The Public's THE HUMAN SCALE Plays Tel Aviv, 5/18 - 5/21

By: May. 11, 2011
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The Public Theater and 3-Legged Dog have been invited by Director General Noam Semel to perform their acclaimed production of THE HUMAN SCALE at The Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv, Israel, making it the first American production at The Cameri in its 66-year history. Written and performed by Pulitzer Prize-winner Lawrence Wright and directed by Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis, THE HUMAN SCALE will make its Israeli premiere on Wednesday, May 18 and run through Saturday, May 21 at Cameri Theatre 4, located at 18 Shaul Hamelech Boulevard.

An unsparing and graphic exploration of the ongoing crisis in Gaza, THE HUMAN SCALE will be performed in English with Hebrew translation. After performing in Tel Aviv, the artists will travel to the West Bank to visit theaters and artists in the Palestinian-occupied territories.

"We are honored and humbled to bring The Human Scale to The Cameri," said Director Oskar Eustis. "We look forward to this being an important step forward in our dialogue with Mideast artists and audiences."

Wright's powerful essay about the ongoing crisis in Gaza called "Captives," published in the November 9, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, led to the creation of THE HUMAN SCALE which was produced Off-Broadway by The Public Theater and 3-Legged Dog last October for four weeks.

THE HUMAN SCALE will feature original designs by Aaron Harrow (video); Deb Sullivan (lighting); Matt Hubbs (sound); Michael Friedman (composer); and David Korins (scenic consultation).
LAWRENCE WRIGHT (Author/Performer) is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for The New Yorker. He joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1992, where his work has won the National Magazine Award for Reporting as well as the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism, and Overseas Press Club's Ed Cunningham Award for Best Magazine Reporting. Wright is the co-writer (with Ed Zwick and Menno Meyjes) of the film The Siege, starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis and Annette Bening. He also wrote the script of the Showtime movie, "Noriega: God's Favorite," directed by Roger Spottiswoode and starring Bob Hoskins. His history of Al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, was published to immediate and widespread acclaim, spending eight weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and being translated into 25 languages. It won the Lionel Gelber Award for nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Award for History, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. In 2006, he premiered his one-man play, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, at The New Yorker Festival, and then enjoyed a sold-out six-week run at the Culture Project. It was made into a documentary film, directed by Alex Gibney who won the 2008 Academy Award for Feature Documentary, and aired on HBO in September 2010. Wright has published six previous books: City Children, Country Summer; In the New World: Growing Up with America, 1960 - 1984; Saints & Sinners; Remembering Satan; Twins: Genes, Environment, and the Mystery of Identity; and God's Favorite. Wright is a fellow at the NYU Law School's Center on Law and Security and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

OSKAR EUSTIS (Director) is the Artistic Director of The Public Theater and has worked as a director, dramaturg, and artistic director for theaters around the country. From 1981 through 1986 he was resident director and dramaturg at the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco, and Artistic Director until 1989, when he moved to the L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum as Associate Artistic Director until 1994. Mr. Eustis then served as Artistic Director at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island for 11 years. In 2005 he took the helm at New York's Public Theater. Throughout his career, Mr. Eustis has been dedicated to the development of new plays as both a director and a producer. At The Public he directed the New York premiere of Lawrence Wright's The Human Scale, Rinne Groff's Compulsion and The Ruby Sunrise, and Hamlet for Shakespeare in the Park. At Trinity Rep, he directed the world premiere of Paula Vogel's The Long Christmas Ride Home (Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Production); Homebody/Kabul (Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Production). He has directed the world premiere of Rinne Groff's The Ruby Sunrise and Compulsion; Angels in America, Part I: Millennium Approaches (Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Director); Angels in America, Part II: Perestroika; as well as world premieres of plays by Philip Kan Gotanda, David Henry Hwang, Emily Mann, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ellen McLaughlin, and Eduardo Machado. He commissioned Tony Kushner's Angels in America at the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco and directed its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum. He was a professor of Theatre, Speech and Dance at Brown University, where he founded and chaired the Trinity Rep/Brown University Consortium for professional theater training. He received an honorary doctorate from Rhode Island College in 1999 and Brown in 2001 and has held professorships at Brown, UCLA and NYU. He currently serves as Professor of Dramatic Writing and Arts and Public Policy at New York University. Eustis was the lead producer on the Tony Award-winning revival of HAIR, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and The Merchant of Venice on Broadway.
THE CAMERI THEATRE OF TEL AVIV (Noam Semel, Director General; Omri Nitzan, Artistic Director) was founded in 1944, and is Israel's biggest theatre and one of the country's six public theatres - the municipal theatre of Tel Aviv. Each year The Cameri stages up to ten new productions, together with twenty productions from previous years, which are performed before audiences totaling 1,000,000 people in Tel Aviv, throughout Israel and all over the world - some 2,500 performances every year. The Cameri has 40,000 subscribers. So far, The Cameri has produced more than 500 productions on its various stages. The theatre's company includes 100 of Israel's finest actors, and its plays are directed by celebrated directors from Israel and abroad. In 2003 The Cameri moved into its new and sophisticated home in the Tel Aviv Performing Arts Center complex. Three years ago, in a step almost unequalled for an institution of the arts, The Cameri Theatre was awarded the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement and Special Contribution to Society and the State of Israel. In their decision the judges noted: "The sixty-year-old Cameri Theatre is a young, involved, responsive, socially-oriented theatre that is attentive to the reality in which we live and responds to current needs. The Cameri Theatre is engaged in fostering and developing original Israeli drama and strengthening ties with the finest culture and modern drama in the world. The Cameri Theatre strives towards excellence on the level of artistic performance in all its branches: acting, directing, sets and music. It nurtures individuality in terms of content, spirit, and character, fosters and encourages young actors and advances them. The Cameri Theatre strives to broaden the circle of audiences and reaches out to new audiences, including performances in the periphery and on the confrontation line, and in its new home it constitutes an artistic and cultural attraction to all social strata and age groups in Israeli society."

3-Legged Dog Media + Theater Group is a not-for-profit arts organization that operates 3LD Art & Technology Center where it produces new, original works in theater, performance, media and hybrid forms. Their mission is to explore the narrative possibilities created by digital technology, and to provide an environment for curated resident artists to create new tools and modes of expression so that they can excel across a range of disciplines. With this residency program 3-Legged Dog has transformed a tightly knit producing company into an international community that directly facilitates the work of approximately 650 artists a year from 23 countries around the world. 3-Legged Dog's own productions and installations have been seen at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Venice Biennale, Signature Theatre, The Kitchen, PS 122, La Mama, the Ontological Theater, and at their home 3LD Art & Technology Center. In 2011, 3-Legged Dog productions, Losing Something and Fire Island will be featured at the Prague Quadrennial Exhibition of Performance Design. The company has won numerous awards including the American Theatre Wing's Hewes Design Award and The Rockefeller Foundation Cultural Innovation Fund Award. For more, visit www.3ldnyc.org.

THE PUBLIC THEATER (Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director; Joey Parnes, Interim Executive Director) was founded by Joseph Papp in 1954 and is now one of the nation's preeminent cultural institutions, producing new plays, musicals and productions of classics at its downtown home and at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. The Public Theater's mandate to create a theater for all New Yorkers continues to this day on stage and through extensive outreach programs. Each year, more than 250,000 people attend Public Theater-related productions and events at six downtown stages, including Joe's Pub, and Shakespeare in the Park. The Public Theater's productions have won 42 Tony Awards, 151 Obies, 41 Drama Desk Awards and four Pulitzer Prizes. Fifty-four Public Theater productions have moved to Broadway, including Sticks and Bones; That Championship Season; A Chorus Line; For Colored Girls...; The Pirates of Penzance; The Tempest; Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk; The Ride Down Mt. Morgan; Topdog/Underdog; Take Me Out; Caroline, or Change; Passing Strange; the revival of HAIR; Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and The Merchant of Venice. For more visit www.publictheater.org.

THE HUMAN SCALE, produced by The Public Theater and 3-Legged Dog, will run at Tel Aviv's The Cameri Theatre from Wednesday, May 18 through Saturday, May 21 at 9 p.m. Tickets can be purchased by calling 972-3-6060960, www.cameri.co.il, or by email at booking@cameri.co.il.

The Cameri Theatre 4 is located at 18 Shaul Hamelech Boulevard, Tel Aviv, Israel. THE HUMAN SCALE will be performed in English with Hebrew translation.

 



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