“What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties,” remarks the patient in one of the two beds opposite mine. He has a long face, flowing long white hair parted in the middle and, like me, he’s dressed in hospital pajamas. The bristled cheeks have a plasticity that makes him look young, although he’s no doubt 80 or so. Both of us are seated in high-backed imitation-leather upholstered chairs next to our beds, our various tubes carefully arranged for our comfort.
Yosef MiloThe time: January 1997. The scene: the intensive care unit on the eighth floor of Hadassah’s Ein Karem complex. The u-shaped ward has two wings; we’re in the smaller of them, with just three beds. The third one is occupied by a bearded Moroccan elder. Next to me sits my wife, Ilana. Next to Hamlet sits his Ophelia. Surrounding the elder are a clutch of children and devotees. Hanging over each bed are intravenous bags to which we are connected; over each bed hangs a monitor that displays our vital signs, but in such a way that we can track the heartbeat and oxygen supply of everyone except ourselves. On the ledge behind each bed stands a vase full of lung suction catheters. Stage left, for Hamlet, is a large sliding door leading out to a narrow balcony where the nurses slip out to smoke. Dark clouds hang low over Mevasseret Tzion and the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway.
I can’t remember my line, and in any case speech comes hard—it’s only been a couple days since the doctors removed the ventilator tube that had been stuck down my throat for two and a half weeks.
Hamlet cocks his head and smiles at me expectantly. When I don’t reply,
Arie Tcherner and Udi RotschildAn astounding metamorphosis lies at the center of Nisim Aloni’s play The American Princess—now on stage in a truly amazing production at the Khan Theater in South Jerusalem. A son turns his father into a character in a film, receives him back as an actor who plays his father, and then kills—but is it the actor or the real father? Or is there a real father? Does the son know enough to tell the difference?
The play takes off from ancient myths—Oedipus, Persephone, and other primal stories of parents, children, and death—but them leaves them far behind. Except for his finely-tuned Hebrew language, Aloni (one of Israel’s leading playwrights and translators of plays, who died in 1998) removes his story entirely from the Israeli context that hangs so heavily over so many of this country’s original works of drama. The action takes place in an unnamed South American country and the two main characters are the deposed king of a Central European principality and his wayward 20-something son. The Khan’s Arie Tcherner and Udi Rotschild offer flawless performances in this sonata for two actors, under the fine direction of Udi Ben Moshe.
