Review from the Canadian Jewish News

Reading Hebron's Humour Offensive
By BEN ROSE
CJN Staff Reporter
Canadian Jewish News, November 28, 1996

TORONTO- It is sad that a play about such serious subjects as the massacre at Hebron and Palestinian-Israeli peace should be subtitled, "A comedic quest for truth."
For Reading Hebron by Jason Sherman is not a true comedy, though the playwright uses the ability of Jewish people to laugh at themselves as a way of hurting them.

Since the hype sent to the media in advance clearly states that Nathan Abramowitz has come to the conclusion that the Israeli government condoned the massacre of 29 Palestinians by Dr. Baruch Goldstein, how can the play be viewed as an honest examination of the tragedy ?

It is all very well to say Abramovitz is a Canadian Jew searching for his identity, but not, in this reviewer's opinion, is it legitimate to use the Jewish penchant for self-criticism to clothe his search as comedy. I found it offensive when Abramovitz, in a burst of repartee, said, "there's no business like SHOAH business."

Sherman has tapped once again into the mother load of poking fun at Jews, which strikes a responsive chord with some theatre audiences. In League of Nathans, Abramowitz is disillusioned by what he finds in Israel. Now, some years later, the playwright has raised the stakes and blames the Israeli government for the Hebron massacre.

Along the way he overdoes the stereotypical Jewish mother's concern for her son and two grandchildren. Sure, this brings laughs, but for what purpose?

The acting by the five-member cast headed by Michael Healey is formidable, the direction by Brian Quirt ingenious, even brilliant, the set design by Dany Lyne clever and efficient. The wailing from inside the Tomb of the Patriarchs sets the stage crisply.

It's too bad that such a witty, and densely-layered script examining the conscience of one Jew is built on a fault line.

 


Review from the Globe and Mail

Massacre goes under a microscope
by KATE TAYLOR
Theatre Critic
Globe and Mail, Toronto, Saturday November 23, 1996

On Feb. 24, 1994, a Jewish settler named Baruch Goldstein from the West Bank city of Hebron shot 29 Palestinian worshipers at the tomb of the Patriarchs, a site sacred to both Jews and Muslims. If Jason Sherman's Reading Hebron is often very funny, it's because this new play, which opened last week at Toronto's Factory Theatre, is not about those who died. Rather, it is an examination of what it means to be Jewish when Israel is oppressing Palestinians.

Nathan, (Michael Healey), an alter ego for Sherman himself...is a liberal Toronto Jew obsessed with the massacre...


Near the beginning of the play, witnesses from the inquiry pop up in small windows in the set, giving their testimony. They reveal a great deal of their own racism toward the Palestinians as they describe details of the massacre, such as a rule that allowed Jewish settlers to enter the tomb without disarming first. That straightforward documentary style quickly breaks down, however, as Nathan gives voice to his nervous thoughts and the people he would like to question actually appear on stage.


In Nathan's imagination, a helpful staffer at the Israeli consulate lunches into a tirade about self-hating, assimilated Jews; his cousin's husband speaks in the paranoid whispers of a right-wing Jewish terrorist, the loan officer at his bank becomes a cigar-puffing capitalist mocking Noam Chomsky's theory that Israel is America's client state, and Chomsky himself appears at a Passover seder.


Both in Sherman's script and Quirt's quick direction, the subtlety and humour of these switches from the real to the imaginary are brilliant. There are no dimming lights, no funny sounds, just seamless scenes played by Healey and an ever-versatile cast of four (Niki Landau, Alon Nashman, Earl Pastko and Felicia Shulman-Rowat). . .

The play's smart humour- dark, daring, almost obscene at times- is mainly directed at Jews, but also touches Palestinians and takes the odd nasty shot at Gentile Canadians. It diminishes as the play progresses, building toward its final painful lines, a difficult movement that Quirt makes utterly plausible.

What is less integrated into the play is the story of Nathan's private life, left on the back burner while he pursues his research. . .Both his ex-wife and the amorous boss [depicted] question his compassion as he neglects those close to him in order to worry about a faraway massacre.

Indeed, like Nathan himself, this play is better at dealing with ideas and ethics than with emotions and personalities. Only Nathan is really a character; the rest are stereotypes (the predatory single woman, the Jewish mother) or political mouthpieces (Chomsky, Edward Said, New York Times editor A.M. Rosenthal and so on).

Despite the best efforts of the cast, this Who's Who can be confusing- if there ever was a play in need of detailed program notes, this is it, and Factory doesn't provide them. . .

These problems do not fell Reading Hebron, however, for the play belongs to Nathan. It is his interior monologue, his intellectual debate. For all his anxiety, guilt and emotional removal, Healey makes of him a sympathetic character, visibly struggling with a profound challenge to his own identity as a moral man. . . Rarely can you see politics so unapologetically and so successfully argued on stage.