Hare explains: “The reason the play is called ‘Via Dolorosa’ is because I’m saying I come from a different Christian tradition as a total outsider.” Originally, the play was to consist of a trio of monologues by an Israeli, a Palestinian and Hare. But the Palestinian writer decided that his collaboration might seem like a conciliatory gesture toward Israel. What the London audience saw, and what the Broadway audience will see, is a passionate pilgrim evoking the human panorama behind the politics and violence. Guided by director Stephen Daldry in Ian MacNeil’s set, a symbolic wooden chaos, Hare uses eloquent shifts of voice, body language and eyes that reflect anger, sorrow and (not much) hope to portray the struggle over “a patch of land lying like a small brown anchovy on a school atlas.”
Hare’s first guide is Keith Lawrence, a young Brit who pitches Tel Aviv as “sexy, a happening kind of place.” They meet Eran Baniel, a theater director who describes the famous production of “Romeo and Juliet” he codirected with a Palestinian, in which Israelis played the Montagues and Palestinians played the Capulets. The idea was to bring the two sides together, but, says Baniel, “in this production the Capulets really hated the Montagues.” Brilliantly evoking this surreal world, Hare describes the Israeli equivalent of the Oscars, where all the winners’ speeches were about politics, the best actor calling for the impeachment of the prime minister. He visits an Israeli settlement in an area where 4,000 troops protect 500 settlers from 750,000 surrounding Palestinians, half of them in refugee camps. There the tensions are brought home to Hare when his Jewish wife, the fashion designer Nicole Farhi, is excoriated as an “assimilationist.”
Crossing into Arab territory produces charismatic Palestinians like Haider Abdel Shafi, a “superbly handsome” septuagenarian in a silver Savile Row suit, who attacks Arafat for corruption and graft. Hare’s told that “there are more Palestinians in prison today under Arafat than there ever were under the Israelis.” He meets the Palestinian codirector of “Romeo,” George Ibrahim, who insists that “artistically our side was better.” Ibrahim attacks films like “The English Patient” and “Air Force One” for their portrayal of Arabs. The post-Soviet world, he says bitterly, needs an enemy. “Now it’s us.”
Hare is fair-minded without being wishy-washy; he sees the balked strength, the fierce logic on all sides as Palestinians and Israelis are split into warring factions. These fractures are embodied most dramatically in Israel’s “flaming red firebrand” Shulamit Aloni, who attacks Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his “fascist” policies. Netanyahu himself makes a speech insisting that like all great men, he has been misunderstood. In the same speech he names a brick in the Wailing Wall after Kirk Douglas (whose real name was Issur Danielovitch). Such details give “Dolorosa” a reality that in London at times aroused fevered reactions. One evening a contingent of Orthodox Jews attempted to interrupt the performance with a prolonged barrage of coughing. The New York audience, with ties to so many in the Mideast, is the ideal Western audience for the play. Whatever their allegiance, they will come away vibrating with faces, voices–and ideas that people are dying for.
