War, politics play huge roles in new shows

Two faces have refused to leave me since I saw "The Human Scale," a solo play written and performed by Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and foreign correspondent for The New Yorker.

Neither face belongs to Wright, a calmly untheatrical man, who, if I remember correctly, is wearing a tweedy jacket and standing on a platform in front of a desk with a coffee mug on it. Really, it doesn't matter what he wears. What matters, and what I can't get out of my mind, are the faces of two young people - a boyish Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit and a preteen Palestinian girl named Huda Ghalia - and the parts they play in an ancient war that will not end.

We encounter each one early on, in videos projected on the theater wall at the sleek 3LD Art & Technology Center (80 Greenwich St.) near Ground Zero. Gilad, still being held by Hamas after being famously kidnapped from a tank in 2006, looks lonely and scared in a video made last year to prove to Israelis that he was still alive and available to trade for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Huda is shown in an Arab newscast of an Israeli massacre of beachgoers on the Gaza coast. The stunned girl runs away from the camera and toward her father, whom we see at the same moment she does, lying dead in a dune. The camera freezes on her scream.

So what else is new? You may well ask. You also may ask whether "The Human Scale" isn't less a play than a lecture/demonstration on what Wright calls "another predictable chapter in this monotonous conflict" in the Middle East.

To those I would answer that, despite the trappings of a lecture/dem, "The Human Scale" is a haunting piece of what Wright describes to me as "nonfiction theater." It is a lucid, immediate and, yes, dramatic analysis of tragedy so intractable, raw and repetitious that crises blur and defy rational conversation. Wright, with his endearing lack of theatrical flair and meticulously chosen visuals, lays out the facts and the contentious history while pondering the relative value of a human being - weighed in hostage lives and seen as individuals on a "human scale."

The play, running through Oct. 31, also is part of a substantial new wave of Middle East consciousness, both in and around the theater.

New York has a new Off-Broadway venture, the Noor Theatre, created this year to produce emerging and established playwrights of Middle Eastern descent. 

Seeing the 'light'

How fascinating that, in these economic and inflamed times, the new company has moved onto the radar screen with such seemingly relative ease. The New York Theatre Workshop (famously the home of "Rent") has taken Noor (which means "light" in both Arabic and Farsi) under its wing, with plans to co-produce its first staged offering next year.

Co-creator Lameece Isaaq says she first realized the talent pool of actors, directors and playwrights in an unlikely place, the Arab-American Comedy Festival. "It was refreshing to us to find a more nuanced dialogue between the cultures within the regions," she says. Noor, which offers monthly readings, presents "Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes," a Hollywood satire by Yussef El Guindi, an Egyptian-American playwright, tomorrow at 8 p.m. at the Fourth Street Theatre, 83 E. Fourth St.

Meanwhile, at the Public Theater, artistic director Oskar Eustis (who staged "Human Scale") is behind the London importation of a massive project, "The Great Game: Afghanistan," which runs Dec. 1-19 at the Skirball Center of New York University. This is the Tricycle Theatre's celebrated series of one-act plays commissioned from 12 British and American playwrights to explore "the culture and history of Afghanistan since Western involvement in 1842 to today." The plays can be seen over three nights, or weekend trilogy days.

Politics on a small stage

Closer to home, but inevitably linked to the Middle East, are two new political plays at the Public. "In the Wake," by Lisa Kron ("Well"), is set at Thanksgiving 2000, when the presidential election had not yet been decided. The family play about "love and country in the first decade of the millennium" begins previews Oct. 19 and opens Nov. 1. The next night, the Public LAB opens Richard Nelson's "That Hopey Changey Thing," which is set on Election Day, Nov. 2, 2010. The title, of course, comes from Sarah Palin's quote, "How's that hopey changey thing workin' out for ya?," which has since become tea party T-shirt fashion.

I'm still annoyed about a self-satisfied speech in "Time Stands Still," the Donald Margulies play about war journalists that reopened on Broadway this month starring Laura Linney. Her boyfriend, also a front-line journalist, has a rant about political theater as "that favorite lefty pastime: preaching to the choir! They sit there, weeping at the injustice, and stand at the end shouting 'Bravo!' - congratulating themselves for enduring such a grueling experience, and go home feeling like they've actually done something, when, in fact, all they've done is assuaged their liberal guilt."

Thinking again about Gilad, the Israeli prisoner, and Huda, the Palestinian orphan, in "The Human Scale," I asked Wright the familiar question that dogs political theater. Does he fear he's just preaching to the converted? "People have very settled opinions," he says with knowing understatement. "I try to take them somewhere they can enlarge their vision, to see more of the other side, no matter which side they're on in this eternal argument. To do that, I have to go to a very dark place." He'd like to take the play to Israel and Gaza, very dark places where light - some call it noor - might come in theaters.