Kvutsat Avoda (Work Group) Theater Ensemble 
קבוצת עבודה
Home for new Israeli Drama

19.4.19 Yuki Lavie. Cafe The Marker

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Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and Poland suddenly enter the room. No, this is not the beginning of a joke, nor are these diplomatic talks by a senior political representative. It is the feverish mind of playwright Noam Gil who, in conjunction with the "Kvutzat Avoda" ensemble, created the social thriller "Lady Amar" presented at the Tmuna Theater. Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan are a brother and sister pair who, in the dead of night, kidnap an elderly woman in the middle of the street, and place her in a dark hideout, which a few minutes later turns out to be her home. The three kidnappers tell the astonished lady - who insists that her name is Pauline Weiss, that she is married to a successful industrialist and that they are a wealthy couple with connections in high society - that she is their mother. The progressive amnesia she has suffered from has forced her to hallucinate and fall into false visions, to invent Arabian Nights stories about herself and the biography she supposedly belongs to. "Jacqueline Amar" they scold the meticulous woman, who has nothing in her accent And her intonation does not hint at the ethnic origin that her "children" seek to instill in her, much to her displeasure.

For days she will spend in the company of the three dubious people, slowly revealing the story of each and every one of them, unwillingly being sucked into the "story of her life" as they describe it to her (the gap between her and the character she walks in the world as, with a sense of lordship and satiety, is grotesque in itself), but she will insist that it is all a conspiracy. Pauline (in the negative) Weiss is not prepared under any circumstances to step into Jacqueline Amar's shoes (in the above), and will try her best to escape the place.

The play's director, Yigal Sachs, could easily have fallen into the pit of a cheap comedy of errors, the populist sitcom that such an absurd constellation gives him. Instead, he took Gil's play and built it into a patchwork of a human plot, whose central axis, while revolving around sectarian tension and the inexhaustible conflict between Ashkenazim and Mizrahi, is one that has a hint of compassion and beauty woven into it. The three children are not monsters who just molested an elderly woman who happened to be in their path. In their opinion, they love their mother, whose mind has apparently gone mad and the stories of the fabrics she weaves are becoming more and more insistent to the point of being unable to actually care for her well-being. The kidnapping for friends is for her own good, to return her to the bosom of her loving family, and through visual stimuli and exposure to the depths of the elusive consciousness they hope to succeed in their mission. Thus we will learn about the experiences of Israel, the eldest son, professionally played by Yaakov Zada Daniel, and the breakdown he is in. We will get to know in depth the many deceptive faces of Levanon (Victor Sabag) and his uncompromising rigidity. And we will mourn with the daughter, Yarden, who is played by Liz Rabian in a performance that is full of compassion. Tenderness and delicacy. The climax of the play, in my opinion, is in the interaction between the two. The daughter understands that the mother will not cooperate and in a desperate act she begs her to hug her. The body language of both of them summarizes in a nutshell all the clichés about ethnic differences, while one of them embraces the other with full emotion, while the latter demonstrates formal coolness even during this gracious physical gesture. The highlight is Orly Tubli, the kidnapped mother. She is spectacular in her vocal diversity, in her dramatic and eloquent power on the one hand, and in her humorous winks on the other. The imitation of a Moroccan woman she suddenly adopts shakes the hangar in the Tmuna hall with a roar that has not been heard in a long time. On the surface, she is the passive one of the group, dragged into this horrific saga, but in fact she is the one who steers the ship with her determination, cunning, and the viewers' curiosity related to the mystery of her identity.

Sachs and Gil, who have collaborated fruitfully in the past ("The Settler" and "Toys"), have once again created a complex, charged and bloody issue that seeks to map the ethnic division in Israel in 2019. "You are committing cultural kidnapping on me," Poland shouts at her kidnappers/children, and how ironic that the premiere of "Lady Amar" took place just days after the last Knesset elections, when the very unequivocal results they produced correspond with her words.