The Drimer sisters mount a theatrical rescue mission for their father in new show

A Good Place Where All is Bad was created by Nachmi Drimer’s daughters Anat and Nurit. Having built the play around their iconoclastic father, now 74, the sisters cast 17-year-old Amir Meyhuhas as their dad, who made headlines in 1974 by refusing to take the stage on opening night because his name had been omitted from the ads. Drimer was sacked the following day.

That play was Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience in which four actors analyze the nature of theater and then both insult their audience and praise its “performance.” 

The sisters begin A Good Place Where All is Bad by addressing the audience, directly, as a single entity, as if all the patrons were their father: “You are the star of the show,” they say, “and you are a loser.” 

Meyhuhas comes on stage to the chords of “La Vie En Rose.” The decision to cast Meyhuhas as Drimer allows the sisters a wealth of dramatic options. In one scene an assortment of voice messages sent by Drimer to his daughters is played onstage. Anat and Nurit take turns acting them out. 

We hear their father plead for attention, display rage, and offer love. At the same time, Meyhuhas performs dazzling feats with hula hoops on a different part of the stage. The scene is a manifestation of family dynamics in which the adult member behaves like an attention-seeking performer.

Like Handke, who told his audience that no theater show would take place that night, the Drimer sisters inform us that this is no fiction. Drimer is their real-world father, sitting in the front row, watching them. Meyhuhas speaks words written by Drimer in his diaries over many years. Family photographs, taken by Drimer when his two daughters were little, are also shown to the audience.  

Time becomes a thick, almost chewy, presence

Time, in this show, becomes a thick and almost chewy presence. In the photographs, the Drimer sisters were children, now they are grown women on stage. We hear that their father is an older man from the voice messages, but we see him on stage as a teenage actor. These are absurdities: Parents cannot be younger than their children. Using these paradoxes, the theatrical experience is able to make us feel time and its pains.  

Drimer (Meyhuhas) mourns the loss of his wife, who died in a car accident. He also misses his late mother. In a highly emotional scene, he recounts how his mother sang to him.

“The Porcupine Wants to Dance” is a 1932 song by Anda Amir about a porcupine who wants to dance with the other forest animals. The animals refuse to come near it because the porcupine is prickly. Like Drimer, the porcupine is desolate. It then finds a solution – to dance alone. Drimer wrote in his diaries that he did not want to be a porcupine at all. He wants to be a werewolf.    

During this show, we learn that Drimer is a great lover of vampires, witches, and other monsters. His daughters perform the roles of Dracula and the Wandering Jew from a play he wrote. The two monsters compare tzores (troubles) in a funny, and very Jewish, exchange. 

In A Good Place Where All is Bad, the Drimer sisters mount a theatrical rescue mission for their father. The show includes a side-splitting English performance of a Shel Silverstein-like song.

A Good Place Where All is Bad will be performed on Sunday, November 19, 8:30 p.m. at the Incubator Theater, 18 Mesilat Yesharim St., Jerusalem. NIS 75 per ticket. Hebrew performance with one English song. To book, call *6627.