Wandering Israeli
Elad Shippony brings his Hebrew theater to English
Elad Shippony is as independent as it gets. For the past 10 years, he has sold his theatrical show, The Wandering Israeli, based on his personal travel stories, solely through hard work and word-of-mouth. This summer, Shippony developed the original Hebrew version into English and is appearing every week at the Arab-Hebrew Theater in Jaffa through the end of August.
Shippony will take The Wandering Israeli on an American tour starting on September 11 in Los Angeles, then going on to Palo Alto on the 12th and New Jersey on the 15th.
Shippony sat down with The Jerusalem Post to talk about using language as a means of connection, the joy of traveling, and selling the English show before it actually existed.
Can you tell me about yourself?
I was born in Israel, but when I was three my parents moved to LA. That’s where I grew up, but I always knew I would come back because they instilled in me this love for Israel. It was my dream to become a journalist. I had a choice to either go to Columbia University on scholarship or go back to Israel and join the army. So I came back to Israel and joined the army. I was adopted on Kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon. It’s funny because it’s the same kibbutz Ehud Barak was born on. He was the IDF chief of staff when I was a soldier. I lived next door to his mother. She was working in the laundromat. It’s only in Israel that the mother of the commander the IDF could be folding my clothes! I served in Golani and I really enjoyed the army. When I finished, I went to travel for a few years. I spent a year in Africa. I bought all kinds of art in Africa that I sold on Venice Beach in California, which helped pay for my next trip to South America. I learned Spanish during the year I was in South America and realized how amazing it is to travel when you can actually speak with the local people. It gives you a whole new dimension.
Did Spanish help you tremendously in LA as well?
Oh yeah, suddenly I was walking the streets of LA and wow, I can speak to people! When you speak to people in their native tongue, they open up to you. That’s when I really found a love for languages. When I came back to Israel after traveling, I became a youth counselor on Kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon. Every year, I would leave for three months to travel. In 1994, right after the peace signing between Jordan and Israel, I decided that I wanted to learn Arabic. I packed a backpack and went to Amman [Jordan] for three months. I stayed in a hostel and learned Arabic off the streets. I came back fluent. It’s changed my life in Israel to be able to speak Arabic. In 1999, I got married and we went traveling to New Zealand. We came back and she was pregnant with our first daughter, so I realized that I needed to find a real job. High-tech was booming at the time and I got a good job as a technical writer. It was nice and a good-paying job, but inside I knew it wasn’t my calling. So I started to write my travel stories.
These travel stories became the basis for ‘The Wandering Israeli’?
Yes, I had never performed before or learned acting professionally, but I thought I would see what happened. I knew I needed something more in my life. After I had written a few travel stories, I started marketing them as a show. It started off really slowly. I was doing it with another guy who is a percussionist. We were invited to perform in small gatherings like birthday parties. We did that for a year, and then it started to pick up. We added another musician, a guitarist. Then we found a director, who worked with us. She is amazing; she made the show what it is. Within a year of working with her, we were performing on kibbutzim and moshavim.
Can you describe the show?
I go in and out of character; I’m the narrator and the various characters. The main story is my time in Amman. The live music sets the tone. For instance, when I go to South America or Africa, the music changes. It’s not just a travel story, but things that relate to Israelis. The show is very funny. The humor is not below the belt; it’s clean. We’ve been invited to perform in front of religious communities. We’ve performed in front of Arabs also. We performed a few months ago at a teacher’s conference in Carmiel and half of them were Arab. They enjoyed it very much because the Arab characters have a prominent position in the show. But nothing is political. The whole idea is very optimistic, so people connect with it. The story is about traveling and there is not one person who doesn’t find joy in traveling, whether you’re a backpacker or you go to the most expensive hotels.
So there are two shows now, one in Hebrew and one in English?
We started off with the Hebrew show. We performed that for the past 10 years with no external PR, and it’s a good show. We also performed once a month in Tel Aviv. All of it was word-of-mouth. I recently decided that I wanted to take it on tour to the United States, but when I contacted production companies that specialize in bringing Israeli productions to the US, they all said no. All I need to hear is “you can’t.” So we started doing it ourselves. We figured out how it works and that the main areas are LA, Palo Alto, Boston and New Jersey. So we sent out mail. When we sent mail out to the Palo Alto JCC, the woman who was in charge of cultural events saw our promotional material and recognized our percussionist because he was with her in class in Hod Hasharon. We closed the show right away. In Jersey, we kept trying to contact this one particular lady at the JCC who we knew could help us, but we weren’t having any luck getting through. One day, I’m sitting in the dining hall on my kibbutz, telling my neighbors this story, and they told me that they have a cousin in New Jersey who they can connect me to. It turned out that the cousin was the same woman we were trying to reach! Those are things that only happen to Israelis.
The thing was that we said initially we needed four shows in order to make the American tour viable, but we only had three because Boston didn’t want us. So I was thinking what I could do, and I thought of an English show. This way we could sell it back to back with the Hebrew one, and it worked. I sold them the English show without actually having one at that point. Now we had six shows, one in Hebrew and one in English at each venue, but we needed to develop the English show. So I went to the Arab-Hebrew Theater in Jaffa and convinced the manager to let us perform there every Monday night. We’ve been doing that for the whole summer. It turns out that there are no long-running theatrical English shows geared for tourists in Israel. Sometimes you follow an idea, and it turns out to be an amazing opportunity.
Shippony performs The Wandering Israeli in English at the Arab-Hebrew Theater in Jaffa every Monday this month. To purchase tickets to the Wandering Israeli at the Arab-Hebrew Theater, go to: http://www.arab-hebrew-theatre.org.il/en/show.php?id=2783.
For more information on the Wandering Israel, go to: https://www.facebook.com/iNoded/.