裸聊直播

• February 5, 2016

裸聊直播’s College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences is co-sponsoring a live dramatic solo performance about multiple perspectives on the Middle East conflict. “Wrestling Jerusalem” is presented one day only on Feb. 10 at 2 p.m. in the University Theatre on the CSUEB campus in Hayward. It is free and open to the public as part of the Jewish Culture and History Series at CSUEB.

Based on research over several years of travel and study in the Middle East, writer and performer Aaron Davidman explores the complexities of the region through a physical theater performance that embodies the voices of the many living that reality. “To understand the Middle East, one has to be able to hold a simultaneity of truths,” Davidman said.

A self-described “everyman progressive American Jew,” Davidman first visited Israel in 1992 at the age of 25 to study Torah. “After that trip, I knew there was some synthesis I was reaching for,” he said. “I knew the storyteller in me and the young Jewish man in me — those two parts would come together somehow.”

But it wasn’t until he became artistic director of San Francisco’s Traveling Jewish Theatre (TJT) in 2002 — a post he held until the theater’s demise in 2011 — and returned to Israel and Palestine that he knew he wanted to write a play about that troubled part of the world.

Directed by Michael John Garcés, artistic director of Los Angeles’ Cornerstone Theatre Company, the short and tightly structured piece embodies the many different voices, points of view and opinions that Davidman encountered on several trips to the much-disputed region. He considers it a hybrid form, inspired by the autobiographical work of Spalding Gray and the transformational theater pieces of Anna Deavere Smith, and says it’s the most challenging and ambitious project of his theatrical career.

A performer since his Berkeley High School years, Davidman has a degree in acting from Carnegie Mellon and an MFA in playwriting from San Francisco State. He based “Wrestling Jerusalem” on real events and people he interviewed and recorded, plus composite and invented characters based on people he met and conversations he had. Most of the real people’s stories are repeated verbatim, with only their names changed to protect their privacy.

He whittled the characters down to 12. Among them are a fervent, friendly Muslim who tells him, “We are all the same under God”; the son of Holocaust survivors whose teenage son died in a bus bombing in Haifa and who had attended a peace camp for Israeli and Palestinian children two weeks prior to his death; an Arab woman whose commute between East Jerusalem and Ramallah — though just a short geographical distance — takes her hours each day; and a Jewish-American medical student who supports Hamas.

Also in the mix is Aaron Davidman himself, a visitor attempting to hold, and now to share with audiences, all the varying viewpoints involved. “I had to get to the [essence] of all the characters I portray,” he said.

For more information, call the university box office at 510-885-3118 or go to