On Holy Ground
Program notes state that Stephanie Liss’s play, On Holy Ground “brings the Israeli-Palestine conflict into sharp focus from the wildly different perspectives of three women.” If only this were the case. The one Palestinian character was written as a caricature without any effort to explain why she was the person she was or why she behaved as she did. This seriously tilted the play off-balance. I had the impression that the first act was written at a different time than the second act and only later coupled with it to make an evening. This felt to be even more the case as the actor bowed at the end of act one, something that occurs sometimes in opera and ballet, but not in the theatre. It occurred to me that this was an effort to signal that the two pieces were entirely separate.
The first act consists of Henrietta Szold (1860-1945) telling the story of her life. As she speaks directly to the audience, the addition of two short lines certainly would have been helpful: “Thank you for coming. Thank you for taking an interest in my life . . .” This would have set up the audience as interviewers writing for a newspaper perhaps. Or maybe they are friends or simply guests in her garden. Ms. Szold is an important and fascinating figure. She was a co-founder of Hadassah, founded the first Jewish hospital in Palestine, established social services accessible to both Jews and Arabs, and proposed a bi-national state in Palestine. She rescued 30,000 Jewish children from death at the hands of the Nazis.
Actress Salome Jens has the elegance, authority, depth, and presence of nobility that fleshes out this character. She made her emotional moments, but somehow seemed not to use her body fully and sometimes had a vocal pattern, a melody that distracted from her performance.
The second act is about an Orthodox Jewish woman (Lisa Richards) who has lost her teenage daughter to a Jihadist and the Palestinian mother (Abbe Rowlins) of the bomber. Ms. Richards is wonderful in her part. She brought tears to my eyes. I was, however, confused by the introduction of a colorful scarf. It was unwrapped tenderly as if it had been meant as a gift for her now dead daughter; but then it is neglected until the very end of the play. Instead of being carried to symbolize the dead body of the girl and laid at the feet of the mother of the murderer as I thought it might be, it is nonchalantly used as a shawl. It could have been integrated more fully and used more meaningfully.
Her counterpart, the Palestinian mother comes off as a one-dimensional villain. Ms. Rowlins creates a formidable opponent, but I needed to see more humanity and less grimacing. This might not be possible since there is little effort in this play to give voice to the plight or injustices inflicted upon the occupied peoples. This obvious imbalance minimizes our sympathy for the Jewish woman as well as the Palestinian one. At one moment, the Jewish woman says something like, “We live to live . . . they live to die.” This is a rather presumptuous oversimplification of a whole psyche, I would think, but it sums up the intent of the writer.
Although I am a great fan of director L. Flint Esquerra, I was confused with the execution of this piece. The lights and sound distracted from the flow of the play. This is especially true when sound is introduced at the very end of the performance. It cut off the one sympathetic moment of the Palestinian mother and made it difficult to know that the presentation had ended. Perhaps these problems lay at the feet of the person operating the sound and lights.
Everyone in this production is a trained and experienced artist, and that quality shines through in spite of the imperfections. Many of the problems may be ironed out as the play continues its run.
MET Theatre
1089 N. Oxford Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90029
www.themettheatre.com
11/11/11−12/18/11
Fridays and Saturdays @ 8:00, Sundays @ 3:00
(800) 838-3006