InterAct's "House Divided' (2nd review)

A rich (albeit all-male) evening of political drama

JIM RUTTER

Interact Theatre Company has largely billed Larry Loebell’s House Divided as a play that examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from something other than an “Israel as oppressors” point of view. If nothing else, I’d argue that InterAct’s otherwise riveting production should win an award for false advertising. House Divided is a rare case of a play that exceeds its PR promises.

Through a series of flashbacks that intersect scenes set in the present, the play tells the history of strife in the Goldstein family that began during the Vietnam War— specifically, in Philadelphia in 1972, when two brothers, Young Lou (Robert Daponte) and Young Doug (Noah Herman) both found religion—the former embracing Jewish Orthodoxy and Zionism, the latter turning instead to anti-war activism. Decades later, Lou (David Howey) is a retired Israeli officer who conducts tours in Israel, and Doug (Paul Meshejian) still campaigns for peace in the Philadelphia offices of Amnesty International.

Aside from phone calls, they haven’t seen each other for years. The reason transcends politics: Young Lou condemned Young Doug’s marriage to a non-Jew (in a statement that marks the play’s worst moment), and convinced the pair’s father to move to Israel, abandoning Young Doug in America.

And while both men have raised their own families, the passage of time has only intensified family divisions. Lou’s son Oren (Davy Raphaely) serves in the Israeli defense forces, defending settlements, manning checkpoints and, as he puts it, “harassing Arabs.” He asks his father, “Have you ever done anything that you thought was right but no one else would understand?” But Oren is asking the wrong guy: For Lou, it’s “Israel first, me second.” So Oren deserts the army and seeks refuge at Doug’s home in America (strikingly depicted by designer Dick Durosette).

What do children owe parents?

But to say this play is about Israel is like saying that Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children is really “about” the Thirty Years War. While Loebell’s play does present multiple views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the present-day issue is merely the bone that these dogs fight over. And much to Loebell’s credit, the universal issue of how political strife destroys families eclipses any argument over current events in the Middle East.

Loebell’s focus may be contemporary, but he transcends the subject matter by centering his theme on questions like, “What type of duty do children owe their parents, or their country?” and “How should an individual stand up for what he/she believes is right?” and “Can a soldier—or anyone who owes a duty—conscientiously object against his sworn duty to obey superiors?” and— most important— “How do we move away from the stories and myths that justify hostility and move toward more practical political solutions?”

In this gripping production, Loebell’s intelligent writing treats the issues with the importance they deserve—by showing how they too often direct and distort the attitudes and actions of an individual’s entire life. Loebell could have set his play anywhere a conflict has divided a household: the “troubles” in Northern Ireland, present-day Lebanon’s inter-faith civil wars, the Shiite-Shia conflict in Basra, Iraq, or the American Civil War. House Divided reminded me of the conflicted brothers in the TV mini-series The Blue and the Gray 25 years ago as well as of Antigone. This new drama will remain relevant long after the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has ended.

The absence of a plot

A few quibbles: With the exception of Young Doug and Young Lou’s back story, House Divided offers little in the way of plot. Instead it substitutes argument leading to discovery to partial resolution to another discovery to another argument, and so on. But hey, Shaw’s Major Barbara fails in this respect, too. And while humor abounds in House Divided, it usually results from one character’s insulting comeuppance to or willful misinterpretation of another’s argument.

Also, Loebell’s failure to include a single female character brings to mind the feminist argument that war and violent conflict are man’s inventions that would disappear if women ran the world. I wonder if Loebell subtly (or subconsciously) agrees. And director Seth Rozin ends the second act too abruptly; I needed a moment to realize that Oren’s final decision didn’t mark the end of the play.

Passion diluted by frustration

As an ensemble, the entire cast delivers staggeringly rich performances. Raphaely imparts a passionate yearning diluted by frustration, and Hodge’s severely understated presentation makes Paul’s gradual change an almost casual evolution of beliefs, allowing his shift in character to shock both those on stage and the audience with his transformation.

As a beleaguered father torn between his son and his country, Howey as Lou towers over this production. His forceful performance becomes even more powerful because while it’s gut-wrenching to watch him crumble under the weight of his grief, his commanding presence makes it hard not to agree with his position (Loebell gives Lou some of the play’s best arguments). When he finally, devastatingly laments, “Time pushes us forward and the world continually asks us to make peace with what we abhor,” the muted agony of his delivery is that of a man slowly realizing that even in his own family, his entire life’s commitment has been for nothing.

Though I’m a political theatre junkie, too many of the new plays in this genre leave me feeling disappointed, because they fail to integrate their contemporary issue with any universal theme that will outlast current events. Here, I worried only about how the eventual resolutions in the second half would live up to the intense, complex moral challenges presented by act one. Interact's House Divided gave me the most richly integrated evening of political drama I’ve experienced in a very long time.



To read another review by Bob Cronin, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.