Rewriting the Rules?
Playwrights Roy Chen, Maya Arad Yasur, Noam Gil, Danielle Cohen Levy, Sharon Stark, Maayan Even, and Ido Setter, in a lively discussion about playwriting that deals with the fantasies, absurdity, and illogicality of what we commonly refer to as "reality."
What makes you write in a style that is not bound by the "rules of realistic reality" and to what extent is your writing style a conscious choice?
Roy Chen: Reality is unreal, especially here among us, and writing about it follows suit.
Danielle Cohen Levy: For me, the stage invites writing suited to the stage—to its poetics, to its density. It invites imagery, it invites imagination and song. So it doesn't surprise me to find that fantasy makes its way into the text.
Maayan Even: Insisting on writing according to the rules of realistic reality feels like insisting on dreaming according to the rules of realistic reality. Sometimes a realistic dream comes along, troubling us to the point that we can't tell it apart from reality even after waking up, and sometimes you dream about flying tapirs dancing in the clouds. Just as I love all dreams, I love all writing possibilities, as long as the passion remains to illuminate something fundamental about life that usually remains in the dark. For me, a play is an opportunity to concretely present something inherently ethereal, something from the depths of consciousness. After all, everything that goes up on stage is an image; no matter how hard we try to imitate reality, we are still part of that ridiculous event where people dress up as other people and pretend to experience and act—and we all know it's a bittersweet illusion. So let it at least be beautiful, let it be funny, let it be strange, let it be something of what takes place within us all the time as we're forced to live under reality's strict rules: a piece of our inner, true reality, liberated from rules.
Maya Arad Yasur: In both of my plays that could be defined as absurd plays (Amsterdam and The Exiteers), my very "What if"—the core premise of the play—is an absurd situation that opens a window to a philosophical look at everything to come: In Amsterdam, a 1,700-euro gas bill dating back to 1944 lands on the doorstep of a 21st-century Israeli violinist's Amsterdam apartment. In The Exiteers, a man and a woman with no memories find themselves locked inside a house they don't recognize, required to tell the story of the house and the reason for their presence in order to figure out where they themselves hid the key—like in an escape room. Both dive deep into the philosophical question of how identity mechanisms are constructed.
Ido Setter: When I approach writing a text, I always try to write it in the way I would find most interesting to read. I wrote my first play as a student in Motti Lerner's playwriting and analysis course, which delved into developing Aristotelian plot alongside developing characters' desires, obstacles, and conflicts. I was deeply influenced by it at the time, even though the plays and films I loved didn't usually exist in that realm. We did a staged reading, and I remember that while I was happy with it and the new experience, I also had a very clear feeling that the play didn't represent me, and that my strengths as a writer lay in other genres.
Noam Gil: "Suspension of disbelief" is a more complex mechanism in the theatrical medium (as opposed to cinema), and precisely because of that complexity, something in the writing process is freed from the need to be "realistic." In the plays I write, I seek to show that the reality we live in is far more fictional than meets the eye. Regarding the conscious choice of my writing style, I'm reminded of a Stephen King quote. When King was asked why he constantly writes horror books, he answered the interviewer: "You ask me as if I had a choice." That strikes me as an answer that holds true for any writer.
There is an argument that fantasy is aimed at the emotional world, absurdity is aimed at intellectual and critical response, and nonsense wants to entertain and make people laugh. Is this true in your opinion? What do you think is the difference between fantasy, absurdity, and nonsense? Are these different and separate stylistic elements or genres? Which of them do you connect with more?
Sharon Stark: I think these worlds blend together wonderfully. Fantasy, absurdity, and nonsense can integrate when you construct a slightly distanced world—one that allows us an external perspective on reality. To me, nonsense stems from a sense of absurdity, and its humor precisely serves that external viewpoint, ridiculing the absurd, and sometimes dangerous, conventions within which we exist and try to live "normal" lives.
Roy Chen: The Hobbit, a beloved fantasy book, is in my eyes also intellectual and critical, while Alice in Wonderland is entertaining, funny, critical, and moving… I understand the intention behind the statement, but any genre can evoke all these responses if it is well-written.
Noam Gil: Of the three, I am drawn to fantasy the least. Truth be told, I'm also not drawn to plays that fit solely into a single definition of "absurd" or "nonsense." The plays I love trash rigid definitions and try to play in every arena. Somewhere, I heard a playwright characterize his plays as "absurd realism." I'm all for this term, and I view it as something that also characterizes what I write. I love plays that stretch realism to its very limit—to the point where the gap between absurd and realism, between "sense" and "nonsense," gets eroded. Of course, right now, everything is so crazy, absurd, and illogical in Israel that those trying to think rationally are actually the least logical people. That's what I try to describe in my writing: how the true lunatics are the ones who consider themselves sane, trying to think logically about this madhouse called The State of Israel.
When in the writing process do you define for yourself what the style of the play will be? Is this out of an attempt to create a world that is bound by different rules, or out of a desire to challenge the annoying convention that there should be rules?
Daniel Cohen Levy: What intrigues me about writing is an idea. Not necessarily a style. Sometimes the idea is figurative; sometimes it’s narrative. Sometimes an image pops into my head and the text is born from there (say, what would happen if we encountered whales in space?). Many times I only understand what I’ve written halfway through, or even at the very end. The style always serves the central idea that intrigues me at that moment.
Ma'ayan Even: It makes me laugh to look at the writing process as something orderly and logical, because in reality writing is always a chaotic, unruly and wild business—it reminds me of riding a bucking mechanical bull, holding on by the horns and trying desperately not to fall, and the harder it shakes and the greater the danger grows, the greater the pleasure becomes. For me, style isn't an outfit you dress the story in, but truly a part of the story itself, and trying to separate style from story is like trying to separate water from wetness. For example, in the musical The End, we wanted to write about our absurd ambition to be larger than life and death, and from that, we realized we had to write something that itself tries to be ridiculously large, while simultaneously embedding the small, pathetic, and silly inside it—thus recreating the sensation of a balloon inflating with air until it bursts. What I'm trying to say, basically, is that the story itself—say, in the case of the musical—is almost meaningless, and the whole point is how you tell the story.
Roy Chen: Everyday realism is something that has always been far from me, but I let the play define itself.
Sharon Stark: The style of the writing becomes clear as the work progresses, as the logic of the dream establishes itself. Dialogue can be very realistic and still exist within a set of rules from the world of fantasy—for instance, characters stuck at a specific point in time, like in the play "Home Front".
Ido Setter: I try to define the style of the play at as late a stage as possible. It seems to me that defining it too early might disrupt or flatten the development process of a good idea. The texts I enjoyed writing the most so far—the plays Echo and Amiram, and the novel Theatralia—started with the assumption that I was writing them solely to clarify something with myself and my writing process, and that the chances of them reaching another reader were close to zero. Yet even at that stage, where I could write out of absolute irresponsibility, I still had a commitment to the initial premises I laid out, to the themes I chose, and to the form I created.
Fortunately, these three texts reached creative partners and ultimately the audience, and the fact that the significant decisions regarding them had already been made during the writing stage helped greatly in the process of bringing them to the audience.
In order to create a world that doesn't obey the laws of realism, do you think it is also necessary to break the rules of classical drama? How and to what extent?
Roy Chen: We live in an era in which unity of place and time is no longer the sole way to describe reality.
Maya Arad Yasur: I think the rules of drama are generally rules of storytelling rather than of a specific medium, genre, form, or style. So even if I decide to distort the chronology of events and the idea that one event stems from the previous one, play with the dimensions of time and space, shatter representation, rely not on character psychology but on other engines or the lack thereof, and even omit the characters themselves, it would still be possible to talk about an inciting incident, a character's desire, an obstacle, conflict, crisis, climax, and so on. That's why I don't like to say I'm "breaking" the rules. I examine, challenge, knead, tickle them, and use them for my needs.
Noam Gil: I believe good playwriting is that which contains a clear logic within itself. You can call this logic "Aristotelian" or "Brechtian" or whatever, but I don't like texts that toss out all the rules. There are rare examples of truly amazing anarchic texts, but in most cases, we're talking about amateurish texts by writers who think they reinvented the wheel (and they haven't). Even in "absurd" texts, there is a logic, and that logic usually defines itself through the writer's relationship to reality or realism.
Sharon Stark: Yes, sometimes the rules of classical playwriting are broken in order to adapt themselves to the world of the play, and yet, a dramatic tension that exists and carries over from scene to scene must be found in order to maintain interest and develop alongside the plot. Ultimately, storytelling has rules that can be bent but not entirely broken, because that is human nature. The expectation of meaning and the filling in of gaps in the viewer's mind hold a place of honor, and that is what we play with.
Maayan Even: I’ve never really understood who set the rules for writing and why, and I’ve never felt that I had a goal to challenge conventions. But I do find myself returning time and again to dealing with worn-out clichés, including theater clichés, and I admit to a defiant urge to mock these clichés. For me, this is a way of saying something about the world we live in: an opportunity to prove once again how ridiculous everything is, to allow the audience to laugh at the nonsense we are usually asked to respect, and perhaps also a way to invite the audience to take another look at the world and see how strange and foolish everything in it is, yet somehow beautiful at the same time.
Are your characters aware of the breaking of the rules and the absurdity of the situation, or does this reality seem normal to them?
Maya Arad Yasur: All of my characters have yet to complain that they feel anything is off. Sharon Stark: The characters I write don't define themselves as "unrealistic", on the contrary, they try to deal with situations in the most human way possible, and sometimes discover, as we do, that in the space between internal and external reality, there are many other forces and conventions governing what occurs.
Maayan Even: For me, it’s much funnier and more interesting when characters live in a world that, to them, is simply the world—just as we are accustomed to the strange world we live in and treat it as the norm. A moment ago I wrote (I’m actually writing in the middle of a boring course on psychodiagnostics, so I lose focus every sentence) about inviting the audience to take a fresh look at the bizarre world we live in; for that to work, the characters need to treat their world as normal, so that we, watching from the outside, can see just how bizarre it is. At the same time, the theatrical illusion always seems foolish to me when it takes itself too seriously—after all, we all know these are grown adults in costume prancing around on stage. So while the characters might not be aware of their illogical world, the actors usually are, and for me that’s part of the point: leaving a tiny margin between the actor and the character they play, allowing the actor to also look at it from the sidelines.
Roy Chen: I love shattering fourth walls. In the play The Draft Dodger , an audience member is brought up to complete a beret march, while in Souls, the character of Marina chases the audience out of the theater so they won't encourage her son to keep telling his story.
Danielle Cohen Levy: For me, the characters are part of the world being built; they aren't preoccupied with the question of how this can be, but rather what to do and how to act. I essentially ask myself, "If I were in this moment, how would I act, or how would different versions of me act?" I'm interested in moral questions, and as I think about it now, it seems to me that in spaces of fantasy/sci-fi, I manage for moments to touch upon the question in a way that is a bit more poetic rather than just concrete (a girl who can't speak in the middle of a battlefield, or characters forced to deal with the appearance of a horse-lawyer in their lives).
Sharon Stark: In plays like Home Front and Trulove Ltd., the characters realize the rules of the world they are in too late and try to rebel against them. In other plays, such as Father Figure, the rules are clear to them from the beginning, but not to the audience, which creates an amusing and surprising gap.
Noam Gil: Usually, my characters find themselves sucked into some fantasy that initially seems inviting and exotic, but later turns into a trap from which there is no escape. I love writing about characters who flee the drab reality surrounding them into some absurd fantasy. The question is whether to fight the fantasy or to serve it. In many of my cases, dealing with reality is simply too traumatic. At that moment, fantasy swallows reality whole and becomes the new reality.
How important is it to you to be understood? Should the viewer decipher the play and understand your choices, or do you prefer to leave them in uncertainty?
Roy Chen: I try to be clear and understood to myself, first of all—meaning to truly decide and know—and then there’s a chance I’ll be understood without having to be overly explanatory.
Maya Arad Yasur: For me, the question is about my reader, not the viewer. I don't want the director, the actors, the scenographer, the musician, the lighting designer, or the costume designer to simply "understand" something; perhaps even the opposite. I want it to provoke so many questions in them (existential, political, philosophical) that they'll want to enter the rehearsal room and investigate them—using their own unique tools, through the text I wrote.
Ido Setter: It’s complicated… In terms of my personal taste, a work in which everything is decoded the first time you experience it is less interesting. On the other hand, it's unlikely I'd manage to stay interested in a work that outright rejects any possibility of decoding. In the recent plays I’ve been writing, I put less and less emphasis on developing plot and characters and more on a stylized theatrical experience: I invite the audience into a world where what occurs on stage holds equal standing to the language expressing that occurrence. I think creating a framework with its own internal logic encourages the audience to walk down the path the work lays out and try to decode it.
Maayan Even: When I’m not understood, my heart breaks. For me, that’s the single greatest wish in writing, and in creation overall: to be understood by someone, and to give someone the feeling that I understand them. Just like the great works I love helped me feel that someone in the world understands me.
Sharon Stark: It's important to me to be understood, but that doesn't mean I choose the "correct" interpretation of events for the viewer. I try to be clear about multiple possible ways to decode the events, leaving the viewer to swing between the options without being able to settle on one over another. That is to say, there is a certain absurd paradox in the world of the work (as in life) that cannot be absolutely resolved. For example, in the play Home Front, the audience is required to re-understand the chronology of events in every scene, deciding what is reality and what is imagination, what is objective and what is subjective in the characters' thoughts, and what once happened versus what is happening now.
Noam Gil: Theater is a medium that forces the playwright to be in dialogue with other creators (directors, artistic directors, dramaturgs, actors). These creators ask me questions, and I have to provide answers. Answers like "that’s just how it felt to me" or "I simply trusted my intuition" are not acceptable. At the same time, a play that is completely understood—where every single detail fits into some neat, organic structure—is a boring play. In short, it’s a delicate balancing act. A playwright needs to understand what he or she is writing about, but contrary to what artistic directors say, a good text is not just about a single topic or theme; it’s something that allows the viewer to form multiple interpretations, which may not align with one another at times.
What creators or theatrical traditions have influenced you, and contributed to shaping your writing style?
Danielle Cohen Levy: A defining moment in my writing was reading a short story by Kafka called The New Advocate. A very brief fragment (a single paragraph) about Alexander the Great's horse becoming a lawyer. I remember that when I finished reading the story, I paused for a moment and asked myself: Is it possible I just read a story about a horse that’s a lawyer? The ease with which reality slipped into a parallel world thrilled my imagination. There was no need for an explanation. Kafka’s writing revealed this audacity to me. Not why is this happening, but rather, given this reality, what happens now? There was so much freedom in that. It made my fingertips itch to start imagining and writing it down.
Sharon Stark: I am of course influenced by Theatre of the Absurd—Ionesco, Beckett; by postmodern philosophical ideas; by nonsense shows like "Michael" that prioritize the characters' quirks over narrative continuity or well-structured drama; and also fine dramatic plays based on a sense of confusion and disorientation can serve as inspiration—such as the play The Father by Zeller.
Maya Arad Yasur: Theatre of the Absurd; 1990s British plays that Aleks Sierz defined as In-Yer-Face Theatre (Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp, Mark Ravenhill); and I was particularly influenced by postdramatic theater from the Netherlands and Belgium at the turn of the century, which was largely devised theater. It recognizes the presence of the audience and the stage in a shared space, shatters representation, and acts upon the audience rather than just between the characters (if there are any) themselves. Therefore, the influences aren't from playwrights, but from directors: Johan Simons, Jan Fabre, sometimes Ivo van Hove, Katie Mitchell, groups like the Dutch De Veenfabriek, the German Rimini Protokoll, the English Complicité, and others.
Noam Gil: I have tons of plays at home by many playwrights that help me whenever I'm stuck. The three playwrights on my personal Mount Rushmore of playwriting are Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, and David Mamet. I have all of their plays at home, and I often steal from them. Even though much of what I write is considered absurd, I am much more drawn to realistic playwrights (I can't really stand Beckett or Ionesco). In the writing classes I teach, I always tell my students that reading plays by Ibsen, Chekhov, or Arthur Miller is the best writing class any playwright could take.
Maayan Even:: First of all, I love medieval theater. It's the period that is always despised and swept under the rug, and I can understand why, but I find a lot of inspiration in that theatrical spirit of fables, fragmented representations, and divine and natural forces on stage. In a way, I feel that almost everything I've written is a kind of morality play without the morality: The characters are always representations, the story is always a fable. I also really love Commedia dell'arte, the freedom to be foolish to the point of madness, the overly exaggerated til it's funny, the search for a single, clear, coarse element of a character. And though it might be considered embarrassing to say, I'm not ashamed to admit that I worship Hanoch Levin with the fervor of a Taylor Swift fan, and I don't think I'll ever stop adoring that crazy, wicked, generous genius. Apart from him, I drew (like everyone else, I think?) from the holy trinity of Beckett-Ionesco-Pinter, but honestly, I think Shakespeare truly invented everything and all the rest are just footnotes to Shakespeare. Besides that, I find a lot of inspiration in animated series (BoJack Horseman, South Park, Rick and Morty), and my dream has actually always been to create a cartoon on stage.
What is the role of language and dialogue in your writing? Do your characters speak differently than people in the real world?
Roy Chen: I feel like my characters speak like in the real world, but no character of mine has ever said "baduk" [slang for "for sure"], so I'm not totally certain about that.
Sharon Stark: The theatrical world is constructed through expressional means as well as plot, and one of these expressional means is, of course, language. Beyond content, tempo, wordplay, humor, inherent paradox, and double meaning are also important to me. This is aimed at creating a theatrical language with its own internal logic—a kind of closed, metaphorical world that dialogues with reality like a dream. The stylized text demands commitment in performance, like in dance, and helps lift what transpires to the level of imagery.
Ido Setter: My relationship with language and dialogue in writing is similar to that of my university teacher, Miriam Guretzky, who, when I suggested using Keter plastic chairs, said: "I don't want to see Keter chairs on a stage. It's enough that I see those ugly things in reality." I don't want people in my plays to talk "like in reality," not necessarily out of an aesthetic consideration (you can hear gorgeous sentences on a bus or in the street), but because in my view, a play should be a play, existing in the artificial space of stage and audience while being aware of that existence and its inherent artificiality, operating differently than the world outside the auditorium does. Since every play operates this way anyway, it seems strange to me to try to hide it, so I try to emphasize it as much as possible. One of the main tools I use is distancing the texts spoken by the characters from everyday speech as much as possible, by using a different register and writing them in meter.
How do you experience our reality outside of the theater? To what extent do you think it is realistic, absurd, apocalyptic, or fantastic? There is an argument that we live in an apocalyptic vision in a science fiction story, and that the news is a combination of nonsense, absurdity, and fantasy, more absurd than any imaginary satire. How do you experience the competition of reality with your imagination? We may reach a point where everything will be so extreme that realistic writing will be a subversive act in opposition to reality.
Sharon Stark: I experience reality as something very difficult to decipher, hence the sense of absurdity. My need to write is an attempt to focus on and decipher a particular issue in both the external and internal worlds.
Roy Chen: What is usually called "unrealistic" has always been my term for the inner world of the soul, which is part of reality—that's where the demons and angels are, the miracles and sins, the dreams and nightmares. Everyday reality has all of that too, but the bureaucracy is very different.
Maya Arad Yasur: Realistic writing seeks to create an illusion that this is simply how things are, which is why realism will always strive to imitate reality as it exists at the time the play takes place. Could absurdity or fantasy become the new realism? It could definitely be. And then new genres will be invented that seek to peel back the fantasy or absurd realism and reveal what rumbles beneath it using a form that we might not even recognize yet.
Noam Gil:When you look at Israel, the conclusion is that God is Ephraim Kishon and we are living inside one of his sketches. Life in Israel is a dark comedy. Sometimes very sad and gloomy, but also very stupid and senseless. As for the theater, since October 7th, theater (at least the repertory theater) has become much more escapist, and musicals have never been more popular. The theaters are afraid to deal with the burning issues tearing Israeli society apart. You can criticize that, but I also feel part of this desire to not cope (unlike the political pieces I wrote before the war). I still haven't managed to address what has happened to us over the past two years in my writing, especially when I'm flooded with horrors all day, every day. There’s a reason post-apocalyptic narratives are more popular in the United States than in Israel. For us, the apocalypse isn't a hobby. It's something deeply embedded in our consciousness.
Danielle Cohen Levy: In recent years, I've been dealing much more with "true stories." Some of my works actually begin with the words: "Everything you are about to see on stage really happened." I often find reality to be incomprehensible and extraordinarily intriguing. Stories interest me immensely, because telling a story always transcends into the realm of fantasy—the way the story takes shape, how I chose to tell it, the narrative connections, and the imagery revealed through language make reality no less poetic than fiction for me, and sometimes even more so.
Maayan Even: When I'm doing well, it seems funny to me how stupid our reality is; when I'm not so well, it makes me cry. But the reason reality is like this, in my eyes, is that everyone is so detached from themselves, so afraid to truly know themselves. That's why, to me, subversive art will always be that which demands the audience to meet itself, with all its sad, pathetic, ugly, and ridiculous parts, and any style that allows this is a welcome one.
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