They Tried to Cancel My Play

The plastic surgeon who specializes in breast implants had issues with my play. He intimidated the director of the theatre hosting the reading into canceling! In an email he wrote, “The last thing we want to do is offend the local Jewish community by showing some progressive lefty self-hating Jewish propaganda.” Only after 24 hours of intense lobbying by the artistic director of the Sundance Institute Theatre Program, who has nurtured the play and was producing the reading, and a letter from me to the artistic director and board of the theatre did reason prevail. The reading was back on. Art: 1, Thought Police: 0. In e-mails the surgeon disparaged me, the author and professor who would lead the post-show discussion, and the artistic director of the Sundance Theatre Program. We were either “self-hating Jews,” “anti-Semites,” or just plain ‘ole “ignorant.” The plastic surgeon hadn’t even read or seen the play. But he did come to the reading. What were his issues once he saw the play? That while I presented both literary and visual images of the controversial separation barrier that divides the West Bank from Israel, I did not present gruesome images of children killed or injured by suicide bombers that the barrier is there to prevent. During the Q&A, he told me and the rest of the audience in the crowded theatre that, as a plastic surgeon, he’s worked on such victims in Israel and he offered to provide me with x-ray images of ball-bearings, screws and nails embedded inside the skulls of children, to add to the projected images in the play. I thanked him for his offer. And we heard from a number of other audience members who were not missing such imagery. Sad to say, while he came to the reading—and I do give him credit for that—the surgeon didn’t hear my play. He didn’t hear the very personal story of an American Jew who loves Israel deeply and fears for her survival. He didn’t hear the story of internal conflict that so many of us share as we try to untangle the competing interests of our allegiance to our tribe and our commitment to social justice. I do respect and honor his efforts to help Israeli victims of terror attacks. But there is no gruesome imagery in the play. None. To present such imagery would be to use violence as pornography. A few years ago I spent a day with a sweet and broken-hearted father of a ten year-old boy who was murdered in a bus bombing in Haifa. He would be as outraged that an x-ray of his son’s remains would be used for someone’s political agenda as he was outraged that Israeli politicians have used funerals of suicide bombing victims to make speeches to bolster support. That’s the theatre of politics, not political theatre. For more information on my play, “A Jerusalem Between Us” go to: http://aarondavidman.wordpress.com