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November 14, 2003
Let's talk love, not war
Israeli theatre group puts on delightful performance.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
Want to know where some of your Combined Jewish Appeal (CJA) contributions
are going? Whether they are being put to good use? An almost-packed
Norman Rothstein Theatre witnessed firsthand last week that the
dollars are being well spent, and got to enjoy some the fringe benefits
of their donations.
Kiryat Shmona's Marah Theatre company was in Vancouver for a Nov.
5 performance of playwright and artistic director Roi Rashkes' Telling
Love, a series of skits and songs about love: the love between
friends, romantic love, love found on the Internet, love for family
and other stories. Actors Amichai Azar, Ron Richter and Hadar Lipman
wooed the crowd.
With a running time of about an hour, Telling Love was the
perfect combination of humor and seriousness. A projection screen
at one side of the stage provided English translations for the Hebrew
songs. One musical number was particularly amusing, beginning with
the line "I'm the guy who lives with you and bugs you so much"
then goes into his many "offences," such leaving the toilet
seat up, not being able to remember dates and not knowing how to
fold clothes. The title song, "Telling Love," was more
sombre, describing the continuing situation in Israel and the motivation
for the play: "Drowning in a flood of bad news.... But now
we're going to talk about love."
Marah Theatre is supported by CJA donors as part of Partnership
2000, a program that connects communities in the Galilee Panhandle
region of Israel with the Vancouver Jewish community. In his introduction
to the play, Rashkes thanked the audience, saying "without
your help, nothing would happen." He described the job of Marah
as being "to bring people up," to let them have a good
time for an hour. He joked that, when he sees audiences enjoying
his work, he's glad that he didn't become a doctor, as was his mother's
wish for him.
The heart of Marah is a core of five professional actors and, with
the recent arrival of Rashkes as the company's artistic director,
six new plays have emerged in the last year, including Telling
Love. In addition to performing, Marah offers workshops to children
in schools and after school, as well as to teenagers and adults.
The company gives participants from Israel's northernmost communities
a chance to express themselves creatively, while learning the professional
skills of performing arts.
Marah's visit was sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater
Vancouver and Partnership 2000.
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