Slaying dragons

A master of children's theater, Hanoch Re'im uses minimalism to maximum effect.

By BARRY DAVIS
Visual minimalism (photo credit: Courtesy)
Visual minimalism
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Will Shakes would, no doubt, have spotted the pertinence – after all, the Bard did coin “all the world’s a stage,” did he not? Hanoch Re’im’s life, to date, reads like the script for a tense drama, adventure story, tearjerker, romantic thriller, you-name-it.
Quite simply, the award-winning, 47-year-old director, actor, playwright and scriptwriter – almost exclusively in the domain of children’s theater – has the hard facts to make any Hollywood executive drool; and possibly any psychologist dive for their compendium to bone up on the latest observations on Freudian-based neuroses or the Oedipus complex.
The “personal details” section of Re’im’s CV includes the following data: married for the fourth time, father of six daughters, three with his current and, according to Re’im, final spouse.
Not bad for a man who has yet to hit his half-century and has, in between marriages and children, accumulated an impressive thespian resumé thus far.
Re’im’s upcoming play, Ish Katan Vedrakon (“A Little Man and a Dragon”), will be performed at next week’s Children’s Summer Festival. The show is a production of the Khan Theater of Jerusalem and is principally aimed at children in the four to nine age group.
Re’im’s wife, Lova, who incidentally was Re’im’s student when he taught at the Nissan Nativ Acting Studio, also plays a couple of roles in the show.
The storyline features a child who hears someone whimpering, and sets out in the direction of the local king’s castle wearing a red hat knitted for him by his mother to find the unhappy soul. On his way he meets all sorts of characters – a guard, a magician and a cook – and swaps hats and roles with them. He also in each of his guises encounters a dragon, and manages to vanquish the fire-breathing behemoth, who threatens to swallow up half the kingdom.
As the magician, the boy manages to reduce the dragon to a small, unimposing creature before he encounters the unhappy king who is fearful of the monster. Naturally, when the king sees that the object of his trepidation has been downsized to very manageable proportions, all is well.
In visual terms, A Little Man and a Dragon is a minimalist production, with music by Re’im’s long-standing cohort Avner Kanner, which suits Re’im’s theatrical mind-set.
“You only need a single character – like the boy in this play – around which you develop a whole show,” observes Re’im. “You build the design, the music and the play itself around just one character.”
Indeed, Re’im’s first stage offering, Tiyul Lekochav Hagevina (“A Trip to the Cheese Star”), which has been running for over 18 years, is visually Spartan. But, says the director, it is not the physically tangible that is important here.
“There are almost no props in A Trip to the Cheese Star, but when the teachers ask the kids to make drawings of what they saw in the show, they all draw spaceships and all sorts of things that weren’t actually there on the stage. They know they didn’t actually see them, but their imagination does the rest.”
Re’im takes a somewhat orthodox approach to the process of choosing his fellow cast members for his productions.
“I don’t hold auditions,” he declares. “I just sit down and chat with the candidates, and if that doesn’t suffice, I have various exercises that I do with them. They are exercises I devised myself, and the actor in question does not feel he or she is being tested.
“The exercises help actors address theater work in a relaxed and intuitive manner. It gives me an idea of whether the person and I speak the same language.”
Re'im's offstage life evolution is no less captivating than his onstage work.
He was born and brought up on Kibbutz Dalya in the Galilee and, as was the custom in those days, slept each night in the kibbutz children’s building rather than in his parents’ home. His mother died when he was just eight years old – “it took me until the age of 15 or 16 to finally realize she wasn’t coming back,” he says – and he often snuck out of the children’s building to climb into his dad’s bed.
“Sometimes I slept between him and a Japanese volunteer who later became my mother,” Re’im recalls with a smile.
All in all, Re’im did not choose a bad line of work.
About 20 years ago, manic comedian-actor Robin Williams once quipped to his Metropolitan Opera audience in New York that they probably paid their quacks a fortune to keep themselves on an even keel, while he released his pent-up emotions on his audiences – and got paid for the “therapy session” in the process. Re’im says he can identify with that, and says he also enjoys the emotional steam-releasing properties of his chosen career. Many of his childhood experiences and scars found their way into his work, he says.
“The first show I did with the Khan Theater, Sipur Laila (“Bedtime Story”), was based on my memories of sleeping in the kibbutz children’s building. I think one of the reasons that I work in children’s theater is that it allows me to address the psychological issues of the child in me.” Bedtime Story also touches on his mother’s death.
Re’im has other motives for reaching out to younger audiences.
“I think children’s theater is more important than theater for adults,” he declares. “I relate to adult theater as a form of entertainment. For a start, adults are already corrupted and they go to the theater out of choice. Children don’t choose to go to see a play, their parents take them.”
Re’im believes that even when children have some say in the matter, it is a byproduct of conditioning.
“They may want to go to a play because they know about it from TV, but then it’s because they have been brainwashed,” he says.
Focusing on the junior sector, says Re’im, may offer fertile terrain for getting his products out there, but it comes with a heavy responsibility tag.
“It’s true that it is relatively easy to tempt kids – although, I must say, it’s not that hard to get adults on your side, either – but because of that, you must not be cynical. There is so much rubbish on the children’s entertainment market, and it is often delivered at ridiculously high volume.”
With his vast experience in the field, which includes serving as artistic director of the annual Haifa Children’s Theater Festival – not to mention his hands-on domestic role to an abundance of offspring – Re’im is also in a perfect position to pass judgment on the nature of his young audiences.
Despite Internet exposure, he believes – to paraphrase a certain Ms. Stein – that a child is a child is a child.
“My shows look at innocence. A five-year-old is always a five-year-old, external influences notwithstanding.”
Do Re’im’s shows aim to convey some educational message?
“You know, ‘messer’ [“message” in Hebrew) means ‘knife’ in German – and you don’t give a small kid a knife,” he replies earnestly and somewhat cryptically.
Then again, Re’im projects always offer an abundance of ideas for children to imbibe, and even some social comment ,which the kids may or may not get.
“I am getting a new play up and running, called Shtayim (“Two”), about a Hebrew-speaking girl and an Arabic-speaking girl who meet up at a smashed-out theater on the [political-cultural] seam. All the props and the stage are in ruins, which alludes to what goes on here – in cultural terms – these days.”
Quite a few of Re’im’s plays have been translated into several languages, including Arabic, and have been performed in Europe and North America, and he hopes that Two finds its way into Arabic.
True artists, naturally, convey their own feelings and baggage through their work, which, considering his eventful personal history, in Re’im’s case could be a bit risky. The director begs to differ.
“Once, after a performance of Bedtime Story, a woman came up to me and told me she had brought her son and two nephews to the show, and that her nephews’ mother had recently died. She said that as soon as the show mentioned my character’s mother’s death, she wanted to get her nephews out of there. But then she saw they were fine with it and, in fact, she realized that my story gave her nephews’ situation some sort of legitimacy.
“This sort of thing happens, and not just to them, and they also saw how much strength you can derive from the situation.”
Success notwithstanding, Re’im keeps his feet firmly planted on the ground.
“I always say that even though I am the director, playwright and leading actor of a show, I am really just a stagehand. We are all stagehands. It’s about the work.”
A Little Man and a Dragon will be performed at the Children’s Summer Festival at Beit Yad Labanim in Tel Aviv on August 16 at 5 p.m. The festival runs from August 16- 18.For more information: www.yadlabanim.org.il and (03) 562-9351.