Falling Out of Time is a brave mélange of heart-rending poetic moments and experimental staging. The Gesher Theatre production, adapted for the stage and directed by Yehezkel Lazarov, is based on David Grossman’s eponymous book, a dramatic prose poem, an investigation of grief. Grossman is one of those rare writers who does not sacrifice human emotion and the joys of humor on the altar of great intellectual literature, resists the temptation of trends, and engages with his time and its concerns to write books that enter that most intimate of places, the human heart, transcending time and place to become universal.
Grossman’s son Uri was killed in Lebanon in 2006, when his tank was hit by an anti-tank missile. 20 year old Uri Grossman was killed on a Saturday, just a few days after his father and fellow novelists Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua held a press conference, urging the government to stop the fighting in order to give negotiations a chance. Falling Out of Time was written in the aftermath of this loss. It is unlike any of Grossman’s other works, it is neither novel, nor play nor poem, yet contains qualities of all three genres. How does one translate such a work to the stage? What is the genre of grief and loss?
Western culture has a protocol for public expressions of grief, certain conventions to which one must adhere. Each religion provides its own rituals, and then life goes on. But for those who have lost a loved one, in that life there will always be death. It’s a private experience that usually goes unspoken behind the public and necessary veils of acceptance, closure, and moving on, but it is always there. And that is where Yehezkel Lazarov takes us – there.
We are walking, we do not know where we are going, but we are walking. When we arrive, we do not know where we are. A man (Doron Tavori) and his wife (Lilian Ruth) are up on an elevated dais that has stairs leading down from it on one side. The man slumps in a chair, his head leaning back, the woman stands at a distance, her back towards him. We witness the stillness that comes after catastrophe breaks through routine, dinner disrupted by pain. The pain, unspoken in the 5 years since the death of their son, emerges and urges the man to go “there.”
“Where?”
“To him, there.”
“To the place where it happened?”
“No, no. There.”
“What do you mean, there?”
“I don’t know.”
Enigmatic, nameless, like characters in a folktale, the couple speak and we, the audience, are plunged into the depth of their pain before we really understand what is going on. There is a strong sense of disorientation, uncertainty and displacement, enhanced by the staging. Lazarov breaks with all convention to create an experience unlike any other. As the audience stands around the dais, the conversation between the man and his wife unfolds in two layers: the direct speech of the actors and recorded narration, the two flowing together as a river of sound. It’s like experiencing a moment in time and the recollected moment, the subjective and objective co-existing in time and space, each with its own version of the truth. As the man prepares to leave, the narration informs that his wife “kisses and touches” him, yet the actors stand apart, at opposite sides of the dais.
It is a strange world that one enters here, much like a folktale or parable. There is a guide of sorts, the Town Chronicler (Alon Friedman), who interviews the residents of this realm, and each story is a story of loss. These are not the polished versions, edited for the public expression that our culture permits and expects. It’s a raw cry, that speaks in that arcane language of the soul – poetry. Falling Out of Time forces the eye to look upon the face of grief, to hear the secret ravages of the heart, to be “there” in that place that no one wishes to enter.
Lazarov has created an imaginative and moving work of art. Falling Out of Time is intense, it’s the kind of play that jolts you out of complacency and by the time you walk out of the theatre, you feel that you have not just seen something, you’ve been through an experience. Everyone is implicated in this story. Using a diverse palette of artistic means, Lazarov embodies the realm of loss, conveying the physicality of grief as well as its emotional and metaphoric aspects. Not all the choices here flow smoothly. Structurally, the play might be described as having three parts. In the second part, the layering of action within the theatre space is at times more of a distraction than an enhancement, but this is a small flaw in an otherwise strong work. The entire cast is excellent, but Lilian Ruth and Doron Tavori make an indelible imprint on the mind and feelings. Tavori distills the essence of a man torn between life and death, the desire to live on with the woman he loves, to have a good life in this shared time on earth, and the inexorable pull of death, its eternal presence. “In August he died, and/ when that month was over, I wondered:/ How can I move/ to September/ while he remains/ in August?”
Falling Out of Time is a daring work of art, and I urge you – go there. Note: those who have mobility issues should call the theatre and find out what is involved and see what arrangements can be made to accommodate wheelchairs and difficulty in walking. The play is intended for age 16+. Tickets may be ordered via the Gesher Theatre website.
Falling Out of Time
based on the book by David Grossman
Adapted for the stage and directed by Yehezkel Lazarov; Music: Keren Ann; Set design: Yehezkel Lazarov, Michael Kremenko; Lighting design: Nadav Barnea; Costume design: Aline Lazarov; Cast: Doron Tavori (The Man), Lilian Ruth (The Wife), Miki Leon (Centaur), Alon Friedman (Town Chronicler), Bar Sadeh (The Town Chronicler’s Wife), Paulo A. Moara (The Shoemaker), Noa Koler (The Midwife), Alexander Senderovich (The Duke), Lupo Berkovich/Evgeny Treletsky (The Math Teacher), Ruth Rasiuk (The Woman in the Net).
* Quotations are based on Jessica Cohen’s English translation of David Grossman’s Falling Out of Time (Knopf 2014).
