Despite threats and blacklist, play based on word-for-word Oct. 7 testimony tours US

On October 7, husband-wife duo Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, both Irish journalists and playwrights, watched in horror the incoming reports of torture, rape, kidnapping, and slaughter of Israelis at the hands of Palestinian terrorists.

On October 8, they watched with a different kind of horror as the news coverage in their home country focused not on the massacres, the growing body count, nor the thousands of rockets being fired into Israel, but rather on the fact that Israel had turned off the electricity in Gaza, the region from which they had just been invaded, “as if that was the real atrocity,” says McAleer. “Already, just the day after, the story of October 7 was in danger of being memory-holed.”

As the days went by, news coverage continued to slant against the Jewish state — as did responses from the art world. By October 18, a collection of 2,000 actors and artists had signed a letter condemning Israel for “war crimes” without making a single mention of Hamas, its invasion of Israel, its rampage, the hostages the terror group held, or the rockets being fired at Israeli civilians.

“So,” says McAleer, “Ann and I thought, somebody should do a verbatim play on this. We just looked at each other and said, ‘If not us, who?’”

The couple traveled to Israel and interviewed survivors and family members of the massacres that saw 1,200 people brutally slaughtered and 251 men, women and children kidnapped to the Gaza Strip. They then created a theatrical piece providing the word-for-word testimony of these interviewees.

The play, “October 7: In Their Own Words,” was performed to full houses — albeit with a hefty police presence and bomb-sniffing dogs — at Princeton University on September 24 and UCLA on October 7. Performances at more American campuses are on the horizon.

By the beginning of 2024, the play was ready for production and McAleer and McElhinney began contacting theaters in New York. Having rented theaters before, they assumed the process would be straightforward. It was anything but.

“It was just one issue after another of doors being closed,” says McAleer, adding that renting theaters in New York City is standard practice. “We wrote to every playhouse in New York and every one of them turned us down.”

The Actors’ Temple, an off-Broadway theater that doubles as a synagogue, was the only venue in New York willing to allow “October 7” through its doors.

With a venue confirmed, McAleer and McElhinney posted a casting notice on Actors Access, a nationwide industry site for auditions. Shortly thereafter, a discussion began in a Facebook group called Theatre Folx of Color, an online theatre community that prides itself on rejecting hate speech and being “kind and courteous.” “We’re all in this together, let’s treat everyone with respect,” says the group’s “About” section.

A member posted to the 14,000 followers, encouraging them to “stay away from this project” and calling the survivor testimony “fabricated.” Additional posts denied the Hamas massacres and accused Israel of the usual cornucopia of buzzwords and slurs. One post called Jews “violent aggressors” and claimed that the play was part of a larger effort to build “sympathy for an apartheid/genocide.” Further comments suggested disruption of the play and hinted at hate mail that could be sent from anonymous email addresses.

Casting difficulties continued. According to McAleer, “actors worried that taking part in this play would damage their careers — which is an incredible thing to contemplate, that doing a play about one of the darkest days in Jewish history, in New York, would damage your career. There would be no Broadway if it wasn’t for Jews. There would be no New York if it wasn’t for Jews.”

‘It might damage my career, but f*ck it’

The play calls for a cast of a dozen actors to portray 18 characters, all of them real people interviewed by McAleer and McElhinney in Israel. Those portrayed include Biliyah Michal, who survived by hiding on a roof with her children and grandchildren, Michael Zilberman, who drove south into the carnage to find his daughter after seeing her wounded in a Hamas video posted to social media, and a religious man who voluntarily made trip after trip into the active kill zone to rescue people hiding in bushes and ditches surrounding the Nova festival site.

The play follows their testimony to provide a step-by-step account of the day as a whole, as well as each person’s individual experience. The audience makes it through to the end with a sense of the horror of the day, the tragedy of the loss, and the courage of people who sacrificed and survived.

In the end, says McAleer, “the actors who accepted the roles were the ones who said, ‘It might damage my career, but fuck it.’”

One of those actors is Leora Kalish. When asked about antisemitism in the arts, Kalish responds that the arts industry is concerned with what is trendy.

“I’m not surprised that a lot of the antisemitic stuff is coming from people in the arts,” she says, “because Israel these days is not considered a cool place or a cool people to identify with or protect. It’s not cool to support Jews.”

In discussing the sexual violence against Israeli women on October 7, Kalish contrasts the global response with the 2014 kidnapping of over 200 mostly Christian Nigerian girls by the Islamist terror group Boko Haram. The campaign to bring them home received support from women’s organizations, celebrities, and arts professionals all over the world.

“But who,” asks Kalish, “came out in support of the Jewish women? This wasn’t just murder. Women had their breasts cut off and nails shoved up their vaginas, and there was just nothing.”

She points out that the Sheryl Sandberg documentary “Screams Before Silence,” a shocking and powerful film about the sexual violence against Israeli women on October 7, was almost completely ignored by the industry.

“Sheryl Sandberg is no slouch. She’s a powerful woman,” says Kalish, “and even she couldn’t get through.”

Another actor in “October 7″ is René Ifrah. Asked about whether or not he was worried about accepting the role, Ifrah responds, “I’ve always had a line in the sand. It’s: Do you fuck with Jews? If you fuck with Jews, we’ve got a problem.”

Regarding antisemitism in the arts, Ifrah agrees with Kalish that much of it concerns what is popular. Being anti-Israel “is so fashionable,” he says. “It’s so trendy. In the arts, everyone seems to buy into the same narrative” that Israel is an evil oppressor and the Palestinians are innocent victims. “The arts industry,” he says, “has been captured by this ideology.”

Nevertheless, Ifrah questions the number of people who truly agree with the anti-Jewish trend.

“In the arts industry, a lot of people are afraid to say the wrong thing,” he says. “There’s this culture of fear that leads many people to not be honest about their real opinions — which leads me back to pre-Holocaust Germany. It’s like, how do you keep your mouth shut? Have you not learned anything?”

Need for extra security

Performances of “October 7” required security guards, metal detectors, and armed guards in the audience every night due to disruptive, destructive, and sometimes violent anti-Israel protesters in addition to the almost taken-for-granted terror threats. This comes as the NYPD reported a surge in antisemitic hate crimes following the October 7, 2023, onslaught, with Jews across the United States experiencing the highest number of hate crimes ever recorded by the Anti-Defamation League.

The need for extra security is typical now for plays with Jewish themes in New York, a norm that should be shocking, yet is accepted by the wider theater industry, say the play’s producers. According to McAleer, “it’s an indictment of the art scene in New York and in America.”

Meanwhile, across the pond, a London production of “The Merchant of Venice” last year required security for the lead actress, Tracy-Ann Oberman, who was targeted after October 7.

As Oberman said when interviewed by the BBC, “You’ve got a Jewish actress who has to have security in the West End because of speaking out about the rapes on October 7 and the industry has not risen up and said, ‘That’s wrong.’ There should be more people who are saying, ‘This is unacceptable.’ They would find it unacceptable if this was happening to any other minority.”

Despite six weeks of full houses at the Actors’ Temple, “not one journalist from a mainstream publication turned up to review it,” says McAleer.

“Even if they were bad reviews,” says Kalish, “it’s crazy that major publications didn’t think that this is something to pay attention to.”

According to McAleer, the press releases they sent out for “October 7” had the highest percentage of views of any of their agent’s previous releases — and also the highest percentage of unsubscribes.

“Of course,” says McAleer, “they’ll say it’s not antisemitism, that it’s ‘anti-Zionism’ or ‘anti-colonialism.’ But, you know, it’s funny the countries they decide to focus on. There are a lot of conflicts in the world, a lot of them much more violent, but they choose to focus on the only Jewish country. Why is that?”

For Kalish and Ifrah, being a part of the play has been a profound and satisfying experience. For both of them, portraying the real people who went through hell on October 7 feels like a kind of public service, and something they wouldn’t trade for a safer, less controversial job.

“Israel exists for a reason,” says Ifrah, “and I will stand by it. That doesn’t mean I agree with everything. That doesn’t mean I don’t have criticisms. But if there’s ever been a country that has earned its legitimacy for existing, it’s Israel.”

Kalish is equally committed. “There was no way I was not going to do this play,” she says. “They want to take us down. They want to shut us up. But we’re not going to let them. We’re still here.”