Absurd
Drama
Comic Drama
Poetic Drama
Subject:
Love
Humor
History
Survival
Holocaust
Family

Text in:

he

English

The play is a poetic comedy about a family on a train with quite a few communication problems, fleeing their homeland. The parents make all the possible mistakes in trying to break the bad news to their daughter, who for her part only talks to strangers. The train travels, passes cities and countries. No one knows where she is racing and why she does not stop. At one point, a guy with 12 egg trays enters the trailer, further destabilizing the relationship between the girl and her parents. How long has he been on the train? two years? ten? fifty? eighty? Maybe from World War II. He was forgotten there and his entire family was destroyed (the girl on the train reads “Man Searches for Meaning” by Viktor Frankel, and right from the start, without even saying a word, creates the gruesome and funny equation between “family” and “Holocaust”). At one point, the girl jumps off the train. This jump, possibly to her death, allows all the characters a kind of “extrication” from the role-playing game and the pointless trap they were stuck in. In other words, “death” also enables a kind of “rebirth”. What was perceived as complete stagnation allows a kind of release (both emotional and erotic) and a new “game”. The play moves from the realm of personal and psychological to the fixations of the “nation” – Nazis. holocaust. Refugees by train, etc.  This creates a beautiful and spectacular movement between the real and concrete towards the abstract and symbolic. (Quoted from the article by Udi Ben Saadia)

These are the judges’ reasoning to award: “For brave choices and building an absurd and poetic world that touches the collective social memory of our existence here. In a unique and uncompromising language, Eldad Cohen harnesses the Hebrew language and the symbols of Israeli culture to weave a stage dream.”