"...gripping, soul-searching, magnetic..."

August 30, 2006 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

From the moment that Jonathan Epstein, sole actor in David Hare's "Via Dolorosa," enters up center and moves down to address the audience, he has it in the palm of his hand. For 90 minutes, no-one in the packed theatre coughs or rattles a program.

In this gripping, soul-searching, magnetic play, Epstein, immediately and seemingly effortlessly, becomes the play's author, David Hare, the celebrated British playwright who in 1997, troubled as so many in our world are by the Israeli/Palestine conflict, journeyed to the area, spent time in Israel, talking to settlers, theatre people, some fanatic, some troubled, then crossed the policed border into Palestine where Arabs in crowded settlements in Gaza told him their stories.

And finally, himself Christian but married to a Jewish wife, Hare, alone in Jerusalem walked the narrow lane, the Via Dolorosa, the path that leads up the hill to Calvary.

In the character of David Hare, whom Epstein has so completely and compellingly become for us, Epstein wanders the stage, his London study, where during the months following his journey, he has tried to understand what he has experienced—the words and wrath, Arab and Jewish, of those he encountered, to put them into the play we are now seeing, as he moves from desk to bulletin board for a scrap of memory, to share with us in the intimately telling, and so reliving it that the very room about which he paces becomes Tel Aviv or Jerusalem—an opulent country home in Israel, or a crowded street on the Golan Heights.

And voices of those to whom he talked, echo out briefly as he becomes them, brings them briefly before us, but only in the Brechtian way, of remaining himself in the telling, always David Hare telling us.

It is a virtuoso performance, one of Epstein's finest, controlled, calm, sharing, but at the same time swept into the emotions of the telling, his voice paced, nuanced, somehow containing the emotions of those to whom he talked and yet remaining his own.

David Hare's play was first presented in London in 1998 and seen on Broadway a year later. All the events after l998 are not reflected in the play's account.

But the evening news tells us how badly the situation has escalated.

The program lists a chronological history of the Middle East—notes so helpful that it is well-worth arriving early and reading them before the play. They help one understand why, but offer little hope.

In detail, they document Israel's Old Testament claims to the land dating from Saul and David as early as 1000 BC. As for the Arabs, they trace roots 2000 years further back to the Canaanites, earliest known inhabitants of Palestine. Both claims are tangled with religion. While Christians, such as Hare, walk the Via Dolorosa.

So , go early, and let the program notes fill you in on the see-sawing struggle between Arab and Jew, the 6 Days war in 1967, the Camp David accords in 1978, the pacts, agreements, assassinations, the hatred and misery that explodes on our evening news.

This area, the birthplace of three world religions, is as Epstein tells us (in Hare's words) a place "where prayers and dreams saturate the air above it." And watching this play one is bound up in the prayers and dreams and sufferings of all.

As Epstein wanders the stage trying to catch the mystic identification, sits on a step that becomes (if indeed in reality it is and can be so identified) the spot where the Cross stood, his voice in the telling is poignant and deeply moving.

What do we need so badly that all the fighting and suffering continues? Is it the stone or the idea? The belief in the stone?

Because in 90 minutes this play so captures the seemingly impossible situation, so tangled in history, religion and politics, the issue of place looms pulsingly, a place to live, a place with water in that desert land, a place with one's own God, no matter how we name him.

This play, after a week in Boston, will return to the stage of the BTF's Unicorn Theatre and be playing there through October 21. Magnificently directed by Anders Cato, beautifully staged in a setting by Chris Bonne, and backed by composer Scott Killian's music, Via Doloroso, this production will remind you of how fortunately we are to have in the Berkshires these amazing talents.

This production ends the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s season on a resounding note.

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