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Via Dolorosa by David Hare

Written By
David Hare

Performed by
David zum Brunnen

Directed By
Paul Frellick

Run Time:
90 minutes

Deep Dish Theater

"Must our lives in the West necessarily be shallower than those of people for whom the stakes are so much higher?" That is the question posed by British playwright David Hare in this one-man show, Via Dolorosa. To try to find the answer, the fifty-year-old writer embarked on a journey to the fifty-year-old state of Israel. Via Dolorosa is the result of his travels and numerous conversations with politicians and artists, settlers and historians, both in Israel and the Palestinian territory. Hare explores not only the landscapes, ideologies and emotions of the region, but his own values and beliefs, and those of Western civilization.

EbzB Productions presents David zum Brunnen in the widely praised Deep Dish Theater Company production of "Via Dolorosa". Designers include Christa Devitt (sets), Judy Chang (costumes), Steve Dubay (lights), and Devra Thomas (properties). Kit Wienert composed original music for the production, which is directed by Deep Dish Artistic Director Paul Frellick.

"This play is really unique," says Frellick. "On the surface it couldn't be simpler. One man recalling events and conversations from a trip abroad. But by the end of 90 minutes, the author has assembled an astonishingly complex picture of the forces at work in the Middle East and the multi-faceted nature of the conflict there."

" 'Via Dolorosa' has all the brilliant, lightning-witted writing of Hare's other well-known plays ("Plenty", "The Secret Rapture", "Skylight", etc.), but above all, the play is a very human look at the present state of life in Israel and the occupied territories. It's a heady mix of ideas and passions. There should be plenty for theater-goers to talk about on the way home."

News & Observer

Stones and Ideas on the 'Via Dolorosa
By ADAM SOBSEY, Correspondent, The News and Observer

CHAPEL HILL -- In 1997, when 9/11 was just another day in September, the celebrated English playwright David Hare traveled to Israel full of questions: about faith, homeland and the ancient grudges that pit neighbors against one another. The next year he wrote a monologue about the trip, in which the answers are as eternal as the crumbling stones of Jerusalem and as disputed as the West Bank.
Seven years later the world has changed, and Deep Dish Theater Company has remounted Hare's "Via Dolorosa." "Our intention," writes director Paul Frellick, "is to provoke discussion, assessment, contemplation." In that goal, the company ably succeeds.

Hare performed the original "Via Dolorosa" himself. His Dantesque role as both voyager and author was essential to the play, in which he described meeting various Israelis and Palestinians who hoped to use him as a mouthpiece for their righteous ideologies. Caught between, the Gentile Hare tried to name what he sought in others' holy land, but not even a pilgrimage over the sacred titular road revealed it. "My subject is belief," Hare declared. Trusting that impulse, he traveled on and told the tale.

Into Hare's vacated spot steps the veteran local actor David zum Brunnen. It's a daring and perhaps dubious move. What is a 90-minute monologue, written for the playwright's own voice, from his very personal and murky motives, without the playwright to deliver it? But with unassuming candor, zum Brunnen tries neither to replace nor to mimic Hare. Instead he offers himself as a surrogate, retracing Hare's search with confident, brisk steps. In doing so he provides a full view of both the author's uncertainty and the welter of hate, mistrust and devotion he found in Israel

The set design, by Christa Devitt, aptly displays the eventual theme of "Via Dolorosa." Upstage looms scaffolded, unfinished scenery. Is it partly assembled or partly razed? The only furniture is a drafting table and chair. As the monologue develops, it compasses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a peace in endless disrepair, halfway built and then ruined by its own makers. It also admits that the play too is an idea-in-progress.

Hare could create only this eloquent sketch -- a staged drama would never recapture the real one playing out in blood and in the news. Devitt's set is willfully unsightly to mirror, in Hare's words, both the "little strife" of holy war and "the bigger strife of the soul."

"Via Dolorosa" is virtually actionless. zum Brunnen speaks, sitting or standing, with little directorial embellishment by Frellick. The effect, heightened by zum Brunnen's intellectual zeal, is that of a master lecturer's exegesis on a thorny subject that both thrills and vexes him. The script and the actor lightly tread the thin ice between cerebral excitement and personal detachment. It never breaks. The minutes zip by.

"Via Dolorosa" isn't for everyone. Its pleasures are almost entirely mental, and it's as much a learning tool as it is theater. Despite the post-9/11 context, the Deep Dish production neither predicts nor resituates that cataclysm: This religious war long precedes jihad, and outlasts global sea change.

The play can't resolve Palestine or its author's purpose. It lacks even a true ending, and this too suits its skeptical mood. "Stones or ideas?" Hare asks of Jerusalem, of theater and of himself. With zum Brunnen's poised, intrepid guidance, "Via Dolorosa" sheds light not on the answers, but on the reticulate questions.

Asheville Citizen Times

"zum Brunnen does a phenomenal tour-de-force of interpreting contemporary Middle East historical figures involved in this pivotal global conflict."

Jim Cavener, Asheville Citizen Times

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