The odd couple

Jeremy Cohen, left, plays an Israeli Jew and Mike Mosallam is his Palestinian roommate in the satirical play West Bank, U.K. (La MaMa ETC)

It’s fitting that Canadian playwright Oren Safdie should be opening a new musical satire called West Bank, U.K. in the very same week that saw another Middle East summit aimed at resolving the long, bloody Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Safdie’s show, premiering Nov. 29 at New York’s La MaMa theatre, is a Mideast allegory with a sitcom premise. Assaf, an Israeli Jew, arrives at his apartment in London’s West Bank after a long absence to discover that Aziz, a Palestinian refugee, has taken over the lease. NYC, their American landlady, steps in as mediator, suggesting they resolve the situation by sharing the place. At first, the two roommates get along, but when Aziz’s fundamentalist Muslim uncle and Assaf’s Orthodox Jewish girlfriend show up, the cosy arrangement begins to fall apart. Before you know it, there’s a furniture barrier dividing the flat and suicide bombers at the door.

The Middle Eastern-style songs, by Safdie’s collaborator Ronnie Cohen, include outrageous comic riffs on the Jewish conspiracy theory and the 72 celestial virgins promised to Muslim martyrs. (“My wives will wait for me in heaven; / They’ll want my manhood 24/7.”) There are cracks about “kikes” and “camel jockeys” and jokes about blasphemous cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. It’s a far cry from the gentle, Canadian-style humour of Little Mosque on the Prairie and much closer to the raw racial comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen and Sarah Silverman.

Safdie admits he and Ronnie Cohen were a little nervous about handling such incendiary subjects. “There were certain moments, when we were writing things, when we wondered, ‘Can we do this? Can we say that? Are we going to get bomb threats?’”

But Safdie, who is also directing the show, found his fears allayed in rehearsals. “My barometer has really been the two actors who play the lead roles,” he says during a telephone interview from New York. His leading men are Jewish-American Jeremy Cohen, who portrays Assaf, and Arab-American Mike Mosallam, who plays Aziz.

“[Mike] is quite an activist in the Arab community here, to the point where he refuses to go out for any terrorist roles, which are probably 90 per cent of the roles for Middle Eastern actors these days,” Safdie says. “And the guy who plays Assaf [Cohen] is just back from Israel and is quite a Zionist. And they seem to be OK with everything in the play — there doesn’t seem to be any concern. Besides, it’s an equal-opportunity offender,” Safdie adds wryly. “One group can’t complain that we’re being unfair; there are little jabs at everybody.”

Not that Safdie is only interested in scoring satiric points. “I want to get into the psychology behind why these people, and these countries, act the way they do,” he says. “For example, if the Israeli seems to jump to conclusions and is a little bit more defensive, it’s because of his history. And it’s like that hopefully for every character — we understand why they’re acting a certain way. I think that takes away the idea that there is a right or wrong; it’s more about how people behave certain ways because this is the way they are.”

The 42-year-old Safdie, whose best-known play is the internationally produced Private Jokes, Public Places, has long wanted to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, which has a personal resonance for him. The son of celebrated Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, he spent his childhood summers in Jerusalem, where his father had a house in the divided Old City.

“It was right bordering up against the Arab quarter,” Safdie recalls, “so literally, the Arab market was down the street. And because my father’s side of the family is Sephardic — they’re Middle Eastern — I felt a lot more in common with that side of the street, so to speak, culturally. My grandparents spoke Arabic, we had the same foods. We used to go on the weekends down to Jericho for lunch and be received with the legendary Arab hospitality.”

Canadian playwright Oren Safdie's childhood experiences in Israel inspired his new work, West Bank, U.K. (James Pattyn)

Safdie felt the best way to deal with the Mideast crisis on stage was to distill it in a domestic situation and use musical comedy to defuse the tension. “I thought that there are certain things you can’t say in dialogue, things which would sound very in-your-face, that could be said in song and in humour,” he says. For the tunes, he turned to Cohen, his partner on previous projects, including Jews and Jesus, a hit show about interfaith marriage also staged at La MaMa, the venerable experimental company in New York’s East Village.

After its Manhattan run, West Bank, U.K. moves across the country to the Malibu Stage Company in Los Angeles, where Safdie is interim artistic director. He’d love to see the play done by a Canadian theatre, too — although his work has been seen in Toronto, he’s never had a production in his hometown of Montreal. “Here [in the U.S.], I’m thought of as a Canadian writer,” he says, “and in Canada, for some reason, they think of me as an American writer.”

Safdie grew up in his father’s famous Habitat housing complex in Montreal, but launched his theatre career in New York, where he’d gone to dutifully study architecture at Columbia University. In his final semester, he took an elective playwriting course taught by eminent American dramatist Romulus Linney and realized that he preferred constructing plays to designing buildings. “It clicked in me that that was what I really wanted to do.”

A piece Safdie wrote in Linney’s class became the basis of Private Jokes, Public Spaces, a comedy about architects that enjoyed critical success off-Broadway and has also seen productions in Canada, the U.K., Romania and Israel — usually with Safdie’s wife, Toronto actress M.J. Kang, in the central role. Safdie’s other credits include the screenplay for the 1998 film You Can Thank Me Later, starring Ellen Burstyn and Amanda Plummer. His most recent play, The Last Word…, made its New York debut last season as a vehicle for Daniel J. Travanti of TV’s Hill Street Blues.

Safdie says he didn’t deliberately choose Muslim and Jewish actors to play the leads in West Bank, U.K., but the personal backgrounds of Mosallam and Cohen have been a great asset. “When Mike speaks, it’s so much from the heart, you can see it,” Safdie says. “Sometimes I have to tell him, ‘Don’t get too sentimental, Mike.’ The tears well up in his eyes.”

The cast, which also includes Anthony Patellis and Michelle Solomon in multiple roles, didn’t talk politics in rehearsal, says Safdie, but there were occasionally some tense moments. “Once, we were trying to do some combat moves and Jeremy said, ‘Oh, this is what they taught me in the Israeli army,’ how you can kill a person with just a couple of blows, crack their neck. And I saw Mike just put his head down. I could see what he was thinking,” Safdie recalls. “But it just passed.”

Nonetheless, Cohen and Mosallam have forged a strong bond, says Safdie, and bring a depth to the show that he hadn’t anticipated. “Where I thought it would be more satirical, it feels more human in some ways,” he says. “There’s a real journey with these two characters that I didn’t expect. They’ve carved out a real story so that, hopefully, in the end, people are moved emotionally.”

West Bank, U.K. runs Nov. 29-Dec. 16 at La MaMa ETC in New York.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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