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January 29, 2007
Dai
Stephen Z. Friedman, Seraphic Secret's New York correspondent, attended a performance of Dai and filed this review.
Coming directly from the airport, after you’ve just dropped just off your 14-year-old daughter for her flight to Tel Aviv, is probably not the best time to see Iris Bahr’s one-woman show, DAI (Hebrew: Enough).
Any other time, however, would be the right time. This moving, one woman show, starring the incredibly intense and multi-talented Bahr (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Friends, the Drew Carey Show), can at turns be disturbing, amusing, annoying and down right frightening. It is a running portrait of Israeli (and Palestinian) society, nicely capturing the panorama of characters that populate modern day Israel. Each of Bahr’s personas not only represents a face of Israel, but a philosophy, a perception, even a psychology, that keep us distinct and often disturbed. The set piece is a sound rather than an object. The powerful sound of an exploding bomb. A sound that all too many Israelis have had to endure.
DAI is set in a typical Tel Aviv café; a correspondent from an unnamed British news group is there, reluctantly filming “man-on-the-street” interviews to provide her British audience with “the Israeli side” of the mid-east conflict (a thinly veiled reference to CNN's Christiane Amanpour). The characters are the interviewees, responding to unheard questions, in this way projecting a very personal view of their world. Just as we get to know them, just as we begin warming to them as people, and feeling the hope and pain that are part of all of us Jews, we are jolted back to the ultimate reality of life in Israel.
Politically speaking, there is nothing new that emerges from DAI, although it might be somewhat eye opening for the uninvolved and under-educated, . . . what could very well be the majority of non-Jews and even Jews in this country. The characters are representative only, they neither cathart nor implode during the course of the show. What is new is the way in which Bahr’s writing talent allows us to enjoy the quirks and laugh with the idiosyncrasies of each of her archetypes, certainly no mean feat in this milieu. After all, dying is easy . . . comedy is difficult.
While the involved Jew may find DAI a bit of preaching to the choir, it is a wonderful review of the nation we are. For everyone else, it is a must see. In terms of writing, acting and the art of theatre, there are never enough performances like DAI.
DAI can be seen at:
Culture Project 55 Mercer St., New York, NY, 10013 (212)253 - 7017 Box Office (212) 925 - 1900
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at January 29, 2007 09:44 AM
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