Re: OSLO

Dear Andre:

Last night I saw OSLO and wanted to share a note of congratulations. JT's play; Bart's staging and the LCT production are brilliant and moving and urgent.

I'm an atheist and grew up in a Jewish household. We rarely went to temple. Being Jewish had a cultural meaning — not religious — and the core cultural values were rooted in morality and justice. It was impossible to speak about Israel with my parents. Some of my family died in the Holocaust and I had two relatives who lived in Israel and were miraculous survivors of Auschwitz — they married when they got out.

Arabs were monsters who wanted to push the Jews into the sea, i.e. to destroy Jewish identity and exterminate us. Arafat was synonymous with Hitler — inhuman. Arafat, like Hitler, cowardly and heinously killed innocent civilians. The Israelis were blameless. They didn't take land. They didn't make Palestinians second class citizens. There was a UN treaty after Hitler. The larger Arab countries fanned the fires of Palestinian discontent because Arabs hated Jews. They were jealous of us. Anyway, I was told, the larger Arab countries could offer the Palestinians land for a homeland.

It was impossible to make peace with the Palestinians as the PLO were terrorists and didn't want peace. They wanted our extermination. When I visited Israel with my parents, it was pointed out where such and such a battle had been fought; where the streets had run red with blood; where innocent children had horribly died. They had been killed horribly, but it was not mentioned what happened to Palestinian children.

The conflict with Jews and Arabs/Arabs and Jews was the defining moral conflict of my growing up. Before the Civil Rights movement, before Vietnam, for me, the burning questions of justice and injustice were made clear in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Clearly, there was no clear right and wrong. There is injustice on both sides. Peace would be a canvas for trying to work out differences and allow co-existence while the fury on both sides would hopefully slowly abate.

What I found so moving about OSLO as theatre is that it brought alive a simple, human belief in the possibility of people who hate each other; who had done mutual injustice; confronting each other and talking. OSLO makes this achingly human and dramatic. The complexity of debate and negotiation — words — become wonderful theatre. The movement of events works and the OSLO doesn't end — as we know — with sweetness and accord but with possibility and ambiguity. A handshake. And all this was happening while there was terrible conflict happening. No matter what we think of OSLO, people who had never talked together, but only killed each other, met and spoke. It's a great disturbing subject for theatre and art and, of course, vital for us to be reminded when we demonize the other, or our enemies, that it isn't so simple.

Best,

Jeffrey

We are getting lots of this.

Hope all well.

B

Sent from my iPhone

Amazing!

lets talk at the end of your day