Famous playwright to visit Israel; Lessin, Simta stage two new shows

Famous playwright to vis

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
manlio santanelli 248.88 (photo credit: )
manlio santanelli 248.88
(photo credit: )
Playwright Santanelli to visit Israel Italian playwright Manlio Santanelli will attend the premiere of his Regina Madre (Queen Mother) at the Haifa Theater on December 16. A comic drama on the complex relationship between mother and son, the play won the Italian Drama Institute prize in 1985. • Helen Kaye Lessin, Simta stage two new shows Bet Lessin and the Simta Theater are each mounting a tragedy. At Bet Lessin, Hillel Mittelpunkt, who usually directs his own plays, has translated and will direct Arthur Miller's modern classic, A View from the Bridge. At the Simta Oded Littman has adapted Sophocles' Oedipus Rex into a cabaret. He's also the director. Miller's drama, which started life in 1955 as a one-act play set in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, is about love, lust, betrayal and honor. Longshoreman Eddie Carbone, an Italian-American, guiltily harbors more than familial affection for his niece and ward, Catharine. Then cousins arrive from the old country, illegal immigrants, but family and community honor demand that Carbone shelter them. When Catharine and young Rodolpho fall in love, the disintegration begins. Meanwhile, three actors play all the characters in Littman's "reality theater" version of Oedipus in which human cruelty, orchestrated by a cynical MC and his sidekick, replaces the Greeks' inexorable Fates. It opens December 20 at the Simta in Old Jaffa. A View from the Bridge opens at Bet Lessin on December 25. • Jerusalem Post staff Holon Cinematheque screens Decalogue The Holon Cinematheque will screen Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Decalogue, in honor of the 20th anniversary of the film, starting December 9. The film, originally made as a 10-part television series, takes the 10 Commandments as its theme and each one-hour episode is based on a different commandment. All the episodes will be shown this month. The Decalogue is considered the greatest masterpiece by the Polish director, who died in 1996. He also made the acclaimed Red, White and Blue film series. • Hannah Brown