Not at The Public

Randee Silv
June 2016

The Siege UK Tour, 2015, Image courtesy of The Freedom Theatre

NY Public Theater Walks Away from Premiering Palestine’s The Siege

So exactly why did The Public slam its door on the Palestinian Freedom Theatre’s staging of The Siege that was scheduled for May? Cold feet? Dodging? Falling prey to propaganda? Is this just another postponement or a permanent cancellation?  The company from the West Bank’s Jenin Refugee Camp has been left no choice but to put aside all pre-production efforts toward a much anticipated collaboration with the famed New York Public Theater. An oral agreement to present The Siege had already been made with the promise of a contract that never followed. Change of heart? Political censorship? Nervous about taking a stand? A case of insincerity? No concrete explanation has been given except that “The Public doesn’t comment on shows that have been under consideration.” What is clear is that this wasn’t for artistic reasons.

The Siege toured the U.K. last year with sold out performances. Why shouldn’t New Yorkers also get the chance to hear from a Palestinian perspective about the 39 day stand-off in Bethlehem? Pressure from the board? But who? Financial contributions at risk? Fearing backlash from Jewish theatergoers? Afraid they’ll be seen as advancing the wrong political agenda? Or nervous about finger pointing demonstrators on the steps of the Public?  But what about New Yorkers who support theater as a platform for cultural resistance and want to show international solidarity with TFT? Hasn’t The Public always promoted groundbreaking endeavors that involve social and political issues?  So why is The Freedom Theatre’s voice being left out of the conversation?

Could this be stirring up troublesome memories from when The Public’s founder Joseph Papp cancelled performances by East Jerusalem’s El Hakawati Theater in 1989? Kufur Shamma, a fictional epic journey of a man’s search for neighbors & family from his village destroyed in 1948, had played without incident in Jerusalem, London, Paris and Berlin. Papp, targeted with negative publicity and criticism about his decision, told the press that he’d done this for strictly personal reasons. The New York Dance Theater hosted the production instead during its U.S. tour without any hesitation.

Maybe the Public is counting on this slipping by unnoticed, differently than when The New York Theatre Workshop “indefinitely” postponed My Name is Rachel Corrie six weeks prior to opening night in 2006. Like the Public, The NY Theater Workshop claimed that they’d only been “considering” the work and that their agreement was really only “tentative.”  Apparently they were swayed by a smear campaign against this 23 year old American peace activist who’d been crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza while trying to stop demolition of a Palestinian home. Troubled by this decision to not allow audiences to see the work, Harold Pinter and twenty other Jewish writers sent a letter to the New York Times, and the one-woman play inspired by Corrie’s journals and e-mails ended up at the West Village’s Off-Broadway Minetta Lane Theater.

In 2014 the Metropolitan Opera was forced to cave into accusations of inflaming anti-semitism and cancelled a live, global broadcast of John Adams’ opera about the 1985 hijacking of a cruise ship. Death of Klinghoffer aired months later despite a scale of protests that The Met had never seen before.  Maybe The Public is just hoping to avoid the same reaction.

So what could’ve been the decisive moment that triggered The Public to pull out?  Was The Siege too politically provocative?  Or were they just being arbitrarily dismissive toward artistically serious, non-violent resistance to oppression? And why can’t New York audiences decide for themselves what position to take on Palestinian-Israeli relations? Why does this issue have to remain in a fog of avoidance and denial? Is The Siege being prejudged? Unfairly condemned? And what about decolonization anyway? What is The Public Theater afraid of? What really are we being protected from?

In his review on The Siege at the Battersea Arts Centre in London, James Bartholomeusz wrote:  “At a time when Western perceptions of the Middle East have become dominated by the hysteria over Islamic State, it was a brave and worthy move to present a play that invites empathy with fighters on a human level. Not every Arab who carries a gun is a disaffected fanatic pining for a holy war; there are plenty who ask nothing more than the power to defend their homes from invasion and occupation.”

The Freedom Theatre was co-founded by Palestinian-Israeli actor/director Juliano Mer Khamis in 2006 as an artistic & political movement: radical, ambitious, and provocative, a “creative Intifada.” Through building an extensive network of international partnerships, friends associations and funders, TFT has been able to build a 250 seat theater, a cinema studio, expand its programs in performing arts, multimedia and psychodrama for young people along with The Freedom Bus/Playback Theatre and a three year professional acting school. The first class of graduates visited U.S. college campuses in 2011 with their own piece, While Waiting. The company’s adaptation of Athol Fugard’s The Island in 2013 links the experiences of Palestinian political prisoners with those held unjustly in South Africa under apartheid.  The tour was co-sponsored by three university theater departments and, interestingly, the NY Theater Workshop.

Juliano Mer Khamis told Maryam Monalisa Gharavi in an interview that, “We believe that the strongest struggle today should be cultural, moral. This must be clear. We are not teaching the boys and the girls how to use arms or how to create explosives, but we expose them to discourse of liberation, of liberty. We expose them to art, culture, music—which I believe can create better people for the future, and I hope that some of them, some of our friends in Jenin, will lead … and continue the resistance against the occupation through this project, through this theatre.

The Freedom Theatre continues to keep alive the vision of Juliano’s mother, Arna Mer Khamis, who visited Jenin during the first intifada in 1988 after the Israeli army had shut down schools, and initiated the Learning and Freedom project where children could freely express their fears and emotional traumas from the occupation through visual art and theater.  The Swedish parliament honored her two years before her death with the Alternative Nobel Prize in 1993. With the money received, Arna built The Stone Theatre,  which was later bulldozed in 2002 by the Israeli army during the 12 day battle of Jenin.

In the aftermath, Mer Khamis returned to complete the filming of Arna’s Children, where he juxtaposed the tragic fates of his mother’s initial students with footage of them from years before. Released internationally in 2004, it won best documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival. Juliano Mer Khamis was killed outside the theater in 2011. There is no certainty as to who the masked assassin was.

The current artistic director Nabil Al-Raee with the theater’s British associate director Zoe Lafferty produced The Siege  to engage with foreign audiences. The script draws on accounts collected from exiled freedom fighters who’d taken shelter in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity alongside 200 civilians and clergy during the second Intifada in 2002.  Audiences watch as they witness the pain, hopes and dreams of five resistance fighters surrounded by helicopters, tanks and snipers as living conditions deteriorate and, knowing the entire city is paralyzed under curfew, a decision has to be made whether to continue the fight or surrender and face permanent exile.

Nabil Al-Raee will be among those invited to speak on the topic, “Prevented Performances” at the Theatre Nation’s Global Conference in Washington, D.C. later this month. The organizers aim to advance a diverse and inclusive climate for cultural exchange minus the disruptions of political polarization. The NY Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theatre are in the process of finding another venue to present The Siege in the fall of 2017.