Israel Horovitz plays

The three Israel Horovitz plays presented a unique experience for me.  It was my first time going to see a play with a more modern setting, and I can honestly say I enjoyed the experience.   Of the three, my favorite was Beirut Rocks, not just for the content, but also because of the ease of understanding and the actors’ well portrayal of all the characters.  It was, for me, the most exciting; it contained the most emotion, because the actions taken and the words spoken by Benji and Nasa cause a sharp reaction in the audience.  At first, it is easy to show sympathy to Nasa, who is being singled out as the terrorist, and is then threatened and violated; but when she makes the remark about Jews and wanting them all to die, the sympathy shifts, and neither of the two seem deserving.

Because the first two plays used few props and even less scenery, it made understanding the plays a little difficult, particularly since it was the first time I’d encountered What Strong Fences Make.   This play was the hardest to understand because of many factors.  One of the most important factors was that the actors directed their voices upstage rather than downstage, which, added to the lack of a visible setting, made it nearly impossible to understand about three fourths of the play.  Unless you were sitting in the first two rows, or had exceptional hearing (and i mean like the level of hearing a dog has) there was no way you’d know that this took place at a checkpoint, and that the two characters, (whose names I don’t know because I don’t remember hearing it or because it wasn’t mentioned) were childhood friends.  It was only when one of the two men onstage (the only prop during the entire play being a rifle in the checkpoint guard’s hands) mentioned his children who had died, did the play begin to make sense.  However my epiphany came slightly late, since just after I pieced together the few sentences I managed to hear (with much difficulty) one of the men ran forward, and the guard shot him, resulting in a large explosion offstage and the sudden end of the play.

The Indian Takes the Bronx was easy to understand, however, there was no plot.  The storyline can be summarized as two grown men terrorize an East Indian at a bus stop when they get bored waiting for a bus that never came, and at the end, one of them, Murphy, takes a knife out and cuts the Indian’s hand.  And while we do learn some of the two men’s background through occasional comments they make, it does little to help explain the cruelty they demonstrate towards the Indian, other than to claim that they were very unstable.