By Laurence Holzman & Felicia Needleman
The sturdy young Canadian thought he was Samson, and went on to prove it by smashing through a wall to escape from Kfar Shaul, the Government psychiatric hospital on Jerusalem's western reaches.
"He was our first Samson," Dr. Yair Bar-El, the hospital director, said as an aside before continuing to tell how the young man had gotten as far as the nearest bus stop when a nurse caught up with him.
"Samson, you must come back to the hospital," she called out.
Mollified by being addressed by what he considered his true name, the patient docilely returned, one more visitor who had succumbed to a form of disorientation that psychiatrists here label the Jerusalem Syndrome.
When we first read this article in The New York Times several years ago, we thought it was hysterical--it screamed musical comedy to us. The fact that every year 200 normal everyday people travel to Israel and come to believe they are God, the Messiah or some figure from the Bible is a hoot. And the fact that 25-30 of them have no prior history of psychological disturbance and simply snap out of their delusion within a week is even funnier.
So we decided to take the leap and make a musical out of the Jerusalem Syndrome. We laughed a lot while writing the script, and we laughed a lot again when we worked on the music with
Kyle Rosen. But when you're writing a project you often get too close to the material to be objective about it, and so you never know if it's really funny or just seems that way when you're writing into the wee hours of the morning. We decided we needed to do a staged reading to see if impartial audience members found it as amusing as we did, and we put together a reading last fall at the York Theatre Company. Apparently it's really funny. More than once, the laughter from the audience was so effusive that it even stopped the action! And what's more, people really cared about the characters and their outcomes.
We're thrilled that The Jerusalem Syndrome has been selected by NYMF as one of its Next Link projects, and we can’t wait to see the show live on stage at 37 Arts starting September 23rd.
