REVIEW: 'The Murder of Isaac': War, Peace and Everything In Between

 There is nothing more telling at a performance of what has been deemed "important" than the way an audience behaves. Before the show at CenterStage's Head Theatre last night, the audience sat mostly silent, dutifully reading all the background notes. (I strongly recommend an early arrival for time to digest these articles to insure a clearer understanding of the piece.) At intermission, as the patrons stood at their seats, a great many looked around with that sneer of self-congratulation on their faces for being among Baltimore's theatre-elite. This is the kind of play that the ladies of society not so nonchalantly mention in conversation in an I-was-there-where-were-you kind of way. And the fact that significantly fewer people remained after the intermission is also very telling. The difference between being seen here and being seen at say, the opening of The Lion King, is that being seen here may raise some extremely difficult questions - the kind everyone prays will not be asked, and is terrified to have to answer. That difference is why The Murder of Isaac is both brilliant and disappointing.

 This production, written by Motti Lerner (translated by Anthony Berris, with music by Eric Svejcar and lyrics by Lerner, Berris and Svejcar), takes place in an Israeli rehabilitation center of victims of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The year is 1998, three years after Prime Minister Yitzhak (Isaac) Rabin's assassination. We are the audience invited to see a performance staged by the patients detailing the events leading up to and ending with the assassination. This type of group therapy allows each patient to process their individual disorders in a focused way. Would that this production was as focused as the play the patients have created. Instead, we have a play full of ideas - every conceivable idea about war and peace it would seem - that tries to have something for everyone. The result should be something along the lines of questioning how can pro-war and pro-peace factions BOTH be right? Why aren't Israeli religious fanatics as despised the world-over (at least publicly) as Arab fanatics? How do people who have been through Hell keep going? Those are the questions this play begs to have thought about, discussed, and even protested. Those ideas are the very ones, I'm sure, that have caused this piece to go largely unproduced. It is extremely courageous of CenterStage to even attempt.

 

Like I said, though, those are the large questions that SHOULD have been provoked. Instead, the questions that went through my mind were: One: What causes one woman to be so angry, while another is so depressed, and yet another is obsessed with sex? Two: Why is this play being performed against a backdrop that includes vignettes of the Vietnam War Memorial, a shrine to the dead of Hiroshima, the victims of the IRA, and a shrine to a child slain over what appears to be the pair of high tops hung by his picture, and NOT against a backdrop of the casualties of the wars these people have survived? (Didn't the background information provided us in the program prepare us enough for that? Did we have to be subjected to such a heavy-handed obvious symbol of "wars of all kinds cause universal pain"?) And Three: Most of all, why oh why is a guard in a mental institution allowed to carry an unsecured, loaded gun around angry, suicidal patients?

The answers to my questions are both why the play still manages to work, even though it is directed (by CenterStage Artistic Director Irene Lewis) with what appears to be homages (and inappropriate ones at that) to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Assassins and Cabaret, and even dashes of Fiddler on the Roof and A Chorus Line.

My first question comes about because the most interesting, best staged, best acted and clearest sections of the play have to do with the patients themselves. These are people we feel for, care about, and can understand - because even though each manifests his pain differently and each blames different things for why they are there, pain and death are universal. Perhaps if the play focused on the patients, their maladies and their treatment, we might have gotten to the larger questions the playwright wants us to ponder.

My second question points out a huge problem here. Yes, we definitely need the background information provided to level the playing field so to speak. But the play itself should convey the universality of war. We don't need heavy-handed symbolism to hit us over the head. And that is not limited to the setting. Does the character playing the defense minister/head of security have to be blind AND use every possible seeing/blindness metaphor ever uttered? The blindness and the title of the character said it all. Similarly, a brief glimpse provided by one character of an actual scar along with the costume designed clearly to cover more (including an obvious, but point making wig) was more than enough. Did we have to see every gruesome scar and unhealed wound?

And my last question speaks to the final moments of the play. Those moments meant to leave us disturbed and sad only really serve to leave one angry that we had been cheated somehow. I do not profess to be an expert on such places of rehabilitation, and maybe things work differently in Israel, but after spending a good deal of time showing us that these patients are taken care of lovingly and with compassion, and subdued by force only when extremely necessary (time outs, medications, a warm hug, even a straight jacket) it seems impossible to believe that a guard would be allowed that close to a disturbed, violent and clearly suicidal patient with a loaded gun. There had to be a better way to get the final point across.

The Murder of Isaac does succeed as an important piece of theatre in two ways. First, when it focuses on the victims it is poetic, stirring and epic in a Shakespearean way. And the play-within-a-play structure works particularly well when it goes with the "Jewish response to Cabaret" musical numbers which comically, sadly and horrifyingly comment on the action at hand. These interludes do the same work that the wordy, repetitive (How many different ways can you say, "the only way to end war is through peace" or conversely, "war is the only way to get peace"?) and didactic scenes which surround it do, but in a more poignant way. And when it is focused, this work engages the mind in all the ways the author clearly wants.

The second and most monumental tribute to the importance of the play is the astonishing power of all sixteen members of the cast. There is not a single weak link here. This group of actors is the very definition of ensemble, and are, quite simply, brilliant. The three main women, Charlotte Cohn as the physically and emotionally scarred Talia, Lise Bruneau as Shulamit a settler who witnessed the murders of her husband and two children, and Mia Dillon as Lola, "director" of the group and "wife of Rabin" are absolutely magnificent and heartbreaking. The triumphs and tragedies of their characters are subtly and powerfully portrayed. Similar work is done by David Margulies as Binder/"Isaac", who is the personification of quiet strength and dignity, Olek Krupa as Yuda, and opposition to Rabin, who allows us to believe that the opposition to an eventual martyr can be equally justified, Tzahi Moskovitz as wheelchair-bound Avner, whose sweet innocence and searing pain are palpable, and Benjamin Pelteson as Yigal, the rebel and eventual assassin of Rabin, whose anger is justifiable if misguided. All of these seven actors give bravura performances that are so grounded and nuanced that they never seem to be acting - what they are doing is as real as it gets. The others are equally fine in supporting roles that fit the acting style of the leads - like I said a near perfect ensemble

The play and direction need major focusing - they need to stop trying to be all things to all people. Let the ideas and the people who have them onstage speak for themselves - what they have to say is what makes this play truly important.

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