The Stolen Party

I didn’t merely watch the performance, I breathed it.  Liliana Heker, a well known Argentinian writer, wrote the stories that inspired the production of the play “The Stolen Party”.  Sitting up front and center in the Khan Theater on the edge of the German Colony in Jerusalem, the ten female actresses from the theater department at Haifa University held Heker’s wide-eyed attention for the hour in which they brought her stories to life on stage.  The play provided glimpses into the worlds of a passionate young girl and two desperate women.  The performance held me captivated, gaping, and with a constant ache in my chest I only became aware of as it was released through my burst of tears as the cast took its bows. 

It opened with Rosaura, a skinny girl with hollow cheekbones and cavernous eyes, a little girl who was so excited to be invited to Luciana’s birthday party despite her mother’s sneering warning, “To them, you are just the maid’s daughter”.   The brilliant placement of the dozen girls dressed in bluish grey on the stage reflected the storm in my heart, watching sweet and awkward Rosaura confuse judgmental eyes and mockery with the most gentle of caresses, the most dimpled of smiles.   One with Rosaura, my heart beat with pleasure with every grin from Luciana, every kind word that assured her special status as the most trusted friend, the friend who is familiar with the house and can be counted on to pour without spilling, and pass out the cake.  And the ultimate crash that Rosaura was too honest to ignore – staring at the money held out in Luciana’s mother’s hand, staring and glaring and wishing desperately that if she would blink her eyes enough it would suddenly transform into the bracelet or yoyo that all of the other children received from the goody bag.  But no, she gaped at the dollar bills frozen in midair; together with Rosaura, I felt my heart drop to my knees, to be replaced only with sadness, anger and shame.   I am the maid’s daughter.
 
Without warning the scene shifted, as did the characters.  I remained.  I was transported to a different home, another world.  I saw four women on stage, but quickly understood that there was, in fact, only one woman and one young lady, each shadowed by an actress brilliantly staged as the character’s inner thoughts.  The wide, lingering smile of the Cheshire cat upon the woman’s face was reflected grotesquely on the lips of her subconscious self played by the tall woman at her side, invisible to all but the audience. 

The woman welcomed the surveyor into her home, calling her by all sorts of endearments like “honey” and “dear”, excusing the crumbs and crusty dishes, the toys and roller blades strewn randomly across the room with an apologetic wave, “Kids will be kids”.  The surveyor was supposed to be there just for a few minutes, just to jot down the particulars of the number of people living there and the size of the house and yard, but was sucked in, her grumbling belly giving the woman the excuse to insist that she sit and eat with her since she wasn’t “used to eating alone”. 

The woman’s bubbling words, eager for company, contrasted strongly with her trembling hands and nervous glances.  Ill at ease, the surveyor was not quite sure what was wrong, but felt strongly that something was.  She impatiently waited for the end of the woman’s incessant chattering about her daughter the medical student, her young blonde son who makes such messes, her other children and her important husband who works hard to support them all. 

The woman’s nervous laugh and exaggerated gestures froze as she heard the child from across the street yell out to her.  Her eyes narrowed, her shoulders tensed.  “That little girl is calling you,” the surveyor informed her softly, since she had made no move to respond.  “So?” she glowered, “do I have to respond to every little brat that calls out to me?”  Ignoring her mother’s pleading, the girl across the street called out, “Give me back my roller-skates! You said that you wanted it for your nephew and you don’t even have a nephew! You don’t have anybody!” 

The woman froze, her shoulders rose, she slowly raised her eyes to the young lady sitting across from her.  The surveyor looked back, aghast, confused, pitying and disgusted. 

“I should go.” She muttered, unsuccessfully attempting to look away from the woman’s eyes.

The woman lifted her arm, trembling with emotion.  But in a voice low and calm she began, “Will you…”

“I will leave it as it is written.” And the shaken surveyor moved towards the front door.

She nodded sadly.  “Thank you, dear.”

The tall woman with the thick curly hair who took the role of the woman’s subconscious moved to the center of the stage, and the rest moved out.  The next story began: “The wind” she moaned, “the wind brings in the dust.”  She shared with the audience her intimate frustrations – her husband, audibly stomping around in the background, didn’t properly wipe his feet before he entered the house or prevent the wind from blowing dust inside. I watched, appalled, as her eccentric obsession with perfect order and cleanliness drives him away and he leaves her.

Her despair was great, but she cries out at the unfairness to God, asking why “if You are all powerful” did He choose to create such a dirty world?

She scrubbed her home all day and all night, and watching her I felt myself straining to see her knuckles, wondering if they were cracked yet and bleeding, longing to climb onto stage, make her stop moving, and give her some lotion to rub over her hands. 

The next day she wakes up shaky, hungry, wild.  Tripping her way into the kitchen she steps over the floor she had cleaned inch by inch the day before, and opens the fridge only to watch a couple of eggs fall out and splatter.  She stares at them, in shock.  Then suddenly decides she is hungry, so hungry, and that she wants steak.  The sizzling meat falls to the floor, and she eats it with her hand.  She lies in her kitchen, moaning, and defiles the room in unimaginable ways.  Laughing and crying and smearing, moaning and dancing and tearing at her hair, she passes the days.

After five days away from his wife, the repentant husband buys a bouquet of the cleanest, whitest flowers, and walks to his home.  Smiling fondly, imagining his wife within, he licks his finger and holds it to the wind, and upon feeling its direction, cheerfully walks around the house to the back door.  He enters and sees his wife in the middle of an overwhelming, reeking mess, weeping.  She sees him walk in and shrieks, long horrible cries that raised my hair on end, cries out like an animal, like a roar emitted by a dying lion to convince those around him that he is still strong, still in control.  Shrieked once, twice.  And collapsed on all fours, shaking, moaning, sobbing.  The husband, still gripping his white bouquet, hesitated, then approached softy, pain visible across his face, knelt down, and slowly, fearfully, wrapped his arms around her.  The shadows in the back, the storm, the blue-grey voices that had shouted against the injustices of filth, approached one by one, softly, slowly, and embraced the growing, coalescing group of thumping hearts, burning pain, and sorrowful love. 

The protagonist of each of the three stories is so different from the others, but they each held me captivated, invested, and in pain.  The stories vary, but coalesce.  Loneliness, love, being different, needing touch.  The first story is one of fallen hopes, a loss of innocence.  A little girl believed in herself more than her own mother does, and yet she is brutally disappointed, the illusion of friendship she had cherished so strongly, shattered.  The second purposefully creates her own illusion, trying to make peace with the lonely world by pretending, yet is betrayed by the brutal honesty of a child.  Despite this, she has no better alternative than to go on pretending.  And the last, a woman whose entire existence seems broken and sick shatters her own protective illusion, breaks out of the chains by which she has been bound by since childhood, breaks free, and collapses, afraid, and alone.  But she is not alone.  She is embraced by her husband; she is embraced by the voices inside her own head which moments before had been angry and sick as much as she. 

Each story is painful, but there is a noticeable crescendo of angst in each succeeding story, each more raw than the last.  But then suddenly – it was over.  I was left on the floor, gasping for breath, beside the tall woman who was smeared with all of the mess in her kitchen and the sweat of those embracing her, and we were left in each other’s arms.  And if we were willing, and when we were ready, we would be able to help each other to stand.  The last story, by far the most painful of them all, was the only one which allowed for any sense of hope. 

I imagine that one of the greatest challenges in converting any story into a play is to offer the same information and insight into the characters’ thoughts without making it sound forced.  The directors brilliantly staged actresses to play the subconscious or the inner voice of the main characters of each story.  This did not create the effect of “cheating”, rather exposed the very lifelike contrasting moments of confusion and clarity within a person’s mind, depending on the number of voices and their modes of expression.

This was demonstrated most strongly in the final performance when the protagonist was frantically scrubbing the floor while surrounded by another nine women doing the same.  The woman was crying out at the injustice of a god who creates such a filthy world, and her desperateness is heightened by the other echoing cries of the same sort from the girls around her, yelling sometimes in turn, and sometimes all together.  Then suddenly, in a moment of clarity, the woman catches herself doing the unimaginable, what in her own eyes would be a crime so great that no punishment could provide atonement and a single woman walks over, runs her finger down the heroine’s arm and whispers to the audience: “she got the chills.”  At this moment our hero knew that she was lost.  And we knew she knew.  And it hurt.

At the play’s end Liliana Heker, who had traveled from Buenos Aires for the festival, approached each of the actresses individually and hugged her.  Knowing no Hebrew, they communicated in broken English, and she thanked them, praised them, and seemed touched by the warm words they returned.  For some, to travel across the world to see your own ideas and imaginations spring to life in a foreign language (Hebrew), mixed with the visions and ideas of directors and actresses, might have been slightly difficult – but Heker was pleased as well as emotional, and in her own words “enchanted” by the performance.  

The Stolen Party, a play based on short stories by Liliana Heker, was part of the Between the Lines program at the 2nd International Writer’s Festival 2010 in Mishkenot Sha’ananim. Between the Lines is a preview of the cultural events that will be initiated by the Jerusalem Season of Culture, scheduled to begin in  2011.

LEILA  DASHEVSKY