In Tel Aviv drama school, 9 plays writ small

Searching for some distraction this week? Perhaps some avant garde theater will do the trick.

Head to Tel Aviv University, where the school’s Department of Theater Arts opened its SmallBama (bama is Hebrew term for stage) Festival Sunday night with a collection of original plays written, directed, acted and produced by a team of students.

The plays are staged in the relatively small spaces of the department’s Mexico Building, offering intimate access and views. It forces the audience to watch carefully and follow every move and word of the mostly short performances.

Some of the plays are fairly alternative in style and content, but not all. There’s “Yael and Sisera,” by Yaara Lokitz, telling the story of a war widow who lives on a border, surrounded by the sounds of battle, when an injured soldier walks into her life.

Another piece, “May the Water Ask for Mercy,” uses Israeli and Biblical texts to explore the connection between sexual assault and the need for purification, looking at the Jewish ritual of immersion in a mikveh, or ritual bath, and asking whether water can suffice in the cleansing process.

In “Shotim” (“Drinkers”), a group of singers engages in an extremely mysterious ceremony of singing, drinking wine, handing out red Gerber daisies and moving around a hand-painted red-and-white checkerboard floor in an absurdist play written by Miri Shlifka.

“No Concentration Camps Start with ‘Ayin,'” by Ealeal Semel, is a short monodrama staged outside, featuring an Israeli teenager trying to process her high school trip to Poland only to tie it to events that take place closer to home.

For director Noa Golani, who turned the play from a two-person piece into a monologue in the last week and a half prior to the festival, the staging was her opportunity to see what she could do with ten minutes of familiar, Holocaust-related drama.

“You need to keep on going until you get it right,” she said, remarking that her actor, another Noa, helped her clinch the proper staging and tone of the play.

Ditto for Ilil Lev Kenaan, whose direction of “Yael and Sisera” draws heavily from the Biblical story — one she said all Israelis know well –but looks closely at the issue of identification and how it affects people’s choices.

“It’s the conflict of individual choices,” said Kenaan.

There are a total of five plays being staged indoors as part of the festival competition, and four outside open to the public, free of charge.

That’s all part of the plan, said Anna Minayev, the festival’s artistic director. “This is an event that allows theater to thrive, to reach audiences, to have our work reviewed and supported,” she said.

“We have what to say about theater, and about all kinds of subjects that are being discussed in society,” said Minayev. “We can do that here. The test is just how the audience reacts.”

The festival, which has been around for 13 years, didn’t take place last year due to funding issues, but Minayev and her team pushed hard to put it together, successfully crowdfunding the project through local website HeadStart and raising NIS 30,000 ($7,800) and selling more than 1,000 tickets before the start of the festival.

A ticket to one play costs NIS 20, while all events outside the auditorium will be presented every evening, free of charge, outside and around the Mexico Building on campus. More information and ticket sales are on the SmallBama website; the festival will run through Thursday, October 22.