From the Press

"A multicultural collage engulfing compaction, love, and humor, which exposes Zionism at its highest and lowest. The play is wild; the events portrayed are independently alive and associatively rich."

(Ido Dagan – Tel Aviv)

"The best play I've seen here lately!..A truly interesting, honest, and touching theatrical undertaking, dealing with the "Isrealness" that people once dreamt of…Israeli theaters don't deal with these questions much anymore. "Longing" does with an adequate theatrical language and with good use of the tools that comprise the theater medium."

(Shosh Avigail – Walla)

"You leave "Longing" with the feeling that one day we may be able to live in this country. The audience that throughout the play transformed from a random mass of people to one unified entity, actually refused to leave once the play was over…Creativity and fruitful dialog that remind me of theater at its finest."

(Eitan Bar-Yossef – HaIr)

"…A nice evening dedicated to reflecting on excerption as the source of pain and frustration, but also the source of a mutual future where longing is the source of coexistence. Special and moving theater!"

(Shay Bar-Yaakov – Yediot Akhronot)

"…Wisely directed and edited out of a theatrical imagination. The play is never overly sentimental and never goes overboard. Longing for what? To the most human of things. A longing where there are no Arabs or Jews, only human beings…The audiences emotional response is easily felt, a silence mixed with excitement…All the actors; Jews and Arabs, give their soul to the performance…truly touching!"

(Elyakim yaron – Maariv)

“LONGING” or “ Exile At Home”

Best Fringe Theatre Award of 2003
Home, Exile, Longing

Directed & Edited by

Igal Ezraty

Stage Design

Uri Onn

Music by

Alla abu Amara

Lighting Design

Chani Vardi

Actors/Writers

Gaby Aldor, Marinna baluzev, Claudia dela Seta, Rauda Saliman, Norman Issa, Ra’anan Ferrara, Oleg Rudobilski

Musicians

Alla Abu – Amra- ooud, Guitar and Clarinett, Amin Sayag - Violin

Writers

Itzik G’uli, Immad J‘abarin, and Danny Hurwitz

A group of Jewish and Arab artists, immigrants, new and old, natives and those who were born in the Diaspora take a voyage into memory. The stories of a grandfather expelled from the Arab village, B’iram, of a mother who emigrated from Cairo to Israel and is dreaming to be buried back there, where she was born, of a daughter who returned to Berlin in her fathers' footsteps and a uncle who chose to return to his native village from which he was banished and work his ancestors land as a hired hand, are intertwined in a saga of two actors from Uzbekistan who are trying to become citizens of their “promised land” together with their child, who is less estranged to the new culture. They all meet Telenovella, a character who dreams of love, without nationality.

The performance takes place on several stages which surround the audience. They, the center, taste different cultures, many modes of pain, music, languages and at the end, the soothing taste of food.
The performance tries to look into the longing to childhood, to parents, to home and to one's homeland.

Exile is not only a political fate- it can be a state of mind, a cultural and inner exile, either imposed or chosen.

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