First score for Gesher

Celebrating the theater’s 20th birthday, Gesher veterans look back on creating a new cultural initiative during the Gulf War.

By BARRY DAVIS
Gesher Theater crew 521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Gesher Theater crew 521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
There is a saying in Hebrew that goes something along the lines of “If it didn’t exist, someone would have to invent it.” That could be readily applied to Gesher Theater which, against all the odds, is now celebrating its 20th birthday.
The mainly Russian theater company has come a long long way since it took its first daring and unsteady steps into the Israeli theatrical milieu and entertainment market. In addition to all the expected challenges of trying to adjust to a new culture, society and – crucially important – language, there was the small matter of some Scud missiles with supposed chemical warheads finding their way to these parts courtesy of Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War.
After making it over here as the Soviet Union fell apart at the seams, the Gesher gang found themselves working out of a basement venue on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, trying to fit in rehearsals for the debut show in Israel – Tom Stoppard’s existentialist tragicomedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – between sirens going off and clamping gas masks over their heads.
“That was very theatrical, doing rehearsals with gas masks,” recalls Gesher Theater general manager Lena Kreindlin, “but we just went with the flow.”
That laissez-faire attitude has stood the Gesher company in good stead, and the theater is now one of the country’s most acclaimed cultural institutions and often flies our flag in foreign pastures, having performed to very enthusiastic response thus far in the US, Russia, Canada, Italy, Colombia, Latvia and several other former Soviet republics.
Some of the Gesher members’ objective aliya-related challenges were compounded by complex personal circumstances. Kreindlin, for example, relocated here as a single mother of a nine-year-old son. She says that all the Gesher actors and non-acting staff played something akin to a professional parental role too.
“It’s like when a woman becomes pregnant,” she says. “The couple don’t think about the fact that they are going to be parents for the rest of their lives. We started up Gesher and just went with it. We didn’t think about the future or how we would manage.”
But, at least in artistic terms, they have gotten by admirably. The decision to launch the theater’s stage endeavor with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead may seem strange, but Kreindlin says it was something of a natural choice.
“The theme isn’t Jewish or Israeli or Russian. We went for something very British with no connection to local cultures and very unexpected. It is an English drama based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. That brought us our first success, perhaps because theater is often based on paradox.”
For Yevgeny Arye, Gesher’s founder and artistic director, the debut production was of crucial importance in setting down a marker in his and the actors’ newly adopted country. “I wanted to go all out and show audiences here what we were capable of, what kind of theater we were going to be and our approach to theater. But I can’t really say which the stand-out production is. It is like saying you prefer one of your children over another. You love them all.”
Maintaining the familial concept, some have been moved to observe that had they been aware of some of the trials and tribulations that come with bringing up a child, they might have thought twice before indulging in some some mutual biblical knowledge.
In the context of Gesher and what the road ahead may bring, Kreindlin says it was mostly a matter of jumping in feet first without overly considering the implications. “I’m not sure that creating Gesher was an act of courage. Maybe it was just foolhardiness,” she proffers with a laugh. “I think it was good that we didn’t know what awaited us.”
Mind you, in one sense at least, Kreindlin and her Gesher colleagues had a head start on the market here. “We brought our audiences with us from the Soviet Union,” she notes. “We came here as part of the mass wave of aliya. We came here with our own theater [Kreindlin and all the other Gesher actors and Arye all worked and studied at Mayakowsky Theater in Moscow and made aliya en masse], and our director [Arye].”
On a recent fact-finding tour of cultural institutions in Tel Aviv by four members of the Knesset’s Education, Culture and Sports Committee, Gesher Theater chairman Eli Zohar bemoaned the fact that the government only confirms budget handouts for culture halfway, or later, through the year. This year, for example, Gesher and others discovered they would be receiving 30 percent less than expected only after initiating and implementing all sorts of projects and the ensuing financial commitments. At the time, Zohar said that the theater was in an untenable position and that it was “on the brink of closing down.”
“We’re always on the verge of closing down,” says Kreindlin matter-of-factly. “Even today, right now as we speak.”
That, the general manager hastens to add, is not for lack of kudos. “We get lots of praise from all sorts of officials and authorities, here and abroad. That’s not the problem.”
Indeed, at Monday evening’s gala 20th birthday bash at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem President Shimon Peres was effusive in his commendations of the theater company. Peres noted Gesher’s role in enriching Israeli cultural life, as did Culture Minister Limor Livnat, who received a less enthusiastic reception than the president. There were also recorded tributes from the likes of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and veteran actress Gila Almagor betwixt the musical and comical sketches performed by the Gesher acting personnel.
Peres added an improvised aside to his prepared speech when he addressed reports to the effect that Livnat has suggested merging Habimah Theater with Gesher, in an effort to reduce each institution’s mounting deficits. Habimah’s accrued shortfall is now in the region of NIS 40 million, while Gesher is about NIS 8m. in the red. Half jokingly Peres told Livnat that “it is easier to merge two political parties than two theaters.”
Gesher chairman Eli Zohar declined to comment on the Livnat initiative, and no response was forthcoming from Habimah management head David Boaz.
MOST OF all, however, Gesher has garnered praise from the ticket-buying public from the outset. Reviews of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead were mostly wildly enthusiastic, and many talked in terms of “a new wind” blowing in the Israeli theater community.
Kreindlin struggles to define the added value Gesher introduced but, when pushed, says the company members draw on their country of birth’s deep cultural roots. “Theater and all the arts were very well developed in the Soviet Union, and we all fed off this.
I think it was like when Habimah Theater started 90 years ago, we brought something else to the world of Israeli theater; we gave it a push. All Israeli theater changed after that. That’s not my original notion; they are things I heard from people who were active in theater here before Gesher and after we started.”
Arye also says he finds it hard to put his finger on exactly what it was that Gesher brought to the performing arts scene here but primarily attributes the splash Gesher made to the company’s willingness to break new ground. “Of course, we came here with all the long Russian theatrical tradition, but we took huge artistic risks with every production,” he says.
“We didn’t come here to do Broadway or West End shows. We came here to try to do our work in the best artistic way possible. We don’t want to be a provincial theater, and just because you are in a small country doesn’t mean you have to be provincial in your approach. I think Israelis, including non-Russian speakers, recognized that from the very first show we put on. Also putting on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by a British playwright, was a big risk. But that worked out.”
“That is possibly our most important production so far,” concurs actor Israel (Sasha) Damidov. “We could have flopped, but we didn’t. Actually, I wasn’t surprised that Israeli audiences liked the production because we came here with a lot of experience. We had done good things in theater in Moscow.”
Even so, Damidov admits that his first impression of “the locals” did not seem to bode well for the future. “I saw people on the beach here, happy and smiling, and I thought ‘Israelis are not serious people; they won’t appreciate what we do.’ But when I saw so many young people sitting in the audience instead of spending their time in pubs, that was very heartening.”
On a more personal level, Damidov highlights Gesher’s rendition of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot as his most important role to date. “That’s when I really felt the audience was with me, that they really got what I was trying to portray. That was a wonderful feeling.”
Surprisingly, Gesher also attracted a large number of Israeli non-Russian-speaking theatergoers, notwithstanding the fact that the initial productions were performed in Russian, with Hebrew surtitles provided.
Even so, the company’s original intent of exclusively engaging in Russian-language theater was soon amended, and Gesher became a bilingual enterprise.
Today, Gesher performs primarily in Hebrew.
“We got some great reviews after the first performance – all sorts of remarks like ‘Where did all this magic come from?’ – from Israeli critics,” recalls Kreindlin. “That was amazing. Here were people who’d seen a show in a foreign language and they were blown away by it.”
THE DECISION to begin doing productions in Hebrew landed Gesher actors with a logistical problem of serious proportions. As the new immigrant actors’ knowledge of Hebrew was poor, they initially painstakingly wrote out their parts in Hebrew in Cyrillic letters. That, naturally, meant there was no room for error or improvisational maneuvering.
Every actor had to get his or her part down to perfection.
“That was really crazy,” recalls Damidov, “reading the parts in Russian lettering. That was hard going, but we had no choice.”
At an earlier stage of this country’s evolution, the decision to perform theater in a foreign language would have been considered tantamount to anti- Zionist heresy. It may seem comical today, but at one time even Yiddish was considered a foreign language and, as such, any production in Yiddish incurred a special tax.
Kreindlin says that critical acclaim and healthy audience sizes notwithstanding, Gesher had its early detractors. “There were people, and officials, who objected to the creation of the theater in the first place, let alone our decision to perform in Russian.
Some suggested that the actors should be dispersed among the existing theater companies and gradually absorbed into mainstream Israeli theater.”
Arye recalls some trying to dissuade him from going ahead with his plans for creating Gesher. “They said I was an established director and that I could get work with Habimah or any other of the other big theaters here, and that all I needed to do was learn Hebrew. I am lucky I didn’t listen to them.”
That “luck” is shared by all theatergoers in this country, and quite a few abroad as well.
Eventually, Gesher’s successes did their bit. “I know who those officials [who didn’t want Gesher to set up shop here] were and, by the way, they give us a lot of support these days,” observes Kreindlin.
Truth be told, budget difficulties aside, Gesher received a helping hand or two from the outset from the likes of the Culture Ministry, the Tel Aviv Municipality, the Jewish Agency and the Tel Aviv Foundation, but it still took a lot of hard work to get the project up and running.
Even so, Kreindlin is not entirely convinced that Gesher’s future or, indeed, the country’s cultural health, is assured. “Everybody showers us with kind words and compliments, but no one has assured us of continuing financial support,” she says. “We’re not alone in this. Cultural endeavors in this country do not get what is provided in most civilized countries.
People, and the authorities, have to realize that culture is our store window and what we have to offer.”
Continuing financial challenges apart, Kreindlin is immensely proud of Gesher’s achievements to date.
“We have put on quite a few landmark productions over the last 20 years that attracted large audiences and established the theater’s star actors. We performed Adam Resurrected by Yoram Kaniuk all over the world. That started in 1993 and ran for 15 years.
There was also Village by Yehoshua Sobol and the Bashevis Singer trilogy and David Grossman’s Mumik.
I think the main focus is on Jewish and Israeli works, and we are blessed with a director [Arye] who knows how to translate literary works into the language of the theater. That’s our secret.”
For more information about Gesher Theater: www.gesher- theatre.co.il