A post-modern classic by Hanoch Levin, a couples recurring life pattern, in a never ending cycle of existential crisis. Levin has been called the Israeli Beckett and is Israel’s greatest playwright to date. And yet his work is virtually unknown in the United States. We produced thius play in both the original Hebrew and in a splendid Yiddish translation by Eli Rosen. We will be reviving it this month at our studio theater.
Check out these links if you want to know more about him and his work
Hanoch Levin, Israel’s leading playwright, who spent more than three decades trying to strip the nation of self-congratulatory armor and force it to examine what he considered its hypocrisy and self-delusion, died on Wednesday of bone cancer. He was 56.
Although his first plays caused enormous controversy when they were performed in the 1960’s and 70’s, Mr. Levin’s death was greeted here with profound dismay at the highest cultural and political levels.
Prime Minister Ehud Barak called him ”one of the greatest playwrights that Israel has ever had.”
The Education Minister, Yossi Sarid, said he ”showed us what we really looked like when we were still saying, ‘Surely, that can’t be us.’ ” He added, ”Levin saved us because without him we wouldn’t have known that the social and political ulcer was about to explode.”
Mr. Levin came to prominence in 1968 with his play, ”You, Me and the Next War,” staged in a tiny club in south Tel Aviv. It was a fierce critique of the euphoria that swept the country after its victory in the 1967 Six-Day War when Israel captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula and found itself the military ruler of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
