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Drama gets displaced with 'Pangs'
(by Herb Hammer - June 24, 2009)
THEATER, BY HERB HAMMER
Drama gets displaced with 'Pangs'
Unless you've been following the historical events in Israel the past 60 years or so, you would barely have a clue as to what's going on in Motti Lerner's high-pitched drama "Pangs of the Messiah."
The play, being presented by the arts department of the Jewish Community Center and staged at the Cleveland Play House Brookes Theatre, is a slice of the possible future of Israel and most urgently the Jewish settlements on the West Bank.
Mr. Lerner's tightly wound characters are a family living in a West Bank settlement. The events surrounding the play are more of what it is about than what happens on stage.
This is where "Pangs of the Messiah" runs into trouble. When the critical portions of a stage play take place somewhere else, while the people on stage do little more than handwringing, the boredom can be overwhelming.
We are in the home of Shmuel, a politically connected rabbi out to stop a peace agreement conjured up by the United States government and soon to be signed by the Israeli prime minister and the head of the Palestinian Authority. The agreement would destroy all of the Jewish settlements and create a new Palestinian state. The lines would be drawn to where they were before the 1967 war.
If we didn't know all of this, the play tells it to us. The rest of the history will require a little studying or digging into the little you can learn from the program.
The plot which develops in Shmuel's living room has to do with the issues of the day. The characters are intended to be real people facing a terrible dilemma, but they're not. They turn out to be merely the many sides of the Palestinian issue Israelis face today.
All of the characters are squeezed into the right-wing side of the problem: save the settlements.
Shmuel believes in peaceful demonstrations. His son-in-law Benny is all for militant resistance. The rest are caught somewhere in the middle.
But the play runs along the same wire all the way through. The cordless phone almost becomes one of the characters. It seems that all eight in the cast are on the phone talking to the prime minister, to each other or to a voice that's unrecognizable.
Emotions run high, but again we are only told about things like dragging people out of their homes to demonstrate against the agreement, the bombing of buses and the killing of children.
"Pangs of the Messiah" is in good hands. Scott Plate directs and keeps his characters moving all in the right direction.
Charles Kartali is a believable Shmuel, capturing the role of the powerful leader about to admit failure.
Laura Carlson Tarantowski's set has a menacing appearance as walls with precise Hebrew writing lean in on the actions.
Motti Lerner's play takes place sometime in the near future. He doesn't take sides; he tells a story that may someday soon take place. He just didn't have to bother turning his story into a play.
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