Tzavta hosts annual Short Play Festival

To emphasize its 15th anniversary each of the 9 short plays at the Tel Aviv festival from Dec. 26-29 will be 15 minutes long.

By HELEN KAYE
"Six" 370 (photo credit: Ran Biran)
"Six" 370
(photo credit: Ran Biran)
To emphasize its 15th anniversary each of the nine short plays at the Tzavta Tel Aviv Short Play Festival from December 26-29 will be 15 minutes long.
There are three sets of plays, each dealing with different aspects of one of this year’s three subjects, Home, Time and War. The festival includes 14/48 – the World’s Fastest Theater Project and from this year will be named the Erik Hoch Short Play Festival in memory of Hoch, who died two years ago.
A fervid supporter of Tzavta, Hoch was the CEO of the Kibbutz Artzi’s Havazelet Foundation for education and culture.
Festival artistic director Eli Malka says that the chosen plays reflect “a reaction in real time to the social and political situation in our country. Israel today is struggling with questions of its identity today, and what it may be down the line.”
The Time set includes Six, based on a short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez which tells of a barman, a client and 15 lost minutes. The Home set offers Housewarming, in which an Israeli and an African migrant worker battle over an abandoned property while in Hoo Ha Mi Ze Ba, is one of the War set and is about a family waiting excitedly for the prime minister.
Roy Reshef, 14/48’s artistic director in 2010, brought the idea from Seattle with its founders’ blessing. Briefly, the project offers 14 plays in two series of seven, each 10 minutes long, chosen, conceived, written and rehearsed over 24 hours with the subject, the directors and the actors all chosen by lot. The first seven are chosen by the participants. The audience chooses the next seven.
In each case an answer to the statement: “The theater would be better if it dealt with…” is written on a slip of paper and thrown into a hat. What emerges is the subject.
Previous subject have been “the neighbor upstairs,” “Ruth the Moabite” and “the underworld.”
The playwright writes the play overnight, it’s rehearsed all the next day and presented in the evening – all on high octane energy.
For more info visit www.tzavta.co.il