Itim announces new lineup

Rina Yerushalmi's Itim theater ensemble, sponsored by the Cameri, is celebrating its 20th anniversary with two projects.

By HELEN KAYE
Rina Yerushalmi's Itim theater ensemble, sponsored by the Cameri, is celebrating its 20th anniversary with two projects. Itim alumnus and director Ari Remez is working on Scottish playwright David Harrower's Knives in Hens. The setting is a small and God-fearing village. The three characters are a Young Woman, her plowman husband Pony William and the outcast village miller. Via the miller, the young woman becomes aware of language, the power it bestows and of her own yearnings to flourish rather than exist. Since its debut at Edinburgh's Traverse Theater in 1995, the play has been performed all over the world and in dozens of languages. It premieres this October. Yerushalmi's Herzl project "may be ready by the end of this year," but she won't commit to a date. This is not a linear biography, she insists, rather it is a series of questions that probe the Great Visionary through his own diaries, his plays, Amos Elon's biography of him and other sources. In fact, Yerushalmi has not cast an actor as Herzl. Why is she doing this? "We don't dream anymore," she says, "We are too busy with reality," which is, so she intimates, doing its best to destroy us all. Additionally, Itim's hit production of The Dybbuk will have two performances at the Noorderzon Performing Arts Festival at Groningen, Holland on August 28 and 29.