To stay or not to stay: Jewish Festival of Performing Arts presents ‘Vienna or Dimona’

Beit Mazia is one of those cultural venues that tend to offer something a little different than the run-of-the-mill entertainment fare. The Jerusalem institution has proven that time and again, and will once more roll out a slew of intriguing spectacles at the year’s Jewish Festival of Performing Arts. 

The eighth edition of the annual festival takes place December 24-28 under the auspices of the Theatre Company Jerusalem – like so many slots in the cultural calendar over the past couple of months it had to be rescheduled – and addresses the wartime zeitgeist and the war’s emotional and experiential fallout, across a broad swathe of productions. The program, for example, includes a curtain raiser slot based on a musical supplicatory format called Singing Prayer. It features a vocalist, a saxophonist, and a pianist performing works by such venerated writers as Natan Alterman and Naomi Shemer, with the audience invited to sing along. The event takes on a more emotive dimension with the inclusion of Kibbutz Be’eri resident singer-songwriter Daniel Wais, and vocalist-guitarist Linor Ein-Gedy who hails from Kibbutz Mefalsim, also located close to the border of the Gaza Strip.

Over the past couple of years or so, quite a few Israelis have struggled with identity issues. As English rock band The Clash pondered back in 1982, in the refrain of the suitably named title track on its Combat Rock record, “should I stay or should I go,” was a query being fielded by some of us. Questions of allegiance and belonging were in the air, with the ongoing sociopolitical turbulence stirred up by the judicial reforms demonstrations, along with an abundance of other existential question marks over life in this part of the world.

Yaniv Peretz takes a darkly comedic look at the benefits and disadvantages of staying put in his play Vienna or Dimona which he also portrays on stage under the direction of Gabriella Lev. The storyline appears to be simple enough although the plot duly thickens over time, and what started out as a plain old marriage of convenience ploy takes on unexpected complexities and challenges. “Guy wants to get out. He wants to move abroad as a completely secular Jew,” Peretz explains. “He meets a non-Jewish Austrian woman, they fall in love and Guy suggests they get married so she can stay on officially in Israel. It also means Guy can live abroad. His dream was to live there with her.” That all sounds pretty neat, but the waters become increasingly muddied as Guy finds himself tackling ever more perplexing obstacles along the way to perceived happiness.

The dissonance between Dimona, Vienna

The cultural, geographic global status dissonance between the two titular towns did not escape my eye. That, says Peretz, is designed to spell out the seemingly unbridgeable chasms that lie between the human dynamics and mindsets of the remote Arava town and the Austrian capital that was once the epicenter of an empire, and still serves as one of the art world’s prime nodal points.

They couldn’t be further apart in terms of everyday life and public and international profile. “Dimona has something deep-rooted and also something of the periphery of society,” says Peretz, quickly adding that he has nothing against the southern city. “It is not about making fun of Dimona. It is about a sort of Israeliness which we so much don’t want to be a part of. When we mention that we are almost ashamed of it. When we look at a postcard of Israel, Dimona is not the first place we will see.”

There is also a comedic side to the choice of locations. “They also go together pretty well,” Peretz chuckles, referencing the Hebrew version of Vienna – Veena – which rhymes nicely with Dimona. Catchy. 

Peretz has plenty of personal street level collateral for spinning out the storyline of the play. He was born in France and made aliyah 20 years ago, at the age of 20, He made his first childhood steps in the world of theater when his mother coaxed her then shy son to try it out, in an effort to help him break out of his shell. Seems it did the trick. “I had no idea what theater was all about before that,” he recalls, “but I fell in love with it.”

He staged his first play eight years ago. Interestingly that also had a Vienna connection, with the plot centering on Holocaust survivor Jewish Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, and specifically Frankl’s flagship tome Man’s Search for Meaning in which he recounts his concentration camp experiences and spells out his psychotherapeutic approach to dealing with the scars left by those horrors.

Thankfully, Peretz is far too young to have gone through anything like Frankl’s tortuous World War II experiences, although he is a grandson of Holocaust survivors. But he does have the requisite biographical baggage to spin out the Vienna or Dimona yarn. The story of the play is very much about us,” Peretz reveals. “It is very personal, and part of what we experienced with the rabbinate here is in the play.” 

In brief, Peretz’s wife converted to Judaism in France. That was a while before they met here. The Peretzes went through the religious officialdom mill here before they got the green light to make an honest woman and man of each other. “The script of the play has words and phrases the rabbis said to us during the process of having my wife’s orthodox conversion process, in the United States, recognized,” says Peretz. “We made the cardinal error of telling them we were living together out of wedlock – a beginners’ mistake. We had secular Jewish friends who didn’t have to hide anything, and the rabbis didn’t make any problems for them. Crazy.”

Peretz says he was careful to skirt around familiar minefields. “I didn’t want to criticize or satirize rabbis and the religious establishment. That has been done many times before. The play is not critical of religion per se. But you can criticize the secular establishment too. We need roots. There is this belief that we should get away from here, from anything Jewish, and we’ll have a better life. I can tell you, as someone who lived in France 17 years, it is not better over there.”

Unfortunately, the issues Peretz raises in Vienna or Dimona are all the more pertinent now. “Suddenly the play is even more relevant. I didn’t want to introduce too many elements from our reality but there is the issue of whether or not to run away. My parents-in-law wanted us to come to them [in France], to get away from the war. They live in a remote place – a sort of French Dimona,” he laughs.

There are clearly some heavy-duty issues worked into the fabric of the play, but a healthy dosage of comedic material helps the philosophical medicine go down.

For tickets and more information: (02) 624-4585/6 and www.tcj.org.il