Cameri to hold International Theater Festival in December

The Tel Aviv Cameri Theater will hold the 10th International and Original Play Festival from December 4 to December 12. Two of the plays come from Poland and Croatia respectively, the rest are produced locally.

Poland is sending the Warsaw Municipal Theater with Historia Yakuba (The History of Jacob) by Tadeusz Slobodzianek, whose wrenching Our Class was a Cameri/Habima production in 2014. Initially also set in World War II, Jacob’s History tell the story of a Jewish baby hidden with a Catholic family. Trained as a priest, he discovers his Jewish roots and must come to grips with his dual identity. In Polish with Hebrew surtitles – I do wish they’d also provide English ones, as I’m sure the theater has them.

From Z/K/M Theater in Croatia comes The Notebook, adapted from the best-selling novel of that name by Agota Kristof. It tells of twins in a small town, again during WWII, who mold themselves to fit in with the frightful brutality surrounding them. In Croatian with Hebrew surtitles.

The five local productions are Hanoch Levin’s immortal Ya’akobi and Leidenthal and his Endless Mourning, I Am Sysiphus, which is three shorts, as well as Terror by Ferdinand von Schirach, and Bereaved by Yehoshua Sobol. Terror, directed by Sara von Schwartze, is a courtroom drama in which the audience gets to decide the verdict of a pilot accused of mass murder. His missile disintegrated the lives of 164 passengers and a plane seized by terrorists who had threatened to crash it into a football stadium filled with 70,000 spectators. The Sobol play puts together an Arab and a Jewish couple who have both lost their sons to the interminable Arab-Jewish conflict. Grief is grief, isn’t it? The director is Alon Tiran.