The first thought that popped into my mind last year after seeing the play “Oslo,” which won the Tony award for best play last Sunday night, was: “That’s it?”
The play left me empty. The brilliant acting and stage directing couldn’t overcome my disappointment that “Oslo” added little to the conversation and only reinforced Western stereotypes about conflict resolution.
The play deftly dramatizes the behind-the-scenes efforts of a Norwegian diplomat-couple who bring Israelis and Palestinians together to sign the 1993 Oslo Accords. As you can imagine, to get these parties to agree to anything, there is endless coddling, nudging, arguing and agonizing. It’s in those twists and turns that the play finds most of its drama.
But there’s an elephant in the room, and it looms over everything. No matter how much drama you see on stage, you can’t help but feel the distracting drama of that elephant, which is this: The agreement that the play worships has turned out to be a dud, a failure of the highest order. The light at the end of the tunnel was really an oncoming train.
So, as much as I enjoyed the acting and the story, I felt its emptiness. Because the play makes such a powerful claim to historical truth, that truth comes back to haunt it. The play wants to have it both ways: It wants us to enjoy the history it shows, but ignore the history that annoys. In my case at least, it was too much to ask.
The failure of Oslo makes the drama in “Oslo” almost trivial. The real drama of the Oslo story is not in its excruciating negotiations, but in its inevitable failure. The agreement itself is transitional. It doesn’t tackle the most serious issues of contention. It kicks the can down the road in the hope that the parties will soften with the years. Of course, the opposite happened. The parties have grown even further apart since Oslo.
In real life, that kind of tragedy can be demoralizing. It’s almost too much to bear. But that’s why we need great art—to make us confront ugly truths. Great art is not there to manufacture hope. That’s what preachers are for. Great art should have the courage to take us where we don’t want to go.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an existential conflict where core narratives are rejected, mistrust rules, resentments accumulate and hatred flourishes. Brilliant negotiators are useless in the face of such hardened conditions. A play that would have tried to capture that tragedy would have captivated me.
Would it have won a Tony? Probably not. Tragedy doesn’t sell. Hope sells. Hope is the elixir of the civilized mind. No matter what reality tells us, we must show some hope. The price we pay for this obsession is that we don’t learn our lessons. In the case of Oslo, the great lesson is that when a foundation is corroded, you can’t build anything.
From the standpoint of the Palestinians, if your society marinates you in Jew-hatred from birth, if you are taught that the Zionist narrative is a fraud and that Israel is a land thief, and if you are promised that millions of refugees will eventually return to that hated Israel and take over, how does a piece of paper negotiated in a Norwegian ivory tower counter any of that? It doesn’t and it can’t, not even if it’s signed on the front lawn of the White House.
I hope a playwright will tackle the Oslo story one day without fear of incorporating its tragedy and going to the depressing depths of the conflict. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, sometimes you have to hit your own bottom before you can see the way up. Maybe the playwright can write an alternate, fictitious story where the heroes are not glamorous negotiators but real change-makers, like educators and bridge-builders.
Ironically, by going to that ugly bottom, we might find some real hope.
“Oslo” never takes us to that ugly bottom. It prefers the comfortable Western cliché that brilliant and determined negotiators can accomplish miracles. That may be true on Broadway, but not in Jerusalem.
The missing drama in ‘Oslo’ : http://ift.tt/2sl3OBL
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