Cameri Theater honors dramatist Hanoch Levin in wartime production - review

A sandy beach in Tel Aviv with the eternal movement of salty sea water splashing against the shore, served as the stage upon which Hanoch Levin’s characters played out their pathetic lives and sang their songs, on Tuesday, in Whoever Wasn’t Born is Missing Out.

The homage production by the Cameri Theater marked the late Levin’s 80th birthday.  Director Tal Brenner’s inspired mis-en-scene provided the carefully selected scenes and songs – gathered from Levin’s extensive body of works – with an ingenious thematic thread. The sea, unlike our fleeting human lives, is eternal. It serves as a site for flirting, weddings, and other ceremonies. The spume, the Greeks believed, was the result of Zeus castrating Cronus and throwing the torn-off organ into the sea. This hidden element of humiliation and unearthly desire – Venus emerged from the newly made sea foam – is an apt match to Levin’s world with its overbearing, humiliating women, fickle destinies, and the desire to live to the fullest.

In a scene selected from Rubber Merchants, Rami Baruch plays an elderly man who learns, in a chance encounter at the seaside, that a woman he had loved for years had also loved him all that time. Played by the wonderful Leora Rivlin, the lady informs the puzzled gentleman that no efforts would have been required to obtain such happiness, one word would have sufficed. 

Anguish is repeated with The Pisser, a scene lifted from The Gigolo from the Congo in which a man (Yaniv Swisa) decides to leave a film screening to urinate and is dumfounded when he returns to learn that not only has he missed the best scene in the movie, he has also lost his date to the man sitting next to her, a chance to sell his script, and an offer to reconnect with a woman he has always desired.

These revelations, heaped one on top of the other, correspond to the description of the missed movie scene in which the celluloid hero makes haste on a motorcycle, then an elephant, and is able to arrive at the nick of time. The ironic contrast between the promise of the silver screen and the pathetic reality is a famous Levin signature. James Cagney’s 1942 performance in Give My Regards To Broadway is our musical cue at the opening of this scene; and the projector’s farewell: “Show’s over wretched people, get out and be ashamed of your lives” is its end.  

Levin is consistently celebrated onstage

Levin’s theatrical world is constantly celebrated as in a recent opera adaptation and an ongoing Jaffa Theater cabaret production show, while it simultaneously fades away.

His characters use the Israeli lira, a currency that vanished 44 years ago when the shekel replaced it. They eat herrings and watch movies on the beach, not at a shopping center. They are unapologetically secular and European-oriented – but are shown to an Israeli audience that, polls show, is becoming more conservative, religious, and aligned with the values of the newly elected US President Donald Trump.

During a beach wedding scene (taken from Schitz), the happiness of the bride (Ola Schur-Selektar) is shattered when an air siren forces the guests to seek shelter. Her groom (Gilad Shmueli) goes off to war; all she is left with are his empty army boots. Her rage boils and explodes on the same beach during a diplomatic ribbon-cutting ceremony. Originally shown in The Patriot, the scene has the US ambassador to Israel (Tom Chodorov) admonish the foreign minister (Swisa) whenever he attempts to build up the US-Israeli relationship into something more than mere friendship. 

The anger of this army widow at a corrupt, brutal merging of interests between an empire and those who rush to do its bidding, heedless of the blood price everyday people pay – is a potent, moving theatrical experience that meets our current lives with a moral backbone rarely seen off stage.

Whoever Wasn’t Born Is Missing Out will be performed from Wednesday, December 4, at 8:30 p.m. to Monday, January 13, at 7 p.m. Hebrew only, Hebrew surtitles will be shown only during the songs. 90 minutes, no intermission. NIS 220 per ticket. 19 Sderot Sha’ul HaMelech Tel Aviv. Call 053-5311150 to book.