Playwright Hare Surveys the Changes in Israel

Ever since the recent Labor Party landslide in Israel, I’ve been thinking about David Hare. That is, I’ve been thinking about “Via Dolorosa,” the English playwright’s daringly reasonable and utterly captivating Broadway solo about the Middle East.

Just as the recent high school shootings worried Hollywood enough to postpone the season finale of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” it seems life also can have unpredictable effects--sometimes inconvenient ones--on perceptions of important art.

I remember 1991, when Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” was scheduled to have its pre-Broadway premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles shortly before the presidential election. But the opening was delayed briefly, which turned out to be just long enough for the Reagan-Bush Republican lock on the country to be broken by Bill Clinton.

So instead of attending a deeply subversive epic about, for starters, the impact of the ‘80s on gay survival and the progressive spirit, we sat there surrounded by an almost giddy sense of anticipation. Kushner’s monumental work, which went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and a barrel of Tonys, had been transformed at least temporarily, for better or worse, by events outside the theater.

“But isn’t this a wonderful thing about good plays?” enthused Hare when I told him about my Kushner epiphany. I had phoned him to satisfy my curiosity about the impact of the seismic change in Israeli politics on “Via Dolorosa,” which runs through June 13 at the Booth Theatre. After all, the one-man show--Hare’s professional acting debut and, he swears, his on-stage swan song--has the audacity to deliver observations about Zionism and Arabs with rich, lucid, unsettling ambiguity, in New York of all places.

In his shrewdly personable, endearingly awkward way, he dares to toss questions that might be considered grenades if they came from someone other than an English visitor, a Gentile playwright: Are we where we live or what we think? Should we value stones or ideas? Can anyone really own land? Can a humane country ever be a religious state? And the ever-popular, what does it mean to be Jewish?

I got to lob some back to him. Has Ehud Barak’s “One Israel” victory over Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud Party affected the air around his monologue? And, assuming that a change this fraught must be having some impact, does it make the play better or worse?

Hare, as politically savvy as he is theatrical, joked that he was “absolutely terrified” that an “outbreak of hope” might ruin his show. More to the point, he said that, if anything, all the coverage of the election “has made the audience more serious and sober. They have seemed to have a keener understanding of what’s going on. They’re notably better informed.”

As for that outbreak of hope for Middle East peace, he wasn’t saying. But he did say he thinks Netanyahu’s hard line “so polarized the country between secular and religious, right and left that it’s no longer considered anti-Zionist to criticize. . . . He has licensed discussion.”

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Linda Winer-Bernheimer is a Newsday theater critic.