Writer and professors take the stage

When a bunch of university professors get excited, you have to figure it's over something special.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman (photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimksi )
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman
(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimksi )

When a bunch of university professors get excited, you have to figure it's over something special.

"I've always dreamed of writing a play," says author Ella Moscowitz-Weiss (Written on the Sea - Hargol/Am Oved), and now she has. Leap, billed as a kind of paraphrased Crime and Punishment, opens at the Tmuna Theater on July 30 directed by Tel Aviv University professor/dramaturg Shimon Levy. Colleague/actor Professor Gad Kenar plays a famous and charismatic psychiatrist accused of the attempted murder of his former lover, now lying in a coma. Rau'da, the tough cop grilling him, has aspirations to become the first Arab police commissioner. Their confrontations are charged, and while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is never mentioned, it is a powerful subtext throughout.

While working on the play with her editor, Haim Pessah, Moscowitz-Weiss took a play-writing course with Kenar, but she didn't dare show him the finished product. She first read the play to actress Orna Porat, who encouraged her to submit it to Kenar; he suggested she show it to Levy and it moved briskly from there.