Review: Shame 2.0 with Comments from the Populace. Truth on stage

Billed as a workshop production to which the press was invited, Mosaic Theater Company’s Shame 2.0 with Comments from the Populace opened Thursday night with all hands on deck in solidarity and much marketing trumpeting it as a “DC world premiere” of docu-theater. Around the edges, however, and in the margins of conversations introducing the play, it became all too clear that the process had proved brutal and that, from the battleground with all lines drawn, the creative team had emerged in pyrrhic victory at best, with everyone still limping and bleeding.

There is a kind of irony in the fact that the show was nearly cancelled, as Shame 2.0 is about, on the one hand, artistic censorship in Israel and lack of equity between the Jewish state power and its citizens who run the country and control the cultural as well as the political scene, and, on the other, the Palestinians who live there, marginalized and under brutal occupation. The play also holds a mirror up to our own current raging debate about “Who gets to tell the story?”

Artistic Director Ari Roth is no newcomer when it comes to tackling difficult subject matter with his theatrical choices. He is committed to cross-cultural engagement and is experienced in the messy process that is most often involved.

In presenting Nicholas Wright’s  A Human Being Died Last Night, Roth gave us another dramatized transcript of several conversations that took place between a psychologist, Gobodo-Madikizela, and Eugene de Kock in Pretoria’s Central Prison between 1997-2002.  The work forced the audience to bear witness and, in some sense, weigh in as both jury and judge.

Another Mosaic production that had been shocking to some and provoked much post-performance debate was The Return by Hannah Eady Edward Mast about an Israeli woman who had nearly destroyed a Palestinian man she’s had an affair with in her convenient lie about being raped, playing into stereotype crime profiles and racist hatred.  Strong stuff and disturbing, but very worth looking at and trying to understand. John Vreeke had directed that play, and he did it masterfully.

In this case, Roth has invited the co-authors Einat Weizman, a Jewish playwright committed to works of social justice and activism, and Morad Hassan, a Palestinian actor living and working in Israel, to re-work and expand their play.

The question is, was this process worth it?

The second question will probably be best answered by the artists and company after the dust settles. Since the production was, after mounting tensions and disagreements, turned back to “the primary authorship,” we will never perhaps know what the original intention was.

As a theatrical experience, it is, in truth, not very satisfying.

Part of the problem, to my taste, was that the two lead performers were uneven in their investment in the material, and not so much unequal in talent as simply coming from two entirely different worlds and styles of theater-making.

Morad Hassan is a Palestinian actor playing himself.  As such, he carries all the moral authority in this story. Moreover, from the moment he walks downstage center, he grabs and holds the audience’s attention.  He shapes his narrative, moving with ease between comedy and seriousness. With his small, wiry body and seemingly oversized hands and sneakered feet, he is a physical performer who knows how to use his instrument expressively. Hassan projects vulnerability and sometimes self-deprecating humor, but hardly the projection of someone deemed a terrorist by a country like ours in the throes of creating false narratives of “us vs. them” Hassan is a truly accomplished actor whose every gesture and every step are given weight and presence.

Local actor Colleen Delany delivered a flatter performance, her arms hanging as if lifeless at her sides. I never believed she could have carried in her the fiery furnace of someone who risked “crossing over to the other side” time and again, taking the heat of being called a traitor and risking her reputation and, even at times her life, to keep exposing the stories of injustice to the Palestinians. Delany’s style was dialed down,to more like a television talking-head. (Well, perhaps this was intentional, as Weizman had been a TV and Film personality.) Ultimately, the two lead characters felt mismatched.

Lynette Ratham played the live impersonation of Miri Regev, the Israeli Minister of Culture and Sports. She valiantly competes with the supersize video projections of this woman and communicates the translated diatribe against the Palestinians and their supporters. She invokes the role as Voice of the Far Right, demonstrating Israel’s heavy-handed suppression of dissident art.  But having Ratham, as the on stage double, perform with Regev’s glamorous TV looks looming behind the actress is tough. Further, Regev is a curious character in the script, neither fully realized nor made into a cartoon-like cameo. Has something been excised or lost in translation?

Director Vreeke has done yeoman’s duty.  You could almost feel him wanting to hold the center together throughout the evening. There might yet be a play in the journey.

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What remains of this play is a montage and patching together of monologues, news clips, and crude bleep-filled diatribes from social media. Jonathan Dahm Robertson has created a world with his series of projections of live political footage that brings clarity to the struggle in Israel for equity.

At one point the action stopped, and big cards were handed out to audience members who volunteered to read. Calling on audience participation always presents theatrically risky business. As the individual readers were not actors or able to project or shape spoken arguments, and some of the statements being quite long, any sense of the evening’s real dramatic propulsion was halted. This process was clearly of great political importance to the play’s agenda, even reflected in the title, adding to the collected evidence of the assault on Weizman in social media. Sadly, much of the text was garbled or lost entirely.

Mostly, I longed for the complexity and nuance of characters and story that I have experienced in many other shows at Mosaic.  There were moments that played and broke the tension then skewered the audience effectively.  Hassan jokes “We are Jews of the Jews,” delivering the line like an accomplished stand up comedian, Shortly after he launches into lines from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice from a production where (irony again) he played the Jew himself “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” I wanted more of this hefty resonance.

The last word on this production must be given to Roth, who faced a most difficult choice in a production where the artists seem to have mutinied. He made his exit, recognizing that “we’re working with frontline artist-activists from a war zone…we’ve offered an integrity of voice as articulated by the artists closest to those frontlines. Few people are as brave or fierce in their documentary-based pursuits to give voice to the silenced as Einat, and her partnership with Morad is to be respected, and has been.” 

Shame 2.0 with Comments from the Populace. Co-authored by Einat Weizman and Morad Hassan. Directed by John Vreeke. Set Design by Jonathan Dahm Robertson. Lighting Design by Brittanty Shmuga. Costume Design by Brandee Mathies. Projections Design by Dylan Oremovich. Sound Design by David Lamont Wilson. Sound Engineering by Robert Garner. With Morad Hassan, Colleen Delany, and Lynette Ratham. Produced by Mosaic Theater Company. Reviewed by Susan Galbraith.