her I wouldn't care if we wiped them out, the world would hate us is the only thing, tell her I don't care if the world hates us, tell her we're better haters, tell her we're chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it's not her," runs the line. "Don't tell her that," comes the immediate next line. "Tell her we love her. Don't frighten her." About 60 members of Britain's Jewish community signed a letter protesting the demonization of Israelis as "inhuman triumphalists who care little about anything except their children's feelings and who teach them that Arabs are sub-human and must be hated."
But in America, the play has so far been a cultural Rorschach blot, with the anger of those who view it as resurrection of the old blood libel matched by the relief of others - including some liberal Jews - who say they feel Churchill's play captures something essential about their frustration over the moral dilemmas presented by the conflict with the Palestinians.
"One of the things that's extraordinary about the play is that, yes, it starts from anger, but it also has incredible tenderness and intimacy and insight and softness," the theatre critic Alisa Solomon, who moderated Thursday's debate at the New York Theatre Workshop with playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner, told The Jerusalem Post.
"It's about people in a very dangerous situation making tough decisions about what to say and what not to say," Kushner told the audience Thursday night.
He said he was struck that an outsider - "a non-Jew, a British woman" - had managed to reflect "certain aspects that go very deep into the Jewish experience," though in an "audacious" way.
Kushner was challenged by Bret Stephens, formerly the Post's editor-in-chief and now a Wall Street Journal columnist and editorial board member, who criticized liberal Jews for being willing to air criticism of their own in a way that Israel's Hamas opponents would not.
"Where do you feel more comfortable as a gay man, in Gaza City or in Tel Aviv?" Stephens said from the audience, after asking sarcastically when Kushner's career-making play about the AIDS epidemic, Angels in America, would be performed at the Islamic University of Gaza.
Kushner deflected the question, saying he'd be happy to discuss the issue privately after the show.
The three New York shows - performed as ad hoc readings, and, at Churchill's request, for free as an appeal for donations to the London-based Medical Aid for Palestinians - were done with the formal involvement of Jewish groups like the Jewish Community Relations Council and the American Jewish Committee, which invited members, including Stephens, to sit in the audience for the debate.
Kenneth Stern, the director on anti-Semitism and extremism for the AJC, wrote in a note given to theatergoers that he objected to the anti-Semitic "canards" included in the last lines of the play.
The audience also included invited guests from Road to Peace, as well as the Palestinian playwright Betty Shamieh and Columbia University Arab Studies professor Rashid Khalidi, who applauded Churchill for provoking public dialogue on both sides.
"If you were offended, that's what [Churchill] was trying to do," Khalidi said from the audience, noting that the play effortlessly switched between a Nazi "they" and an Arab "they."
He also speculated that Israelis would be far more open to engaging with the difficulties raised by the dialogue than Diaspora Jews.
"All kinds of things are said in Israel to which people here have plugged their ears and everyone else's ears against," he said.
The point was echoed by a man who identified himself as Israeli but who declined to give his name to the Post. He said from the audience that he heard echoes in the play of conversations he'd had himself with friends at countless dinner tables.
"The unspoken storyline is from the Holocaust to Gaza... this is a subject which in Israel is addressed," the man said. "It's a bigger reflection on how the Jewish communities [in the Diaspora] have to start developing themselves outside their own bubble."
In Washington, the play set off an equally spirited debate after the city's Jewish Community Center's Theater J agreed to stage it this week.
Artistic director Ari Roth, who has said he found the play's script upsetting, defended his decision to put on a reading even if it offended his own constituents.
"This is an elusive, evocative, wispy play that has mysteries in it, and we are trying to decode them in a public discussion," he said this week.
In a heated debate with writer Jeffrey Goldberg, published on The Atlantic's Web site, Roth compared the play to Pablo Picasso's "Guernica," a painting designed to provoke a visceral reaction to the Fascists' war.
"Come and debate this," Roth said. "I'm angry. I don't think this is a great work of art, but I think there's a great artist doing something interesting here."
"You're the useful Jew," Goldberg retorted, arguing that anti-Semites and opponents of Israel could hide behind the fact that Jewish groups were staging Churchill's play.
"To boycott this and to just turn away and say, 'We don't hear Caryl Churchill, we don't hear this criticism,' that's wrong," Roth responded.
THE ATLANTIC
"Caryl Churchill: Gaza's Shakespeare, or Fetid Jew-Baiter?"By Jeffrey Goldberg25 Mar 2009 03:26 pm
Against my advice -- and the advice of others -- my friend Ari Roth has decided to stage two readings of Caryl Churchill's "Seven Jewish Children" at his Theater J, in Washington. (The first reading is tonight at 8:00 p.m.; the second is tomorrow at 10 p.m.) Given Churchill's strong distaste for all things Israeli and the not-entirely veiled blood libel embedded in the text, Roth's decision to put on a reading has been controversial, but has at least produced a steady stream of publicity for his theater (of which I am generally a fan).
"Seven Jewish Children," (the full text -- it's a quick, if gross, read at eight pages -- is available here) was dismantled by some critics -- "ludicrous and utterly predictable lack of even-handedness" -- and lauded by others -- "heartfelt lamentation for the future generations." I'm in the first camp, in case you couldn't tell. Anyway, Ari asked me if I would come and talk to the audience after the reading, and I said no, but I said I would interview him on his decision to provide Churchill's play with Jewish oxygen. Here's our bizarre and sometimes-entertaining argument on Churchill and theater and Jews.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, tell me why I'm wrong.
Ari Roth: Well, let me ask you, do you think you're still right?
JG: I read the play five times. It reads like anti-Jewish agitprop to me. I see it as a short polemic directed against one party in a complicated conflict. Take the line, "The world hates us, tell her we're better haters, tell her we're chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? Tell her all I feel is happy it's not her." I mean, I think she moves from the traditional smug, self-righteous European morally superior stance --
AR: When you say she starts, she doesn't start there --
JG: No, no, no, let me finish my sentence. I think she moves into an area that she has to know has this very, very terrible historic resonance. It's associating Jews with the spilling of innocent blood. She knows what that means and I think it kind of feeds into, obviously, the very worst and most dangerous stereotypes about Jews. How they revel in non-Jewish blood.
AR: I totally agree with you. I mean, I'm on the watch for this as well --
JG: Then why are you putting it on?
AR: I wrote in the Washington Post and the Washington Jewish Week when the Royal Shakespeare company came over with their Canterbury Tales two years ago and included The Prioress's Tale and they brought, in order to make it pungent and fresh again, they did this re-enactment of essentially a blood libel, a young boy was slaughtered by Jews and buried under the floorboards, and all the Jews wore hook-noses. This was very primitive and I blasted it. They wanted to make it fresh, they wanted to elicit outrage, they didn't contextualize, they didn't -- they wanted to surprise the shit out of people and surprise they did.
JG: Let's start at the beginning --
AR: One other thing, can you be available one of those nights? I want to give voice to a critic.
JG: I'm not going to validate it by arguing against it.
AR: Validate what? The play?
JG: What am I going to do, debate every hater?
AR: No offense, you're a critic who went out in public and said something strong about the --
JG: I don't want to treat this as a serious piece of art worthy of argument. I want to argue against what I think is a grotesquely unfair.
AR: I wouldn't be doing this if I thought it was as bad as you do.
JG: I hope not.
AR: But then I think you should be open to the possibility that it's not as bad as you think. And the fact that some of this piece is incredibly deft in accurately overhearing the trauma that the Jews felt, you know, way back when. When they were hiding a child in the closet. I mean there's tremendous accuracy --
JG: Hold on, are you equating what happened to Jews in WWII to what happens to Palestinians children at the hands of Jews now?
AR: Okay, I'm going to speak like a valley boy: dude, I didn't say that. You know I didn't say that. And you didn't even say that because that's a dumb thing to say. That is not what it says and, in fact, that's a very convenient and easy conflation. Does she mean to suggest that people who are once under siege themselves are now laying siege? Is she creating a compressed historical irony like that? That's a question. There are a lot of questions here. But is she saying what you just said to me? I would say absolutely not.
JG: Let me give you another quote from Caryl Churchill. "Israel has done a lot of terrible things in the past, but what happened in Gaza seems particularly extreme." This is a woman who hates Israel. She's not complicated. I mean, has she ever expressed an ounce of sympathy for a Jewish child victim of a Hamas suicide bomber?
AR: You're a great writer, but you may not love art enough. And you --
JG: I may not love art enough?
AR: Yeah, maybe you don't love the dramatic arts enough. You know a thousand things but you're making assumptions about Caryl Churchill that are not true, in terms of her lack of empathy. So I would invite you to come sit in on a rehearsal. We're just trying to understand what she's saying. Okay?
JG: Why? Why bother?
AR: Why do you do symposiums on Shylock? Why have we done two different pieces on Shylock? Because we want to make love with that character? Because we think it's the greatest comedy William Shakespeare ever wrote? It's not a particularly good play. Why is it of interest to Jews to decode and demystify and see into what --
JG: Decoding Shakespeare is one thing --
AR: How many better playwrights are there than Caryl Churchill living today?
JG: Eight.
AR: Eight?
JG: Okay, seven.
AR: Harold Pinter had lunatic left-wing politics too.
JG: He wasted the last years of his life writing shitty poetry about George Bush.
AR: When I read this play, I knew it was both pernicious and that there was something really strong and right about it, too. And I'm investigating the hell out of it, artistically. And I think it doesn't lend itself to journalistic drive-bys --
JG: I'm not driving by. Caryl Churchill wrote the drive-by. This is a drive-by shooting of a play. I mean, if she really wants to grapple with the complexity of the situation --
AR: -- Write a full-length play.
JG: -- then grapple with the complexity! There's no story in human history that is as simple as the story she presents.
AR: You may be entirely right. This form may be a kind of bastard form -- in ten minutes to tell the history of a people in the 20th century.
JG: I'll ask again. Why are you doing this?
AR: I'm not endorsing it. This is a critical inquiry. And, unlike you, I'm not saying that I'm not going to deem this play worthy of my attention. I think the play is insightful and problematic enough to be worthy of attention. It wasn't intended to be a signature calling card for us. At Theater J, we investigate plays we don't necessarily endorse.
JG: You use this distancing language. You're "investigating" it, you see its "pernicious qualities," but, in fact, you're giving it oxygen and you're giving it the imprimatur of a Jewish theater company.
AR: What is a book reviewer doing when he reads Jimmy Carter's book? What we would do is we would not only read the play and review it, we'd read it out loud and consider it.
JG: Go back to pernicious.
AR: The pernicious piece here, which is when the play goes off -- and by that, we mean in the colloquial sense -- the character spews his rage. Now I'm saying a character spews his rage. That's interpretive already. I'm not saying that the Jewish people did this. There's one part of the paragraph that would suggest that one person is going off the rails there, where you have other people reacting, perhaps, differently to it. I mean you could say, like Motti Lerner said in "Pangs of the Messiah," a play that we did set on the West Bank --
JG: I saw it, I saw it. I did a discussion on it. Didn't I?
AR: Of course. You did it with the Israeli -- so you know what our project is up to in terms of how we love Israel and we wrestle and struggle with it.
JR: That was in the realm of the defensible. I mean, Motti Lerner's play was something completely different. It was a fully-formed, full-length play, it ventilated some of the issues. Maybe because he's writing from the inside, it scanned a lot differently to me than this smug playwright with pronounced animus towards Israel writing this drive-by polemic that's meant to demonize the Jewish state.
AR: I've shared this play with a number of Israeli academics and theater people --
JG: Yes, you found other Jews who agree you could put it on.
AR: The play is about an impulse to protect your children. From early on, the play's motivation, the characters' motivation is to protect the children at all costs. No matter what.
JG: The play's motivation is to demonize the Jewish people. Or at least the Israeli branch of the Jewish people. She's basically saying that Israelis are obtuse to the point of criminality, morally obtuse to the point of criminality and that they don't care about the lives of other people.
AR: I don't think that's fair at all. That's not what I think her project is about. Would it be different if Caryl Churchill were working the front lines of Seeds of Peace, and was an agent of dialogue, and that she wrote this play as a kind of cry from the heart, that she was outraged by the disproportionality of what happened in Gaza. Let's forget the fact that she's not letting her plays be performed in Israel --
JG: How could you forget that? She believes that Israel should be cut off from the quote-unquote civilized world --
AR: Caryl Churchill is talking with different directors now in Israel about her plays and is one step away from lifting her boycott. Maybe that's because we're trying to build a bridge between her and --
JG: Who wants to build a bridge to Caryl Churchill? That's --
AR: You don't and I do. I didn't think I did, but I do want to build that bridge with her because I think she is, she writes better than what her politics are. I hated that quote. I read that quote before I read the play and I thought I'm not going to do this play.
JG: Why?
AR: I thought it might be agitprop. But you know what? I defy you to read those first six chapters and say that they're agitprop. Now you might say it's more seductive than that --
JG: I think she's seducing you toward the point where you stage something that insinuates the blood libel.
AR: I may agree with you. I think she's a very, very shrewd dramatist --
JG: I think shrewd is a good word. I think she wrote this to demonize Israel.
AR: There are different ways of demonizing Israel. And you can look at this as a ploy to seduce the audience and to seduce the reader, but she's also trying to emotionally engage and validate the Jewish audience member or the universal audience member --
JG: Who is she to engage me?
AR: She's going to be remembered a lot longer than you or me, that's who she is. She's a writer who has written twenty-eight great plays --
JG: Czar Alexander III is going to be remembered for longer than I'm remembered, but what do I care?
AR: I read this play and I said, "My God, she's been listening really, really closely to how Jews speak." She's not Jewish. She's gone to a shitload of cocktail parties, she's memorized every play that David Hare ever wrote about Israel. You know, her referencing the swimming pools is a reference to David Hare's "Via Dolorosa" when he talks about something fundamentally un-Jewish about Jews is Gaza sitting by their swimming pools and watching a Palestinian walk two kilometers with a jerry can for two liters of water. That's a direct reference to that. Every fucking line there comes from something else she's overheard or watched or said. And who the hell knows if she's ever been to Israel or not. I have no idea. But she is smart. She is a smart writer. And each one of these lines is doing something that is more sophisticated than you're giving her credit. And then --
JG: Oh, I'm not saying that she's not sophisticated. I'm just saying that she's using her skills and her shrewdness in order to paint a picture of Israel's that's a caricature. And she knows that Jews, because of their self-flagellating nature, will just go along with this to an extraordinary degree. I mean if she were brave, she would write about the Qu'ran, about Islamic fundamentalism.
AR: You know, it's pretty easy to go after Islamic fundamentalism.
JG: It is?
AR: I'm hearing it in the Jewish community ad nauseum. Jews get together and bash the Qu'ran, that's what they do.
JG: Who's bashing the Qu'ran? The Qu'ran is a lovely book. It's filled with very interesting passages. I'm just saying that she seems to be engaged in an exercise of cost-free moral vanity. I know she has explored the demons inside British imperial culture. But this just seems to smug and superior. Maybe you'll say, Jeff you're such a tribalist it's ridiculous, but my general position is that I don't need to listen to Europeans lecture Jews on morality. I think they have a lot more repentance to do. Why does Israel exist? Israel exists because Europe persecuted its Jews! I mean, where's her examination of the British fault? Where's her examination of European fault? The Jews are a scapegoat for her.
AR: I wonder whether you're entirely right about the character of Jews today. And whether we are as self-flagellating as you think. If you look at how the Jews --
JG: If David Mamet wrote --
AR: Can I finish? Can I finish? Look at how the Jewish community is organized institutionally here. And look at how we're set up in Israel. Look at how the Jewish institutions are set up in Britain as well. Do you see a lot of self-flagellating going on?
JG: Yes.
AR: You do?
JG: I think so. And by the way, I think self-criticism is ultimately a gift --
AR: I do, too.
JG: One of the reasons the Muslim world is in trouble is that self-criticism is so stifled. But there comes a point when its like, "enough already." But answer this question. If David Mamet were to write "Seven Muslim Children: An Inquiry Into Why Palestinians Allow Their Sons to Become Suicide Bombers," do you think that people would be sitting in Beirut and Amman, staging the play and having dialogue groups about whether the play was fair or not? And I use Mamet very particularly, obviously, because you know where he's coming from.
AR: He's a rough --
JG: He's a Jewish nationalist --
AR: He's the Jeffrey Goldberg of the American theater is what he is.
JG: He's the what?
AR: He's the Jeffrey Goldberg of the American theater is what he is. And you can feel good about that. He's off the rails, but at least he's got a very strong, pugnacious sense of Jewish pride.
JG: My problem with Mamet is that he doesn't allow for complications to come into his understanding of Jewish power.
AR: Right --
JG: Maybe you could just get Caryl Churchill and David Mamet on a stage together with butter knives and see who comes out alive.
AR: Funny. I like the dialogue we're having right now. It's what I hope to have with the audience. I'm not going to stop until I get you to join me --
JG: No, no, no! You're not going to get me to join you.
AR: You're going to have to own that. There you go. So you do not want to debate?
JG: I'm not going to go debate Walt and Mearsheimer either. Why? Because I think they're motivated not by facts, but by hostility.
AR: If somebody writes a play about Walt and Mearsheimer's ideas, I'd absolutely do a reading of it and talk about it.
JG: You're better than that. You're --
AR: If it was written by a halfway decent writer and somebody wrote a play about the so-called pernicious Jewish lobby that's affecting the way the make our decisions. So listen to this. Here's why we're doing it. The fact that, over eight pages, so many of the lines resonate not with the language of hate, but with the language of perception. Meaning she has overheard, she has seen, she has captured the language that Jews speak to each other with and that is astonishing.
JG: It's astonishing that she overheard the ways Jews talk at cocktail parties?
AR: Because that makes her a ten-times better theatrical reporter than anybody I've ever seen. This is play written with extraordinary precision. She wrote a play that arrested my attention. And it has a problem title. I hate the title. It is a problem place where it ends, but it is subject to an incredible amount of interpretation. It's written with multiple characters. People argue with each other. It's not written as a diatribe. And so you have to allow for the art form of theater to have its way with her text. That is what's going to happen, that's what's happening in this rehearsal room. I struggle with the play. God bless me. I'm a struggling Jew. You know?
JG: You can't decontextualize it. I'm sorry. It comes out of a certain moment and it comes out of a culture that has demonized Israel. It comes out of a particular theater subculture in Great Britain that demonizes Israel.
AR: Does this play play differently in Washington, D.C. then it does in London? The answer is absolutely and the context is tremendously important.
JG: So fine, next Tuesday night, put me on stage and I'll read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the audience.
AR: We should read that thing!
JG: Oh come on!
AR: You know who did that thing, Will Eisner, the great graphic novelist, did his last work on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in comic book form. I'd love to stage that thing.
JG: Let's put it on a show. Put on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I'd sooner do that than this.
AR: How on earth do you get up the balls to talk to all these Hamasniks? And you won't even sit with a play you think you know --
JG: I'm not that much of a masochist. You know, if I want a prostate exam, I'll go get a prostate exam.
AR: It's good for you.
JG: Why do I have to sit there and have this argument: "The Jews are demons!" "No they're not!" "The Jews are demons!" "No they're not!"
AR: You actually read the play five times?
JG: You're not crediting me with sincerity here. I don't think it's artistic. I think it's polemical. I think it's agitprop. And because it's polemical and agitprop, I judge it differently. I judge it as a piece of politics, not as a piece of art. And as a piece of politics it's dishonest.
AR: Can I interrupt?
JG: Yeah.
AR: Lots of people disagree with you about the nature of what it is as a work. Forget its politics. The politics, we can all agree, are pro-Palestinian and angry at Israel. Let's agree on that. It's a play for Gaza.
JG: She's trying to close a circle. "Once the Jews were oppressed, now they are the oppressors." That's her story of Jewish people. Oh, what a tragedy. It's easy, it's smug, it's fetid.
AR: Okay, just stop for a second. Let's pretend we're not talking about a play but we're talking about a painting. Let's pretend Picasso. Picasso was going to paint, à la Chagall, the story of Gaza, like in "Guernica" -- he's outraged by the killing of children in Gaza. So let's say Picasso does with simple brush strokes, little artful renderings of who his friends, the Jews, used to be; who they were in the '60s; how they were in the '90s; and what he sees today. And he does them with little stokes, little hints of this. And they just happen to be the strokes of a master artist, as opposed to an idiot. And they end with a horse braying and an electric light bulb going off and bombs falling. And that is his cry from the soul.
JG: Are you saying Caryl Churchill is Picasso?
AR: I'm saying it's Caryl Churchill's "Guernica." Come and debate this. And how did Franco feel about "Guernica?" Who knows? He was angry too. I'm angry. I don't think this is a great work of art, but I think there's a great artist doing something interesting here
JG: I know exactly what she's doing.
AR: I think she was trying to do her "Guernica" in ten minutes here.
JG: Well, she probably should have spent more time and a little bit more thought.
AR: Look, I hate the fact that she conflates the Israeli military behavior with Jewish behavior --
JG: That's not a small thing --
AR: That's not a small thing but then let's wrestle with it.
JG: I think she has a pornographic interest in Jewish immorality.
AR: I like what you're saying, but other people are going to read this and say: "Jeffrey, you're just not giving enough possibility to the fact that it's more complicated than that."
JG: I think she's the enemy of complication in this case.
AR: If she were, she wouldn't have written the play as well as she did.
JG: It's interesting to me that nothing in the last fifty years of Middle East history has prompted her to write like this until now. The Dolphinarium bombing, the slaughter of innocent people on buses across Jerusalem, the birth of a suicide cult in Gaza. That doesn't interest her. And I'm serious when I say this: I think that people like Caryl Churchill have a kind of gross, sometimes pornographic interest in proving Jewish immorality. It makes them feel better. I believe that. It makes them feel less immoral if they can prove that Jews are immoral too -- that the ultimate victims are just like everybody else. Or worse than everybody else!
AR: You do know what a fierce critic she is, as you've pointed out, of British colonialism. Of hypercapitalism. Of Thatcherite politics, of the Thatcherite economy. She has found many, many other righteous causes to be indignant about over the decades. So this is not the case that she's been waiting all her career to finally get one thing off her chest. She's been getting a lot of things off her chest for many years. Now, you and I don't know what her record of writing is and her record of political involvement on issues pertaining to the Arab-Israeli conflict is.
JG: Well, I've seen what she's said.
AR: We don't know what's in her dramatic writing. She has a long history -- I mean her writing on Ceaucescu and the Romanian Revolution in "Mad Forest" is fucking masterful and she did that work by going to Romania --
JG: I never argued that she's not a talented person. What I worry about is that a play like this demonizes and endangers Jews. I'm sorry. Maybe that makes me limited --
AR: I don't worry about the Jews being endangered by this play one bit. I think this play --
JG: You don't think this play has the ability to possibly increase anti-Semitism?
AR: What do you feel about the articles that came out this week about the Israeli army in Gaza? Does that have the possibility of increasing anti-Zionism, anti-IDF feeling?
JG: Of course! Of course! But that's documentable truth. What Caryl Churchill has done is written a one-sided polemic free of facts. We're talking about two different things. And I've written that Israeli behavior sometimes endangers Jews who have nothing to do with Israel. Anyway, I just don't get it. I understand your impulse -- it's controversial; she's a famous and respected playwright.
AR: It's not as dissimilar as you think to the "Merchant of Venice" issue.
JG: She says that we're "better haters."
AR: Jeffrey, Jeffrey --
JG: That's Shylock, right?
AR: I want your very, very smart blog readers to understand that the way to discuss this play is not to lift lines from the last page and a half of it. That is not how to fully experience and understand the meaning of any drama. I can't cede this to journalists who don't love theater enough to understand what's going on here. That is not a sophisticated way to regard art, by picking out a sentence here and then going apeshit over it!
JG: It's not just a sentence.
AR: She could have said worse.
JG: Oh, that's a great standard to have. She could have said worse.
AR: This is why you don't work in the American theater.
JG: This isn't even the line that insinuates the blood libel.
AR: Okay, this is right at the end. The line is, "Tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? Tell her all I feel is happy it's not her." So let's just say that this is the fucking problem line in the whole thing. I mean, it's one of many. So we are looking at our different options theatrically in interpreting this. If I saw it as heinous I wouldn't have any actors work on it at all. But one of our actors looked at it and said she didn't see the blood libel at all. She said, "I see it as she's simply saying she is recognizing the blood spilled on a Palestinian child," and her character has been protective of her child from the beginning of this thing. And she's saying, "That child may be covered in blood, but I am at least relieved that you're not. And I recognize that that child is injured, is dead."
JG: Your argument is that Caryl Churchill is very shrewd and understands what each line means. She knows what's she's doing. She wrote this to increase people's hostility toward Israel, and based on the title, to Jews. There's politics here.
AR: Listen, I think part of what you're saying may be right. She could have written any number of solidarity plays with the Palestinians. Instead, she wrote a play to hurt Israel. And to hurt the Jewish cause. Her aim here was to hurt. We in the Jewish community are motivated to do things because we love Israel. Even if we criticize Israel, we criticize because we love. Churchill, a great artist --
JG: Criticizes because she hates.
AR: I didn't say hates. You don't know that she hates, my friend. You do not know that and you shouldn't write it. I'm going to sound like my mother for a second. You shouldn't say that, you don't know that, you know that she's angry. She wrote it to hurt. And to hurt a country that she feels has hurt Hamasniks and innocent Palestinians alike. Because both are mentioned here. The innocents and terrorists are both mentioned here. And because she has the ability to, she is hurting back. And she's hurting in the form of exposing.
JG: I just wish you weren't doing this.
AR: Really?
JG: Yeah, really.
AR: Do you think I'm helping to hurt Israel?
JG: You're the useful Jew. You've made yourself into the useful Jew.
AR: And you in your work, in all the work that you do that is critical of Israel. And when you go and talk to people who are building illegal settlements. Jeffrey, we do the same thing.
JG: No. I try to present it in a complicated way. And you do, too, except for this. I think Caryl Churchill and the political forces behind Caryl Churchill are very, very glad that Ari Roth exists because they can hide behind you. They can say, "Ah, look, how could we be anti-Semites if Jews are putting this on for us?"
AR: I find that to be stuff that makes me want to go to the theater and wrestle with it. And to say, "What's going on here?"
JG: Ari, you don't have to wrestle with everything.
AR: Wrestling is not self-flagellation.
JG: No, but it can slide into self-flagellation. I'm a self-critical Jew. I am. I wrote a book about the morally flawed occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. And self-criticism makes you stronger. This, on the other hand, is a simple polemic designed to lower Israel's stature in the world and designed to lower the stature of Jews.
AR: There's a lot at stake here. There are big intellectual and political questions. And to boycott this and to just turn away and say "We don't hear Caryl Churchill. We don't hear this criticism," that's wrong. You asked why I said yes to this. I said yes to this because it's disarmingly, and maybe even unfortunately, so well-written.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
"Readings and Talks for Pro-Gaza Playlet "
By PATRICK HEALYPublished: March 15, 2009
The New York Theater Workshop and two theaters in Washington will hold staged readings this month of Caryl Churchill’s provocative new play, “Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza,” along with talk-back sessions with audiences about the piece’s controversial portrayal of some Israelis, leaders of the theaters said Sunday.
The play, which runs just 8 to 10 minutes, features members of a Jewish family instructing children about how to view violence affecting them, from the Holocaust to the Palestinian uprisings and the Israeli military campaign in Gaza this winter. Ms. Churchill, who opposed the Gaza offensive, includes some incendiary comments about Palestinians in the script, with one character saying, “I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out.”
A production of the play that recently concluded at the Royal Court Theater in London proved to be contentious among British Jews and drew some unusually harsh reviews and commentary, including one by Melanie Phillips of The Spectator, who called the play “a 10-minute blood libel.”
Leaders of the New York Theater Workshop and Theater J, which is presenting the readings with the Forum Theater in Washington, said in interviews that they were staging a few nights of readings because the provocative content merited examination, but that their schedules did not permit weeks-long productions.
“There will be emotion from the audience — you can’t separate emotion from the issue — but my hope is that we’ll do these productions in a way that fosters understanding as well,” said William Russo, managing director of the New York Theater Workshop. “We’re having experts from all sides of the spectrum attend, to help the discussion be informed and not a free-for-all.”
Writers and artists like Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”) will moderate the discussions in New York.
The New York Theater Workshop faced criticism and accusations of censorship in 2006 when it postponed a production of “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” a play sympathetic to Palestinians, after some Jewish religious leaders and others complained about the work. In the interview Mr. Russo rejected the idea that mounting the new play by Ms. Churchill, the British author of “Top Girls” and other works, was a response to the “Corrie” episode.
Workshop leaders had briefly discussed a joint production of “Seven Jewish Children” with the Public Theater, according to people familiar with those talks. Neither theater would officially confirm those conversations, and Mr. Russo said the Public was not involved.
Ms. Churchill has taken the unusual step of offering to license “Seven Jewish Children” without charge as long as theaters do not charge admission but instead ask audience members to contribute to Medical Aid for Palestinians, a British group. Mr. Russo said that the New York readings — March 25 to 27 — would be free, and that the program given to audience members would include a note saying that Ms. Churchill would like them to donate to the group.
“We are not actively collecting money,” Mr. Russo said. “We felt we could honor that condition in the way that did not make us feel uncomfortable.”
Ari Roth, the artistic director of Theater J, which is housed in the Jewish Community Center in Washington, said an arrangement had been reached to pay royalties to Ms. Churchill because the theater does not raise money directly or indirectly for outside groups. The play will be performed at Theater J on March 26 and 28 and at the Forum Theater on March 27 and 29. (It was presented as a performance installation three days last week in Chicago by Roots Productions.)
The three East Coast theaters are not coordinating their productions, Mr. Russo said; Theater J reached out to the New York Theater Workshop after learning of its interest in the play, and it proved possible to hold the staged readings at roughly the same time.
Tickets to the New York readings will be available first to the theater’s subscribers and then to the public. Mr. Russo said it was possible the theater would mount a longer-running production at a later date.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 25, 2009 An article on March 16 about readings of a new play by Caryl Churchill, “Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza,” at two theaters in Washington and the New York Theater Workshop, misstated the history of the New York theater’s plans for another play about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “My Name Is Rachel Corrie.” In 2006 the theater postponed transferring a production of the play from London; it was not canceled, although it ultimately ran at another theater in New York.
"Controversial play about Gaza set for NY reading"By ALLISON HOFFMAN, JPOST CORRESPONDENT IN NEW YORK Mar 17, 2009 21:44 | Updated Mar 18, 2009 7:30
Seven Jewish Children, a new play that drew accusations of anti-Semitism during its London run last month, will be staged in New York next week as part of a panel discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The New York Theater Workshop will present three readings of the short play followed by discussions by panelists, including Israeli and Palestinian activists to be hosted by various moderators, among them playwright Tony Kushner, who wrote the screenplay for the 2005 film Munich, and theater critic Alisa Solomon.
The play, billed as "a 10-minute history of Israel" told through parental dialogues, was written by Caryl Churchill, a British playwright and pro-Palestinian activist, in response to Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.
The New York Theater Workshop production comes three years after it canceled a scheduled staging of the play My Name is Rachel Corrie, which commemorated the work of the International Solidarity Movement activist accidentally killed by an IDF bulldozer in Gaza in 2003.
Seven Jewish Children had its first New York reading on Monday night, the anniversary of Corrie's death, at the Brecht Forum, a Marxist activist organization. The event was held as a fund-raiser for Medical Aid to Palestine.
Chicago's Rooms Productions held a reading of the play last week, and productions are scheduled for Washington as well - including one booked for Theater J at the Jewish Community Center, as part of its "Voices from a Changing Middle East" festival. Jewish leaders in Britain took out an ad in the Daily Telegraph calling the play "historically inaccurate" because of its characterization of the Six-Day War as an offensive operation and because it overlooked the effects of the rockets hitting southern Israel.
Speaking about the play before its launch in January, Churchill said: "It came out of feeling strongly about what's happening in Gaza - it's a way of helping the people there. Israel has done lots of terrible things in the past, but what happened in Gaza seemed particularly extreme."