Absurd, Fantasy and Nonsense - The Real Life Version
Two years ago, reality came and hit us with a cruelty we could not have imagined, it turned our attempts to stylize it into absurdities, but when politicians and spiritual leaders reverted to creating an imaginary alternative reality for us, I discovered once again that absurdity, fantasy, and nonsense serve as a kind of serum for me, and that a low and controlled dose of cynicism and fantasy is an excellent antidote for me to protect against the venom of lies and hypocrisy in life-threatening doses. I think the main charm of using these elements, for me as a creator, is that they also require me to learn a healthy amount of self-irony, and thus I hope they provide me some protection from excessive self-importance, pretentiousness, and hypocrisy. I will get to that later, but for the sake of context, let's start with a pretentious historical overview of the interrelationships between reality and realism, absurdity, fantasy, and nonsense...
Periods of crisis and disillusionment with the political system gave rise to a flourishing of non-realist theater in the last century. The theater of the absurd of the 1950s and 1960s grew out of the ruins of World War II and the realization that rational language and logic had failed to prevent bloodshed. Absurdity undermines the logic of cause and effect, fantasy allows us to observe reality from a safe distance, and nonsense dismantles and ridicules the systems of power and language. All three share an ability to say the unspeakable, either because of an inability to cope with the harsh reality of realism, or because the censor, internal or external, is too strong.
During periods of relative political consensus (the 1950s and early 1960s), Israeli theater was more realistic, serving the nation-building narrative in its own way. As the consensus crumbled, more works began to emerge utilizing absurd and fantasy. Playwrights like Hanoch Levin and Nissim Aloni used the grotesque, fantastical, and absurd to deal with the sense of purposelessness of exhaustion and the collective trauma of the Yom Kippur War. In periods of attempted return to stability and even hope (the peace agreement with Egypt, the stabilization of the economy, the disintegration of the communist bloc, and the hope of expanding peace agreements), the realistic voices that tried to document and provide a historical perspective again grew stronger, or converged inward to deal with the individual and the family. But in our 21st century, with the disintegration of the peace process and the deepening of political polarization, Israeli theater has oscillated between unpretentious escapism and attempts to create a satirical political statement, with escapism often leaning toward conservative realism, and the attempt to respond to political and social reality making use of elements of absurdity, nonsense, and fantasy. It is possible that the political division has created separate perceptions of reality that are also expressed in this stylistic division. In times of crisis like the one we are going through now, the choice of style is related to the very question that we as creators are trying to explore: "What happened?" Requires documentary realism; "How could this have happened?" usually leads to absurdity.
In my experience as a theater creator, absurd, fantasy, and nonsense are not separate genres. These are stylistic elements that also allow me to be self-ironic in my theatrical dialogue with reality. "Kvuzat Avoda (Work Group)" ensemble's plays almost always play with faith and imagination as a tool for dealing with the illogicality of reality. Over the years, plays that we staged as comic absurdity or apocalyptic fantasy have, in retrospect, become plays that seemed to predict the resurgence of populism as a method of government, and the denial of reality as a political stance. When this happened, it may have increased the documentary value of the production in my eyes, but once the absurd is normalized, I as a creator find it less interesting. In the year before October 7th, we staged the play "Welcome"- a Jewish-Arab encounter that began as a dark absurd comedy, and ended as a bloody and painful tragedy. Simultaneusly with the violent conflict that took place on stage, a nightly rerun of an escapist morning show was projected, featuring an astrologer, a spiritual teacher, a beauty consultant, and a makeup artist, giving viewers useful tips for a good life. Every time a violent event occurred on stage, it was silenced by turning up the volume of the silly TV show that was playing at the same time. We loved the comedic effect and the poignant statement, but after October 7th, reality became so cruel that I felt that continuing to perform this show would be a cruel act, just shouting the obvious.
Everything was too painful. Our reality was unimaginable. Creating theater felt like a bland and absurd act in such a violent and painful reality. After the initial shock, many theater creators turned to escapism, and others turned to documentary work. Satire almost disappeared. At the end of 2023, I came across the play "Shura" by Roee Joseph, written with the assistance of the "Starting Point" program. It is a beautiful documentary play that was written in real time, right in the middle of the event, and what is beautiful about it to me is that its style also combines elements of absurdity and fantasy as a way to allow us, and perhaps Roee as well, to deal with the horror. Thus, surprisingly, succeeding in describing the unimaginable reality of the horror, but also in offering comfort.
At the end of 2023, I premiered "Not the End of the World" - I was looking for a new perspective on a world that refuses to recognize truth as a value, and I released a romantic fantasy about love between an idealistic scientist and a "Flat-earther" that takes place in a world where the flat-earth theory has become mainstream. In the days when I felt like the ground was slipping under my feet, and the world felt flatter than ever, this fantasy about a scientist who embarks on a journey to the end of the world to prove his love gave me the opportunity to laugh at myself a little, and at my fears about the direction the world is heading, and perhaps take comfort in a sentence I put in the mouth of one of the characters: "The truth is not what we think of it or what we believe, it's just there."
This year, the shameless cynicism of politicians and spiritual leaders has also returned to our lives, and we have already allowed ourselves to come back to satire and the absurd as a kind of serum against the poison of hypocrisy. I think the magic of these genres, for me, is the possibility that they allow me to protect myself as a voter, by requiring me as a creator to learn a healthy lesson in self-irony. The comedies "The Israeli Patient" (absurd realism) and "Pre-quel and Se-quel Inherit a Cult" (mockumentary nonsense) that we premiered this year are satires that laugh at our need to invent an alternative reality in order to survive pain and trauma, while essentially doing exactly the same thing. In the end, we are not really different from the characters we create, and our reality is no less absurd than our fantasies about it.
From "Pre-quel and Se-quel Inherit a Cult" by Yuval Steinberg and Ben Sgersky.
Comments