|
Interview With Niki Landau
In Reading Hebron's development, and in its debut performance, Niki played various roles. She spoke with Susannah Schmidt from her home in Toronto.
The second draft of Reading Hebron was created mostly in rehearsal at Playwrights' Workshop and then at Factory Theatre. What was it like as an actor rehearsing for a production which was also a work in progress? Insane. Jason is the kind of writer who will dump thirty pages and re-write in a second. He works with the actors right up until the end. As a writer, he is really open to ideas or questions-- scenes could be taken apart and re-worked. It's about a journey, and there's lots of ways to go on the journey. On the level of working on a new script, the freedom that was allowed was wonderful. It was very exciting as an actor. I was chosen for the production in Toronto [after doing the workshop] I think, not because I did exactly what Jason wanted, but because I did a different interpretation. There was the freedom to explore and say what I thought, and I think it worked well because of the partnership there [between the actors, writer, and director]. Were you improvising scenes? There wasn't a lot of actual improvising in rehearsal. At the Factory, sometimes we'd get to a point where Jason would say, "say something here," but that was just about the only time. What would happen when we were working at Playwrights' was he'd take into account all of our knowledge in the writing. We all became involved in reading [about the Hebron massacre] -- he'd brought in piles and piles of research -- and our theories were welcomed, and our arguments too. We'd go out to lunch and have huge discussions about what we'd just done, or what we'd read, and then he'd write scenes. Sometimes he'd lift ideas or phrases we'd used, and throw them back in a different way, or make fun of us, or he'd use them as the basis for an argument in the piece. He picked our brains, there was a lot of exchange going on. For some of us, especially the Jewish actors, because of how involved
we were, it was a very emotional experience. It touched on questions
that were huge... questions of identity... responsibility. The other
woman involved [Felicia] and I, sometimes [would] have to go to the
washroom to pull ourselves together. The speech made by the young Palestinian
at the end who was tortured, which sounds as though Jason is making love--
that was very emotional. Basically, working in the piece changed me,
it was an incredible experience, and it was the reason I went back to
Israel.
How long before the performance did you get a final script? We were already into previews and a third of the play wasn't finished a week before [the opening]. Brian [the director] said, "let's rehearse as if this is the play," and he did a good job directing, and Jason said "yes" to most of what was going on. Jason wrote twenty three different endings, and it just wasn't working. He kept going away and coming back, and towards the end, we were getting scared he just wouldn't return. One time, when he brought the twenty-third ending in, it just didn't work. Jason said, "let's just forget it. I can't finish this fucking scene, and it's been a year, so let's just forget it." No one knew if he meant, forget this scene, or forget the whole play. Michael Healey [who was playing Nathan, the main character] was just sitting there going white. Brian said "take ten minutes," so we left. When we came back Brian had rearranged things but kept the writing, and it worked. Michael had quite a journey. We were playing characters to support his journey, but he had to figure it out pretty much on his feet since things were changing so much right to the end. He had already worked with Jason before and published a diary about the experience. Was it difficult to perform at the Factory, knowing intimately how challenging the piece was? Oh, yeah. I mean, family-wise, I'd end up having fights where it would be a question of whether or not I held Jason's views, and if I did I would be attacked, or not always attacked, but really questioned. I felt... I had to take responsibility for what I was saying on the stage, there was no choice. I had a ten year old cousin who came and who still asks me questions. It was such a way of opening up these things [about Jewish identity]. Alon [Nashman, another actor in the production] is a religious Jew and he had great difficulty, because he was [also] made responsible. You just couldn't get away from it, the questions to yourself and from everyone else. Not to be sensationalist, but we've heard stories about people storming out of the run at the Factory. There were people who walked out and stormed out. Five minutes before the show, we'd be told that there were Orthodox people in the front rows who looked very hostile, and we hadn't even begun. It was usually towards the end when the walkouts happened. I was playing Rabin's grand-daughter having sex while giving a eulogy-- I mean, this was just shocking... unfathomable, disgraceful for most people. Some of the disruptions would happen then. Also, people couldn't take it when [the character of] Baruch Goldstein [who committed the massacre] came onto the stage to read his poem. On Saturday night this woman stood up right then and in full voice started speaking in Hebrew, and then about ten or fifteen people deliberately stood up and left the theatre. I don't think it was impromptu, but a "we're protesting" thing. It sounds like a difficult performance. [Felicia and I] were playing the judges and we were crying. It felt like when you have terrible, awful news that you have to give to someone that you love, and there was no backing out, I had to do it as part of the community. I'd never felt like that before. It affected a lot of people in the same way, not just the actors, because it put these feelings and ideas on the table that tend to be hidden. The former deputy minister of Education, Charles Pascal, called me six times to talk about it. Six times! He said he'd been thinking about these things for so long, and someone finally put it into words. He wound-up having dinner with my father. That was the thing about Reading Hebron. Jason allowed all of it to show, all the tensions for modern Jews, and some people were very threatened by this, because like in any group of people who have been victimized, there is a fear of exposing weakness and fear of further attack and suffering. So were people reacting to fear with outrage? Yeah. And a lot of the time it was scary. There were threatening phone calls, letters. Jason got a call from a guy who claimed to be Baruch Goldstein, [and] the guy who killed Rabin. He called saying that Jewish law allows killing, if it is self defense, and he wanted to meet with Jason over lunch to talk about it. I heard a noise once behind the stage and just freaked out that something was going to happen, [it] was that kind atmosphere.
How interested are people in theatre that challenges accepted values? Oh... [it] terrifies people. That's why no other theatre will [produce the play] they're terrified of it. Factory was the only one that would take the risk. [Most theatres] say either "we don't have a big enough Jewish audience, so it's not relevant," which is not true, or they say that they do have a Jewish audience and it would just be too risky, they can't chance losing their audience. In New York, there was some interest of wanting to do it, but in the end they didn't, because it was too much. In New York, someone would get shot or something. That's when we can be happy about Canadian passivity. Yeah. But it was exciting too, to see Canadians riled up enough to yell at the box office staff because of a show. [The box office staff] would get lectures on Abraham and on biblical lineage... people shouting at them after the show, mid-way through the show... I remember seeing this poor lady [working the box office] with a headset on behind the glass saying, Abraham? Who? Did you get feedback from the Arab community? Yes. Different people in the Arab community would come up afterwards as well. Many of them were deeply touched and wanted increased communication [with the Jewish community]. Some were surprised that a Jew would write such a play. Some of them were angry for different reasons. Ironically, a lot of times Jews and Arabs took offense to exactly the same parts, saying that a certain scene depicted the other group more sympathetically. That it was biased. CBC came and interviewed a guy from a Canadian Arab organization, and he said it was anti-Arab. Then that's exactly what the Jewish person interviewed said, that it was anti-semitic. And Jason was called a self-hating Jew. Some of the Arabs would ask how come the parts weren't played by Arabs. Or, for the speech at the end by the Palestinian who had been tortured, some Arabs wanted to know why he was staged at the back instead of the front. And some Jews wondered why it was included. Basically both groups were coming from a victimized perspective for different reasons. I pointed out that Jason was a Jew, so this was coming from the Jewish perspective... which, of course, [isn't a unified] perspective... People from every angle had a hard time with this, because there was no black or white activist stance. It wasn't just orthodox people at all, a lot of left wingers hated it... it made everyone look at any sense of moral superiority and this attitude of how generous we are to give any land back to Arabs. Why did some left-wingers hate it? Jason likes to take shots at everyone, he even took shots at Spielberg. The piece put into question, not just the meaning of Orthodoxy or Zionism, but what it means to be a non-practicing Jew in North America, and what that means to the relationship to Israel and so on. Nathan's search as a Jew is connected to what it means to be a father, to be a son, that's the meaning of the seder scenes. In Reading Hebron, is questioning being a Jew at the basis of questioning how to be a father and a son? I don't know, but it's all involved. For Nathan, it's not just to be a father or son but to be a person at all... to have a job... to make choices. It's easy to be non-practicing and to say "I was born with it but, it's not for me. I don't respect it so much." But we're handed some things at birth, and it's about caring about what we've been given. It was not about activism but about looking inside at a personal level, which is always going to be painful...But you have to take responsibility, and it comes with a price. You can't always say, "what I do is not causing any ill." Are these questions of identity and responsibility modern day versions of Exodus themes: suffering, wandering... the Promised Land... Yeah, but in this generation we don't have the immediate experience with oppression, and, at the same time, we're coming so close to the Holocaust. So there's this combination of having power with a victim mentality, without the full understanding of the picture. It's difficult to look at history and think, "you were never better, you were just never in power." It would be really similar if women were to say that we're always virtuous and could never be evil oppressors. Any group that gets into power with a victim attitude, that's a lethal combination. There's some people who say, "anything to protect," and I understand why. When you look at history-- it seems like too much. But at the same time you have to look at the reality that that's when madness begins, when any extremes are justifiable because of fear-- that's how the Holocaust happened. So is what surfaces out of Nathan's journey in Reading Hebron like a religious quest? It's maybe what religion should be... perhaps it's spiritual, or about your moral fabric. When I went to Israel it was to say, I have huge problems with this place but I have to say first, I love it. I love these people. I think it was like that for Nathan in the script, once he owns it, the reason he's critical is because he loves it: it's me I'm criticizing. I'm implicated. 
|
