Today's Washington Post gave a favorable review to Caryl Churchill's "Seven Jewish Children," which addresses the Holocaust and the Gaza war.

The author of the article responds favorably to the theater director's decision to bracket the play with a preliminary speech and post-play audience discussion. But I wouldn't describe the parts of the article that amount to a review of the play itself as favorable:

"Seven Jewish Children" (subtitled "A Play for Gaza") is briefer than your average infomercial and 100 times more provocative. Make no mistake, though, it is a commercial, an effort to compress to black-and-white a question of conscience of infinite complexity.

Because Churchill is such a compelling dramatist -- she's the author of, among other plays, "Top Girls," "Cloud Nine," "A Number" and "Far Away" -- the presentation is literarily seductive. Ultimately, though, it's so reductive that it can be consigned to the category of beautifully crafted cheap shot, an effort to cast a multifaceted conflict as intractably one-sided.

All of this pouting about MJ's style and use of the word "battles" aside for the moment, I thought that this description of attendance of the play might...um.....be interesting to TPMCafe denizens since it includes the reaction of another (more stylistically acceptable) regular Cafe contributor who was in attendance:

"This evening I attended a reading of British Playwright Caryl Churchill's ten-minute performance piece, Seven Jewish Children; A Play for Gaza. Had the play been written by an Israel, nobody would have batted an eyelash. But because the playwright is famous, and a leftwing British 'shikse' (I assume), she was pilloried by the Zionists and the play labeled antisemitic, etc., when produced at the Royal Court theater in London.

The reading was co-sponsored by Theater J, the DC JCC's resident theater company, and, was performed on the same night as a New York production. Kudos to its artistic director, Ari Roth, for having the courage to do it, although I am told that politically, his position as artistic director is safe. I had to cross a picket line of the usual Zealots to see the play. Once inside, most of the audience was the predictable Brit Tzedek ve-Shalom crowd -- generally supportive of the play, though a few were a bit uncomfortable.

Roth was keen on artistic balance, and so after the reading of the Churchill play, two "reactions" by British-Israeli and American-Jewish performance artists were read by the actors. Since these reactions imitated Churchill's piece, they came off as much weaker dramatically. Then the audience was given a chance to respond. Then Amitai Etzioni, the GW professor, and a self-described member of the Palmach generation, was given the floor. He lambasted the play as propaganda, and said that Israelis and Palestinians have to look forward, not backwards.

Etzioni, poor fellow, inadvertently provided the dramatic high-point of the evening, when he misquoted a line from the play as "Tell her that we killed the babies deliberately." (The actual line was: "Tell her that we killed the babies by accident.") In fact, this typified the reaction of not only people who did not hear the play, but people who heard what they wanted to hear, and not what the playwright wrote.

Why did the audience react as positively as it did? After all, it is not uncommon for the Brit Tzedek ve-Shalom crowd to display the typical ambivalence of the American Zionist left. I think that the recent reports of civilian abuse by soldiers in Gaza were fresh in the audience's minds, and they were not in the mood to hear calls for balance and context."
http://themagneszionist.blogspot.com/

Professor Etzioni would, stylistically, be much more comforting and familiar to those who care so deeply about such things. Would it matter that he railed about "propaganda" and was so verklempt that he actually misquoted the dialogue to illustrate his points? I wonder.

I've spent so much time on related blogs and more to the point, reading the Israeli media Op Eds that I find all this sniffing about MJ's style to be silly and overwrought. Hyperbole is more common than not and some Israelis such as the acerbic Yoel Marcus and Ynet's satirist B. Michael have raised it to an art form.

By all means, avoid them and MJ, at all costs if hyperbole gives one the vapors. Of course, hyperbole from the fingers of those who use it within a post that conforms to the more comfortable and familiar academic/thinktank style will often get a pass.

Apparently, some bullshit just smells better depending on the source.

I love Churchill's _Cloud Nine_, which I've taught several times in my classes. If she writes a carelessly PC anti-Israel play that's fine; she's earned the right with her other work. What's funny is that anyone thinks her little play-ette matters. The Israel lobby is not the most powerful lobby on Israel, since Jews make up such a small percentage of the population, even given disproportionate wealth. The real drivers of the Israel-is-never-wrong mentality are Evangelical Christians, who, like the settlers, believe that Israel belongs to the Jews because God said so (and never took it back). Any attempt to change U.S. policy towards Israel needs to address these folks, and they've never heard of Caryl Churchill.