Review: Staged Reading TO THE END OF THE LAND

To The End of The Land

Written by David Grossman, Adapted & Directed by Guy Ben-Aharon; Featuring Jeremiah Kissel and Sheila Stasack

Performances by Israeli Stage: November 18 at Temple Isaiah, Lexington, MA; November 22 at Clark University, Worcester, MA; February 4, 2014, at Boston University; Tickets $10/$5 students at www.IsraeliStage.com

Israeli Stage is marking its third birthday with a flurry of staged readings this month at a number of venues in and around the city. Producing Artistic Director and Founder of Israeli Stage Guy Ben-Aharon, recently named one of 18 Chai in the Hub honorees by Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP), presented his adaptation of David Grossman's To The End of The Land at Temple Isaiah in Lexington last night. Two additional performances are scheduled, as well as three December stagings of Anat Gov's Oh, God, previously seen at the Goethe-Institut and Boston University.

Grossman's 2010 critically-acclaimed novel stems from his own experiences as a father of an Israeli soldier (who was killed in 2006), but he gives a fictionalized account that is both a love story and a tragedy. In Ben-Aharon's concise adaptation, Ora (Sheila Stasack) and Avram (Jeremiah Kissel) are revisiting important segments of their lives spent together and apart as they hike the Israel National Trail. The beauty of Grossman's words, and the emotional power of Stasack's and Kissel's reading of them, suggest that To The End of The Land holds promise for a fully-realized play. Ben-Aharon acknowledges that he would like to expand it to a length of 85 or 90 minutes (from its present 65 minutes), but it is a work in progress. It bodes well that the members of the audience, those who had read the book and those who had not, found it interesting and engaged in a lively discussion with the actors and director in a post-show talkback.