Dan Urian

Drama in Education as a Theatre Repertoire

There have been a great many expectations from educational drama, particularly from the second half of the 20th century on, from the moment that it succeeded in freeing itself from the status of merely serving as a tool to teach the English language. Beginning from the 1950s, educational drama was seen as a potential universal panacea in education and instruction. An exaggerated expectation? Possibly. But such hopes are undoubtedly no different from similar hopes held for other means and methods of teaching such as instructional television, computers and audio-visual tools.

Drama in education: From theory to “study cases”

This article proposes a possible direction for research in educational drama. It sets out from the assumption that there are lessons, events or plays which belong to the field of educational drama, and which create a repertoire that can be studied in a similar way to any other repertoire of plays in theatre studies.

Zionism in the Israeli theatre

The New Ghetto (1894-98) by Theodor Herzl was one of the first plays to raise the issue of Zionism on stage. A melodrama, it was written when Herzl was in Paris in 1894, following the first Dreyfus trial and while he was heavily under its influence. The New Ghetto refers to the political and spiritual location of European Jewry, which had exchanged ghetto for ghetto following the emancipation. An argument between the characters Rabbi Friedheimer and Yaacov reveals the distress that Zionism had engendered in Herzl:

Sefrou and Baghdad

Since the beginning of the 1980s Mizrachi theatre practitioners have confronted the problem of community segregation and the ways in which Mizrachi characters are represented. Gabriel Ben-Simchon and Sammy Michael represent two approaches chosen by playwrights and story-tellers of eastern origins (from Arab countries) in their confrontation with the changes that have taken place among their groups and with the stereotyping of these groups. These two approaches are: anti-stereotyping and specific individualization. Michael has chosen a detailed and intrusive characterization, and his characters feature elements of: beauty, ugliness and, mainly, humanity. In contrast, Ben-Simchon, in his plays and stories, has chosen the anti-stereotype as a paradigm that distances his Moroccan-Jewish characters from reality and sends them soaring into a legendary world. Both these playwrights are fully integrated into Israeli society and culture. They have separated from the past (willingly, or nostalgically), but have not shaken off their Arabic cultural links and preach for a shared future by Jews and Arabs in a modern state.

Israeli drama: A sociological perspective

The theory and methodology of social aspects of the Théâtre constitute a scholarly challenge. This is an outlined discussion of the following components: the social‐historical background of the play; the theatrical text itself; and, finally, its audience reception and reverberations in social reality. The repertoire of fifty years of Israeli Théâtre serves to demonstrate the proposed method.

Games in the backyard ‐ rape in the theatre

The play Games in the Backyard has been staged to great acclaim among audiences of Israeli youth. It deals with a case of gang rape tried in the Israeli courts which aroused wide public debate and also affected the plays creators. The suggested study takes us from the incident of rape to the play‐makers’ intentions; the preparatory process before writing, directing, designing and performing the play; and from there to the text itself and the changes that it underwent; and finally its reception process. The article goes from the play itself to several of the theoretical sociological components in play analysis; including the plays “theatrical television” genre as a possible reason for its success.