Not a news cycle runs by without some mention of the nationalist violence and political turmoil that rocks the modern Middle East. Yet we seldom see the aftermath of each clash or casualty report -- the disfigured lives behind the geopolitics of the Muslim world.
It is a noble willingness to present the stories of such scarred individuals that gives Centerstage's newest drama, The Murder of Isaac, its greatest power. Authored by the celebrated Israeli playwright Motti Lerner, the show takes place inside a trauma ward, where the patients have decided to put on a play for their visitors. Their subject: the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was shot down in the wake of a 1995 rally.
Though Lerner's television work is celebrated in his home country, this is the American debut of this particular play. Yet you can't help greeting a mammoth ensemble drama like The Murder of Isaac with trepidation. Such a character-crammed set is easy to screw up, and in its weaker moments, it does seem like you're watching One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest goes to Jersualem. However, weak moments and strong moments alike are soon drowned out by full-bore emotion, unreprimanded absurdity and political anguish. In Lerner's Iraeli hospital, with its wide demographic of patients, fiery passions and grand ideas outweigh coherence and common sense. More often than not, the same goes for the play itself.
Reconciling Lerner's moral urgency with a mode as conceptually nimble and experimental as the play-within-a-play is, to say the least, an ambitious task, even for a Centerstage veteran like director Irene Lewis. The performances, though forceful, are fleeting: more like conveniently grouped, balanced-bias confessionals than a web of conflict. Though in a very inventive step, the prejudices and opinions of Lerner's characters are mirrored by the parts they take in the narrative of Rabin's demise. While they are, in the words of the opening song, "the living dead," The Murder of Isaac's protagonists boldly reflect the state of the Israeli nation.
There is no better example of this than Binder (David Margulies), an older patient who proudly assumes the role of the doomed Prime Minister. Like Rabin, he fought in the 1948 war for independence -- but equally like his assumed character, Binder is devoted to the prospect of peace and a belief in cultural understanding. While Binder feels shame for the deaths he caused during combat, and finds a kindred pacifist in Lola (Mia Dillon), a trauma center volunteer who has lost two sons to battle, not all the inmates abjure belligerence.
Another veteran, Yuda (Olek Krupa), who plays Rabin's political adversary, remembers his military days with wild enthusiasm. The center of the drama is constantly pulled between these two heavy performances, but neither provides the necessary ideological anchor for a single message, which might not be so bad after all.
Openly set in a generic hospital recreation room, with bland wall and folding tables, The Murder of Isaac includes such characters as a deranged Orthodox Jewish gravedigger (Jeffrey Ware), a nervous army colonel (Gordon Joseph Weiss) and a lonely young nationalist (Lise Bruneau).
There is no coherent pattern of interaction, no real structure -- a moot point, since after all, we are now among the painfully disconnected. Ideologically averse, Lerner's characters are designed not to belong together, which makes the play they perform an ironic and disheartening act of cooperation.
But is Lerner deflecting controversy? Nobody has entirely forgotten the hell storm that Steven Spielberg's Munich raised among the punditry, and by including every inch of the Israeli electorate, The Murder of Isaac may be taking a safer route. Still, I cannot help thinking that humanism, not safety from the Op-Ed pages, is the motive here. Even to those who have faith in it, and especially when mated to some of the protagonists' hard-line religion, violence is a plague. To Lerner, it can spread personal chaos regardless of political utility.
The Murder of Isaac may be a play of important ideas and sympathetic themes. However, on an aesthetic level, that does not let it off easy. I am not sure why Lerner felt compelled to include one song and dance routine comparing extreme Zionism to a masturbating college girl (and the Gaza Strip to a vagina), or, for that matter, why the volume of hysterical outbursts never seemed to abate. In trying to communicate a pressing theme so strongly, Lerner has subjugated material to message, clinging to the visceral while the artistic process slips through his fingers. Some of the most promising characters, like a wheelchair-bound young medic (Tzahi Moskovitz) and a mutilated opera singer (Charlotte Cohn) are pushed backstage in a whirlwind that, like Paul Haggis' similarly huge Crash, asks a lot of social questions but never bothers to look for answers.
I had observed the audience carefully when I saw the play myself, trying to gauge the reaction to each new issue, the impact of each striking emotion. For two hours, almost nobody moved, not even to laugh at the follicles of dark comedy that were occasionally detected. Only after the last, cathartic monologue had faded and the cast took its bows did anything seem to register: in a firm, appreciative, but most of all sympathetic applause. If The Murder of Isaac is not a superior drama, it transmits a superior consciousness, a segment of a national narrative that, to Lerner's eyes, continues to read like tragedy.
