Haifa Theatre Presents Season 2016-2017 Artistic Program

On a theme of plays that offer a reexamination of the term: the family and the sense of belonging and the transformation in the Israeli society, Haifa Theatre is proud to present the artistic repertoire for the upcoming year, 2016-2017, which is centered on original and varied theatrical creation of Israeli artists alongside emerging artists.

Nitza Ben-Zvi, Haifa Theatre CEO: "The upcoming season is characterized by original plays that deal with the many conflicts and challenges that make up the Israeli society without the fear of addressing delicate and challenging issues and with the search of fresh and groundbreaking artistic forms while encouraging and developing young Israeli artists".

Aquarium - Premiere

An innovative and imaginative project. Lip-sync movement theatre.
Director and adapter: Roni Brodetsky. Cast: Ha'Haifait group.
Premiering: September 2016.

A synchronized swimming team practices and performs in a pool. They practice, they talk, they argue, they fall in love and it all happens in the water, only when they speak it is not their natural voice that comes but the voice of elderly people.

The play "Aquarium" is an innovative theatrical experiment. Instead of a text, play and words, the production gathered documentary recordings of elderly people who talked about family, sex, destiny, diseases, conscience, Pnina Rosenblum and more.

The young Haifa group's actors lip-synch the documentary recordings of the elderly voices. The tension between the young and old body emphasizes the differences in the ways of thinking and speaking despite the resemblance between the generations.

Husbands and Wives - Premiere

A stage adaptation of Woody Allen's film.
Adapters: Amir Kliger, Moshe Naor.
Director: Moshe Naor.
Premiering: November 2016.

Husband and Wives is Woody Allen's most personal and biographical movie which he created at the time of his tough divorce from his then wife. As the original movie did, this stage adaptation presents the parallel stories of two couples and their marriages' processes of separations, defeats, war and insistency. This is a play that in a frighteningly honest way examines the consolation and lie that destructively blend with the ideal of bourgeois monogamy and the constant combination taking place in it, between the desire for stability and the aspiration for adventure and freedom. In an era that puts the love bone to a constant test this play finds the romance even in the very comic hell of a relationship in crisis and does so with great loyalty to the unembellished truth.

The Pillowman

By Martin McDonagh.
Director: Erez Drigues.
Premiering: January 2017.

Martin McDonagh is considered the greatest Irish playwright of our time and one of the most important voices in the worldwide theatre. The Pillowman, his most known Olivier Award winning play, he wrote because he wanted "to write something as horrific and amazing as The Brothers Grimm fairytales.

In a nameless totalitarian country two detectives arrest and investigate a writer who writes stories with a dark content and about violent towards children. Throughout the investigation the stories he wrote unroll and similarities to horrific unsolved murder cases are revealed in them. When the writer's brother, a mentally retarded young man, is also called for questioning the investigation becomes extreme and the dig for the truth reveals cruel family ties and demands crucial choices from the writer.

The critically acclaimed play is considered one of the highlights of contemporary playwriting and was successfully presented in many productions throughout the world while winning prestigious awards.

The Gilgul of Park Avenue - Premiere

An original adaptation of Nathan Englander's book.
Director: Roni Brodetsky.

An adaptation to the praised story collection by Nathan Englander that creates a tragic-comic, colourful and circus like mosaic out of the variegated exile stories he wrote about Jewish immigrants in today's New York. This is a kind of modern version to the East European Shtetl, about the whims, madness, loneliness and great sadness of the dreaming foreign Jew. Nathan Englander is an award winning author who is considered a leading representative of the generation of young American Jewish authors whose work rephrases the contemporary Jewish identity.

Death and the Maiden

By Ariel Dorfman.
Director: Itzik Weingarten.

An exemplary play which is considered as one of the most important plays of the 20th century. Through her nerve-racking story which is built as and revealed to be a thriller of a woman who believes who raped and tortured her under the previous dictatorial regime before the democracy is returned to her country. In a deep and complex manner the play deals with the terms of revenge and guilt, with the lack of chance to be released from the echoes of the past without a violent relief to the scars that were remained and with the fragility of the order and ethics, against her human soul's striving for an unreachable justice.

The characters of the husband, wife and captive man draw a kind of equilateral triangle which in its center is an uncompromising examination of the ability to achieve peace out of the trauma and creating a relationship based on muted pain asking to be expressed.

The First Coming - Premiere

By Uri Nitzan.

The original play "The First Coming" penned by Uri Nitzan, a senior psychiatrist and deputy-director at the open ward in the Shalvata Mental Health Center, was written throughout a long period of time while accompanying the artistic team in the theatre and informs about the coming of a unique and exciting voice to the Israeli theatre.

Using a unique and powerful language of rare beauty the play provides an uncommon and almost forbidden glimpse into a Haredi (strictly Orthodox) Jewish couple's wedding night while dealing with the inherent fear in their first intimate encounter and with the terrible fear of mating. It turns out that this is only but a deceptive appearance and what seemed at first as a look beyond the keyhole towards the intriguing and hidden world gradually reveals a much more complex, shocking and terrifying truth that brings the play closer to our non-religious world in a soul shaking way.

The play deals with the courage in the hurtful loss of a couple's intimacy which was ruined the moment it became public, published and exposed everywhere. Coming to deal with sexuality is a groundbreaking and exposed way, this important play sets itself a significant purpose: to bring back the mystery that belongs to the sexuality.

"The Wild Duck"

By Henrik Ibsen.
Director: Moshe Naor.

In the center of the play "The Wild Duck" is the description of the inevitable crash of one family whose foundations are based on lies and hidings, and of the fear of the truth's deadly power and its demanding cost of living. The play dares to prove how the term of happiness itself contains an enormous component of repression and self-delusion and contradicts the sacred honesty as an allegedly supreme goal. This family's story is an intense and shaking allegory of the way that the feeling of durability, stability and belonging- to the family, society and community- is mostly based on the ability to avoid exposing skeletons of the past and willingly choosing blindness.

Yehezkel and Perah - Premiere

By Zadok Zemach.

The two monodramas "Yehezkel and Perah", by the playwright and author Zadok Zemach ("Cracks in the Concrete", "Screwed"), allows a couple of aging Middle Eastern characters to be heard, as their values and world view are perceived as anachronism while their rich, rare and decorated language is extolled as a memory to the strength of the becoming extinct Hebrew language.

At the same time that it reveals the Middle Eastern's strong and resonant pain and his foreignness among his family that changes its face in a painful process of transformation and modernization, the language of these plays illustrates the tension between folklore, which is often used as a silencing and covering up tool, and the living, moving and unique beauty of a going extinct Middle Eastern voice which lost its way against the reality crumbling around it and its confusion leaves it bruised and desperate for an understanding and a path. These plays are for the caged and helpless voices which tell their stories to a vanished ear with the intoxicating beauty of a language ceasing to exist.

Uncle Lion's Tales - Children's Play - Premiere

By Yanz Levi.
Director: Moshe Naor.

Yanz Levi's bestselling children's book series, winner of the 2010 Public Libraries award, receives its stage adaptation for the first time. The hero of the series is Uncle Lion who tells his three nephews tales about imaginary adventures in invented places.

Alongside the new plays, the following plays will continue running this year as well:
"A Trumpet in the Wadi", the musical "Billy Schwartz", "4.48 Psychosis", "That the Girl Won't Wake Up", "Good Night Mom", "The Night of the Twentieth", "The Open Couple", "An Hour of Quiet", " Glengarry Glen Ross", "Grounded", "Strudel" - in Russian, "A Very Simple Story" - in Russian.

Continuing children plays:
"Adventures of a Blue Donkey", "Euphoria- The world's happiest city", "What's Your Story, Tamar?", and "On Every Wonder".

Photo credit: Ronen Boidek.