We regret the passing, on April 11, 2024, of the distinguished Romanian author and critic Dan Cristea, who served as the editor in chief of the Luceafărul de Dimineață cultural monthly. In addition to being an alum of the 1985 Fall Residency, Cristea received his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa.
Motti Lerner is a playwright and screenwriter, born in Israel in 1949. Most of his plays and films deal with political themes.
Among his plays staged in Israel are Kastner, Pangs of the Messiah, Paula, Pollard, Exile in Jerusalem, Passing the Love of Women, Doing His Will, The Abandoned Melody, The First Lady, Autumn, Hard Love, The Hastening of The End, The Admission, On The Edge and I Was There. Many of these have also been produced in Europe, the US, South Africa, Australia, Canada and India. His play Eichmann's Trial will open in the National Theater in Bucharest in April 2024. He is the screenwriter for the films Loves in Betania, The Kastner Trial, Bus Number 300, Egoz, A Battle in Jerusalem, The Silence of the Sirens , Altalena, Spring 1941, and Kapo in Jerusalem, as well as 12 episodes of the TV drama series The Institute.
He is a recipient of the Best Play Award (1985), the Israeli Motion Picture Academy’s award for Best TV Drama (1995), the 2004 winner of The Prime Minister of Israel’s award for his creative work, and, in 2014,of the Landau Prize for the Performing Arts. The author of According to Chekhov and The Playwright's Purpose, he has taught playwriting at Tel Aviv University, and Duke University and Knox College in the US; in 2010, he was a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. In 2000, he participated in the IWP. He lives in Ramat Hasharon, a small town north of Tel Aviv.
Literary/personal
Q: As a student, what—or, who? — separated you from the exact sciences and drove you toward the inexact arts?
I studied Mathematics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. After graduation, I did my army service. Just as I finished it, in 1973, the Yom Kippur War broke out, and afterwards I felt that Mathematics was not a discipline that would help me to understand the chaotic reality in which I lived. Theater seemed a much better platform for this purpose. It enabled me to explore the changes wartime causes in human nature. Of course, science needs to be very exact, but over the years I discovered that writing, too, needs to be very exact. This is the challenge and beauty of writing: you must find the exact moment, the exact character, the exact words.
Q: How do you continue your work during the current war in Gaza?
That is a very difficult question. I've protested against wars and military operations for more than 50 years. It's almost impossible to stop them. Even extreme protest like a hunger strike won't be effective in the current atmosphere in this country. I try to speak up against this war at every opportunity I have. But I also try to continue writing. It's crucial to sustain trust in the arts, because one day this terrible war will be over and art will have to deal with its aftermath. Certainly, the theater, part of which is still political here in Israel.
Toward that purpose, I've started a project with Jaffa Theater in which four Israeli Palestinian playwrights and four Israeli Jewish playwrights meet once every few weeks and explore possible scenes they might write about the war. Next month, we'll do a public reading of the eight scenes, and hopefully a play will eventually emerge. Is this going to stop the war? Of course not. But it might encourage a public discourse that will enlighten the spectators about terrible things that are happening in it.
Q: How often and where do you see theater? What have some of your strongest theater experiences been over the years?
I see theater quite often, at least once a month. I am very moved by the plays of Arthur Miller and Chekhov, but also by the plays of my Israeli colleagues Sobol, Mitelpunkt, Levin and others; I must mention an amazing production of The Crucible that I saw in Tel Aviv a few years ago, remembering an observation by the playwright, that this play is usually done when theater people fear their society is on track of losing its democracy.
Q: Is there Palestinian/Arabic-language theater in Tel Aviv, and do interesting things get done there?
There is an Arabic-language theater in Jaffa, a part of Tel Aviv. They do rather interesting work there. Unfortunately, most of Jewish Israelis don't speak Arabic, and therefore don't have much interest in Arab culture. It's a huge problem for many of us here, but at the moment I don't see a solution. We'll need at least another generation to educate ourselves.
Q: Talk about differences in your thinking when writing for the stage vs writing for the screen.
Many writers find significant differences between writing for the stage and the screen; for me the differences are minor. In both arts, I focus on plot, characters, and relationships. I don't look for visual images, or for aesthetic achievements. I probably tend to leave these to the director and the designers. I can't avoid the assumption that the depth of the story depends almost always on the depth of the characters and their relationships. The investment in the characters and their relationships is quite similar in writing for the stage and for the screen.
Q: The year you came to Iowa City, 2000, was the start of a new era for the program after a near-fatal administrative crisis. Any recollections of events, atmosphere, colleagues?
The participation in IWP in 2000 was very meaningful. I wasn't at all aware of the crisis you mention. Most of the participants were very inspiring, and it was quite surprising to see their perspective on writing for their own societies. I had a wonderful dialogue with the Indian poet and playwright H. S. Shivaprakash. A few years later, we started a course at JNU in Delhi in which we compared aesthetic choices of the Indian versus the European theater. Regrettably, it came to an end after few sessions, when he moved to Berlin to direct the Tagore Institute there.
Literary /generic
Q: Who and where is your literary community, meaning, for whom do you write your plays?
I'm writing mostly for the Israeli audience, and therefore trying to explore the critical issues that Jews and Arabs have been facing since the beginning of the Jewish immigration to this country in the end of the 19th century. Kastner and Spring 1941 deal with the Holocaust, Pangs of The Messiah and The Hastening of The End with right-wing messianic ideas in Israel, Golda, The Silence of the Sirens, I Was There, and On the Edge take on some of the most recent wars we have had here. The Admission deals with the Palestinian Nakba of 1948. I hope that these plays, and others, contributed toward creating a discourse that will bring about some change.
Q: Your plays have been staged not only in Israel but also in Europe, the Americas, and in Asia. In what ways have these stagings been different from those in Israel? What gets in the way? You also have a fair amount of experience teaching theater in the US: any thoughts there?
The productions of my plays in other countries are quite different from the productions in Israel. I accept the fact that every theatre produces plays for its own audience. Therefore, the play has to go through some changes to adapt itself to a very specific audience. For example, every production of The Admission outside Israel has to include more information about the 1948 war, which might be familiar for an Israeli audience. In a staged reading in DC of the play Balfour about the 2020-2022 protests against the Netanyahu government, a lot of information was added to clarify social and ethnic background.
I always try to collaborate with the directors in doing these changes. Sometimes it means that the context of the plot and the characters can be more detailed, sometime it means that certain details must be cut. The play has to serve a purpose, and therefore fit the knowledge level and sensitivity of the audience.
As for teaching playwriting –there are so many ways to do it. I think the best thing I can teach is my own way of writing – which is very "classical" in the sense of creating a plot, characters, and catharsis. I believe that these Aristotelian principles are necessary even for writers who might not write Aristotelian plays. I was surprised to discover that in several schools I visited the understanding of catharsis was still based on the assumption that it is only the experience of the spectator, as opposed to the modern understanding that catharsis is originally an experience of the protagonist, and the spectator experiences it through his empathy with the protagonist. I wrote about this at length in According to Chekhov and The Playwright's Purpose. I hope I was able to convince the readers.
Q: In contradistinction to your understanding of catharsis and empathy as the key tools and most powerful experiences theater can give its audiences, Brecht thought the reverse—that theater can only affect politics by teaching, explaining, estranging. How to reach people who have turned their back on empathy, as many in Israel seem to now have vis a vis all Palestinians?
Yes, somehow I still believe that most theatre spectators are capable of empathy and I can therefore write plays that create empathy for the characters and lead the spectators to undergo catharsis—the strongest experience theater can offer. I think that, in spite of his theories, Brecht wrote some of his plays - Mother Courage or The Good Person of Szechwan - with a deep awareness of the empathy the audience will have for these characters.
As for the lack of empathy of too many Israelis to the suffering of the Palestinians under the occupation, and especially during this current war – this is a terrible realization. The Israeli society needs a different leadership that will be able to lay the grounds for different political and social goals, which will include a major emphasis on humanism.
Unfortunately, at the moment we have a political leadership that builds its power on hatred of Palestinians and on incitement against them. On top of that we have strong fascist-religious parties that have accumulated enough political power to spread their racist and violent ideas in the form of political platforms. I hope that the debate about current war will expose the dangers in these ideas. I wrote about it in the play The Hastening of The End, which was done in 2013, and, as expected, didn't create the change I hoped for.
Q: Is a script about the Gaza war churning in your head?
Yes, but I can't rush it. I have to wait until the war is over and I can understand its ramifications better. I hope that will happen soon.
Q: In a recent interview, a well-connected American pundit said that he doesn’t trust anything a (regional/Middle-Eastern) politician says in English, only what s/he says in Hebrew or in Arabic. Is there a translation problem here?
No, there's no translation problem at all. The difference between statements in English and statements in a local Middle Eastern language are a result of the different interests that some Middle Eastern politicians have when they speak to the world and when they speak to their own base. Today, these differences are exposed very clearly and very quickly in the media, and they add to the confusion regarding the political reality, which is chaotic enough already.
General
Q: If you were named prime minister of Israel tomorrow, what would be the first few things you’d tackle?
The first thing is to come to an agreement with Hamas about the simultaneous return of the hostages to Israel, the release of the Palestinian prisoners, a ceasefire, and the withdrawal of the Israeli army. After all this happens, I'll immediately begin negotiations for a political solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, based on two independent states, Palestine and Israel.
Q: What—if anything—gives you cause for optimism these days?
I'm not very optimistic at the moment. The main reason is that I don't see now, on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, leaders who are courageous enough to commit themselves to a political solution. I still hope that such leaders will appear soon. But I must add that the need to write about the conflict doesn’t depend on justified optimism for a solution. Even if your hope is just an illusion, you must write for the mere chance that the writing itself will bring about a change that will justify optimism.
Thank you.
Interviewer: Nataša Ďurovičová
February 2024
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