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Does ‘Romeo and Juliet’ translate to Jerusalem?

When Ellen Geer decided to stage an adaptation set in East Jerusalem of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum, the Topanga Canyon-based theater company she runs, she understood it to be a political choice as well as an artistic one.
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May 25, 2016

When Ellen Geer decided to stage an adaptation set in East Jerusalem of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum, the Topanga Canyon-based theater company she runs, she understood it to be a political choice as well as an artistic one.

“East Jerusalem is political,” Geer said at the nonprofit organization’s outdoor auditorium during an interview in April. “Life is political. I’m not afraid of it. It’s not a matter of taking sides.”

Although the play doesn’t open to the public until June 4, one prominent Los Angeles-based Jewish institution has already accused Geer of doing just that: taking a side against Israel.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, whose mission is to fight intolerance and anti-Semitism, issued a statement on May 19 that called the play “a heavy-handed anti-Israel propaganda platform.”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, said in an interview that the play “turns reality on its head” by portraying a Jerusalem where innocent Palestinians fear attacks by Israelis rather than the other way around.

“ ‘Romeo and Juliet’ has now been leveraged for an extreme political position that, by the way, in our opinion is a lie,” Cooper said.

Cooper pointed to one scene in particular, featured in a promotional video for the play, as evidence of anti-Israel bias.

In the opening scene, a scuffle breaks out between Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers and a group of young Palestinians, ending with the execution-style murder of a woman in a traditional Muslim hijab, or head covering.

Responding to the Wiesenthal Center’s criticism, the theater company said in an emailed statement that it did not intend to vilify either side of the conflict, but rather “to engender thoughtful and emotional response and to encourage dialogue.”

The statement added, “We have worked hard with both our production and our educational support materials to not engage in bias regarding the difficult political issues that exist in East Jerusalem.”

According to the statement, the theater company “will continue to fine tune and make minor changes in response to audience feedback,” but a company spokesperson declined to say what might be changed.

Leading up to the play’s summer run, Theatricum Botanicum staged a number of matinees of the show for local high school and middle school students, accompanying the performances with a day of acting exercises.

Cooper said the center first got wind of the play from a concerned parent of a student who saw it. The Wiesenthal Center then reached out to Steve Zimmer, the president of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), to express its concern.

“This did not go through any LAUSD channels,” Zimmer, who is Jewish, told the Jewish Journal. “This was not approved by us; we didn’t use any district funds for it, and as to our relationship with this organization, that’s something that obviously we’re going to look at carefully now.”

As to whether or not the content was suitable for LAUSD students, Zimmer deferred to Rory Pullens, the school district’s executive director for the arts. The Wiesenthal Center statement quoted Pullens as saying, “This production’s content is not supported by LAUSD for its students.” 

One parent, who heard about the play from his daughter, a ninth-grader at a San Fernando Valley private school, said she came home distraught.

The parent, who asked not to be identified to avoid undue attention for his daughter, said both he and his daughter are concerned that students who might not be familiar with the conflict were being indoctrinated to a negative view of Israel.

“She was disturbed that other schools and non-Jewish kids are seeing this and learning that Israel is the aggressor,” he said.

Theatricum Botanicum hews to a mission that is both artistic and educational, running a Shakespeare summer camp and other youth classes. It also reaches an estimated 15,000 students a year, many of whom are enrolled in LAUSD.

On April 28, a group of actors rehearsed the controversial opening brawl onstage as 300 students milled about the sunny hillside campus, waiting to file into the auditorium to see the play.

Sitting a couple of rows back from where actors were trading blows and slurs, Geer explained that her hope in setting the romance in East Jerusalem was to introduce hundreds of young people to a conflict they might not even know about.

Geer was inculcated from birth with a proclivity for political activism. Her father, Will Geer, a television actor, found himself blacklisted as a communist in the 1950s and barred from most acting jobs.

He originally outfitted the site for the theater, reached by a short gravel road from Topanga Canyon Boulevard, as a plant nursery — “Geer’s Gardens” — but soon turned it into a playhouse for actors like himself who had been put out of work by the Red Scare.

“The blacklisted actors needed a place to perform,” his daughter said. “That’s what Papa built for them here.”

Earlier that morning, she discussed the play’s contents with a group of about a dozen local elders who’d shown up to join the matinee.

“I don’t like updating Shakespeare,” she told them.

But the idea of re-creating the play in East Jerusalem was so intuitive for her that her excitement overcame her reluctance, she said.

“If you can heighten [Shakespeare] in any way with your culture existing now — that’s what’s exciting for me,” she said.

Geer, 75, is enthusiastic when she speaks, with bright-green eyes and white hair that she keeps pinned back. 

Working on the adaptation, she made a point of changing as little as possible.

“There’s just enough changes to keep you rooted in that place,” said Allan Blumenfeld, the actor who plays Juliet’s father.

After swapping “Jerusalem” for “Verona,” the rest of the changes follow naturally: Juliet is the scion of a prominent Jewish family, while Romeo, a Palestinian, wears a black-and-white checkered kaffiyeh as a scarf. Paris, Juliet’s unlucky suitor who is favored by her father, becomes Peretz, an Orthodox Jew.

Most of the dialogue is unchanged, though it’s peppered with words in Hebrew, Arabic and Yiddish.

With Shakespeare’s famous play as her vehicle, Geer said she hoped to superimpose a question of humanity onto the situation: “Even with the death of your child, are you still willing to keep fighting?” she said.

The campus itself has the look and feel of a summertime fantasy: There’s a reason the company chooses to stage Shakespeare’s fantastical “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” there every year. 

For her part, Geer is more than happy to play the part of the dreamer. The idea of an interminable conflict in Jerusalem is simply not acceptable to her, and she sees the humanity of Shakespeare’s play as a means of transcending geopolitics.

“This is an old story,” she said, sitting across from Blumenfeld on a pew in the auditorium. “Isn’t everybody getting tired over there?”

The actor thought about it. He was already dressed in a suit and tie in preparation for his role as the Capulet patriarch. After a moment, to nobody in particular, he asked, “What’s the antidote to the poison of hatred?”

 

“Romeo and Juliet” runs June 4-Oct. 2 at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum. For tickets and information, visit this article at jewishjournal.com.

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