Tzavta hosts annual Short Play Festival
By HELEN KAYE
12/10/2012 21:23
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.
"Six" Photo: 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