An Interview With Shmuel Hasfari
By Michael Crabb
Shmuel Hasfari, one of Israel’s leading playwrights, has never been afraid of controversy – and he’s stirred up plenty of it in his homeland.
Hasfari, in his early fifties, takes an unblinking look at the realities of Israeli society. Understandably, not everything he sees is pretty or comfortable. His gritty plays, animated by vibrant characters and lively dialog, variously mix comedy with tragedy, broad humor with caustic irony. He explores the very nature of Israeli-Jewish identity by observing and presenting the anxieties and tensions that, for better or worse, constitute the turbulent undertow of life in modern Israel.
“I am a playwright,” explains Hasfari. “This is my profession. My job is to look around, sense the course of things and try to make some meaning of it, to find some inner structure in the chaos of reality.”
Yet, for all their uncompromising honesty, Hasfari’s plays garner major awards, tour to festivals abroad and win popular acclaim in his homeland where theatre-going is almost as popular as soccer.
A case in point is Master of the House, with which Hasfari makes his North American dramatic debut at The Laguna Playhouse. It opened at Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theatre more three years ago, won Israel’s Best Play award and is still running after almost 700 performances.
Master of the House is Hasfari’s second dramatic trilogy. He prefers to describe this latest one as a triptych because although all three plays involve related, overlapping characters and happen at much the same time, each play readily stands alone. Although he is still writing the final play in the “triptych,” the second, Milano, has already been produced in Tel Aviv. It transports audiences to a “home” soccer match that’s referred to in Master of the House. The fact the match has to be played on foreign soil for security reasons again touches on one of Hasfari career-long themes, the Israel’s notion of “home-ness.”
In Master of the House – a deeply ironic title given the play’s content – we meet Joel Ben-Ephraim, a newspaper columnist obsessed with Israel’s Bauhaus architectural heritage. Joel is the youngest of three brothers. As the play begins, Motti, the middle sibling and a sports writer – along with his pushy psychologist wife Naomi – is visiting Joel’s apartment home in a typical Bauhaus-style block. The run-down apartment once belonged to Joel’s parents, who make a rather comical appearance in the play. When Shayeh and Zippa needed cash to move into a senior’s home it was Joel’s lawyer wife Nava who bought it as a place where she and her husband could raise the son she earlier bore Joel’s no-good eldest brother.
Spurred by Motti and Naomi’s boastful tales of their splendid home renovation, Nava is now eager to turf out all the old furniture from the apartment and remodel it completely – a development Joel heartily opposes for deep emotional reasons that are laid bare as the play unfolds.
Much of the play’s humor – and there are plenty of laughs – arises from the tug-of-war between Joel and Nava as she schemes to fulfil her remodeling dream. It’s a potentially fraught undertaking of which Hasfari has personal experience – although in his case the process went relatively smoothly. “I was my own contractor,” he explains.
“Renovating or remodeling your home is a mega-challenge for the stability of married life,” says Hasfari, apologizing for his “limited English.” In fact, it’s very good. After all, he has translated such English-language plays as Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible for home audiences.
Hasfari elaborates on his theme. “Every decision you take, every opinion you express – about the color of the walls or design of the tiles on the floor – is a ‘casus belli’ in your partner’s eyes. All your marriage history is present there. When you remodel your home you remodel your memories. It is a test not many couples can pass. This is a radical dramatic situation, ideal for the theatre.”
Hasfari, who writes primarily with Isaeli audiences in mind, is gratified that Master of the House is crossing the Atlantic. “Again and again I am surprised to realise how different audiences have similar responses. It’s an old truth that the more particular and detailed and local you are in your writing the more universal is the result. When you crumble your own cubic inch of existence down to its elements, you find that every human is made of the same atoms.”
For audiences in Israel Master of the House eloquently addresses one of Hasfari’s continuing concerns. It’s the nature of “home” in a country where a population substantially made up of immigrant Jews and their descendants – many Holocaust survivors, like Hasfari’s Ashkenazi parents – struggle to forge a unified identity in the face of external threats and internal divisions. It is no accident that Hasfari sets the play in March 2002, during one of the most deadly and unsettling phases of an extended Palestinian uprising, the Second Intifada. His oldest child – Hasfari is married to actress Hanna Azulai Hasfari – is currently in military service, just as his father was more than 30 years ago. Hanna and Shmuel’s 15-year-old twin sons will likely be required to do the same.
In Master of the House the struggle is between the old and the new, the past and the present – although, as we learn, Joel Ben-Ephraim’s objection to change is rooted in a painful personal reality. It is his inner crisis that gives the play its emotional poignancy and directs its outcome.
Says Hasfari: “I think, perhaps, that the play uncovers and exposes fears and anxieties in people’s minds on several levels – personal security, relatives, the loss a child, the possibility of overcoming grief and the fear of losing your personal, intimate environment. I think the way it’s handled – the humor, the irony – helps people deal better with their hidden fears. That is what theatre is all about.”
--Michael Crabb is an arts reporter for Canada’s The National Post and the author of numerous books. He is the award-winning producer of CBC Radio’s “The Arts Report.”
