Bible tale in spotlight

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

It's called Lot's Wife: An Epic Journey and it marks an important place in award-winning lighting designer Itai Erdal's professional journey: it's the first time that he's co-written and co-directed a production.

The promotional material for Lot's Wife, which will be performed at Langara College's Studio 58, leads with the question, "What really happened in Sodom and Gomorrah?"

"I've worked with James Fagan Tait as a director many, many times ... and we're good friends," Erdal told the Independent about his collaborator on Lot's Wife. "I can't remember why I told him this story for the first time, but it was maybe six, seven years ago, and I just told him the whole negotiation part between Abraham and God, when Abraham says, 'What if there's 60 righteous people? What if there's 45 righteous people?' and all that."

Eventually, Erdal read Tait the whole story and Tait "said right away, 'We have to write a play about this' and he said it for a few years and I never took him seriously and I always thought it's just something he says and then one day on a Bard on the Beach opening which Kathryn Shaw [artistic director of Studio 58] directed, he went to Kathryn and he said, 'Itai and I are writing a play and we want to do it in your school' and she said, 'OK, have me over for dinner and we'll talk about it' and then we met.... So, it was kind of Jimmy's initiative after I'd told him the story five years before that or something, and then Kathryn Shaw just went with it, so she's the one who to be thanking for producing this."

In their version of the story, Erdal said, "We're trying to make these people like you and I, real people and problems, so Abraham – he's such a mythological character, he's the father of Judaism and Islam and of Christianity, such a huge, huge figure – is just a guy with neuroticisms and problems and I think that's one of James' strengths as a writer ... is that he has this ability of taking huge events and people, mythological figures and [making] them into regular people and making them so sympathetic and identifiable."

While Erdal told the Independent that he's in the process of writing at least one other show, including one about his mother, which he hopes will be ready for February 2011, he said he is not about to abandon his lighting career.

"First of all, it will take many years before people will think I can do anything else, but, also, lighting has been very good me.... But, whenever I get the chance to have more creative input in a show, I speak the language of theatre very well, I know what works and what doesn't work in the room, even when I'm just a lighting director. More and more, I do sets and lights together and then I have a little more input, so becoming a co-director is not strange or hard of difficult.... It is a natural progression, but I think I wanted to do this with James Fagan Tait because I admire him as a director and a writer and I wanted to learn from him, so I'm certainly doing that. If I get an opportunity to do that again, I'm sure that I'll take it with both hands."

Not being afraid to learn and a strong support system have contributed to Erdal's success.

"I never went to school," he said with respect to lighting design, "so I don't know how things are supposed to be and I kind of make it up every time that I do it and I try new things so I never get stale. I always try to stay fresh and also I take pictures, I work as a photographer as well, so the photography certainly enhances my lighting, because I'm good at framing.... The other thing is I try to make bold choices. I think subtlety is a huge key in lighting design but at the same time you're supposed to be brave with the choices that you make so, I try to make bold choices with color and with patterns, directions the light is coming. I've also been very fortunate to work with many of my good friends ... that I get so comfortable and when I'm having fun and being comfortable the creative juices flow and you try things and you play."

Erdal said he did his first lighting work in his mid-teens. "I thought it would be cool to do something in theatre and I did the lighting for a puppet festival in Jerusalem," he said. "And then, when I finished the army, when I was 21, I joined the theatre in Jerusalem and became first a stagehand and then a lighting technician and I saw a lot of good designers work and that's really how I learned my trade, I saw a lot of good designers."

Nonetheless, Erdal came to Vancouver in 1999 to do film, not lighting, but "there was a big strike in L.A. and film kind of died and I thought I can always find some work in the theatre again and realized that theatre is really my first love and I don't miss film at all and never went back."

With his family still in Israel, Erdal visits every year and he also has done four shows there since he left.

"I think I'm a successful immigration story and still, I can tell you, that immigrating is extremely hard because changing your language, your culture, family, absolutely everything in your life. It sounds romantic and it works for a little while, but it's just a tough, tough, tough thing to do and the longer I stay – I bought an apartment here three years ago – I don't really see myself going back to be honest with you. I've made a life here that I really love and I have no regrets about my choices ... but, I still look back and I find it hard to believe that I did it.

"I lost my mother a couple of years after I moved here, my girlfriend went back and I was just alone on the other side of the world and you feel like if you can't pay the rent you're going to end up on the street. There's no family to fall back into and, in Israel, family is so tight and people are so close to each other and, in North America, it's very hard to learn how people interact with each other, they're so cold compared to what I'm used to, particularly in Vancouver.... That's why I'm so appreciative of the community that I have around me because the people that I work with are a lot like my family, so the hardest thing by far was just feeling very, very lonely and now that I have a girlfriend that I love and so many friends that I love, that all seems like a distant memory. But those first few years were very, very difficult."

Lot's Wife: An Epic Journey will play at Langara College's Studio 58 Oct. 1-18. For tickets and information, visit studio58.ca or ticketstonight.ca.

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