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ARTS
CHUTZPAH! FEST Deborah Williams believes everyone has a story
by Steve Newton
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Deborah Williams developed her love of storytelling at an early age. It helps when your father— and grandfather, too—are big on bedtime stories.
“My dad’s stories were always sort of a big adventure,” Williams recalls on the phone from her home near Main Street and 33rd Avenue. “He actually grew up on Macdonald Street in Vancouver, so now I can see all these places that he talked about. He and his best friend made their own canoe out of birch bark and paddled through Pitt Lake and Pitt River and then all the way home down the Fraser River and carried it up through the marshes.
“So I always felt like you had to live exciting things to have exciting stories,” she adds. “And a lot of the best stories come from misadventure, when things get outta hand and they’re not under your control. I think that’s what people mostly want to hear, is challenges. We all want to know that everybody is struggling along as much as the next person.”
As well as embracing the art of storytelling—which Williams will celebrate with two events at this year’s Chutzpah! Festival—she is an established actor, playwright, comedian, and director. In other words, she really likes words.
“I do, I do,” she admits, “and I’ve been making a living with them for 35 years. I don’t know if you know the show Mom’s the Word, but I’m one of the creators there, and it’s basically a storytelling show. So we’ve been doing that now for 28 years, actually, and about 13 years ago I decided that I would like to hear some other stories besides just parenting, so with a friend and my husband we started The Flame.”
Williams launched the storytelling series in her living room, thinking it would be just a few friends and acquaintances coming over to share stories, but people loved it so much that they decided to find it a home. That was Main Street’s Cottage Bistro, where once a month for 11 years it would feature various storytellers and a musician and often draw more than 100 people. That venue folded during the pandemic, so the Flame folks have partnered with different festivals, nonprofits, and theatres like the Surrey Arts Centre and Victoria’s Belfry Theatre for virtual presentations, which reach more people and allow Williams to invite folks from different parts of the world to tell stories.
The Flame’s online success notwithstanding, Williams is excited about her upcoming live appearance at Chutzpah! She believes that storytelling is the ultimate way that we connect as human beings.
“We wake up in the morning and we create a story of who we are,” she says, “and then we live that story, right? It’s what we do: we create meaning. So we all are creatures of narrative; that’s how we connect on a very fundamental level. These polarizations that are happening in our society right now are really about people telling different stories and not actually listening to real stories, really human stories. I think we’d have a lot more empathy for one another if we actually stop and listen to the person talk and tell their story. We need to listen a lot more.”
When it comes to the themes that Williams likes to address in her stories, she says that it comes down to some basics, like love and adversity and questing.
“You know, I just got back from Victoria, where we had our first night on the stage there in two years, and someone told a most gorgeous story about going on a road trip with his father, who had Alzheimer’s, but finding this incredible connection together on the road. And by the end, we were all in tears. It was a beautiful piece.
“So there’s such a range,” she adds, “but everybody has a story, and mostly if I ask people if they want to tell a story, they go, ‘Oh, nothing interesting happened to me.’ But everybody has stories, right, and I think that’s what I’m actually good at: pulling a story out of a person, because I know that there’s a story in you.”
At her Chutzpah! storytelling night, Williams will be joined by the likes of actor Stephen Aberle, novelist and creativewriting teacher Glenda Zenoff, retired counsellor and educator Eleanor Lipov, and standup comic Helen Schneiderman.
“It’s all Jewish storytellers,” she notes, “and some people are entertainers by profession, or novelists, and some people are just storytellers through The Flame or have taken my classes over the years. But everybody’s scared before they go on-stage, and then when they finish they just feel so great and realize that they’ve been heard and that they have value and connection.”
Budding storytellers thinking about taking the plunge might want to consider the workshop Williams also has lined up as part of the festival.
“There’s room for people of all levels,” she promises, “from those who are brand new and terrified of telling stories right up to people who are working on their oneperson show and just want to find some new inspiration or ideas. It isn’t for kids—you have to be 19 and up—but it’ll be a range of ages and life experiences and physical and mental abilities. It’s for everybody.”
Williams’s goal of inclusivity in storytelling is mirrored in the project she’s currently working on with Zee Zee Theatre called Virtual Humanity, in which she’s helping 20 Indigiqueer and two-spirited people create and share their stories. The main misconception that she attempts to address in her stories is the one of “perfection”.
“I make a living with Mom’s the Word,” she says, “telling stories about what a bad wife, what a bad friend, what a bad mother I am. I’ve been doing this for 28 years, and it’s in 19 countries and 14 languages, so obviously it’s hitting some chords. People just want to know they’re not alone, so that’s what I like. I like to let the audience off the hook. To let them know that we all do stupid things and we’re all making mistakes all the time, and it’s better to laugh at it or to share it so it doesn’t turn into, like, a stone in your heart.”
Deborah Williams is also a cocreator of the hit play Mom’s the Word. Photo by Emily Cooper.
BREATHE IN HOPE
30T 30 0THA H H ANNU NNUALR L R L REME MEEM M MB M RA AR NCE CE EC DAY Y CONC NCON O ERT
NO ON VE E MB M B ER R 1 0 | 7: 7 : 30 3 0 P M NO O VE E MB M ER E 1 1 | 2P P2 M & 7 :3 3 0P P M
– Storyteller Deborah Williams
As part of the 2021 Chutzpah! Festival, Deborah Williams will lead a storytelling workshop at the Jewish Community Centre on November 7 and will host The Flame—Home at Chutzpah! at the Norman & Annette Rothstein Theatre on November 17.
NOVEMBER 4 TO 24
OPENING TONIGHT!
Live Performances at the Norman & Annette Rothstein Theatre & other venues at the JCC | Plus Digital Streaming
COMEDY
OPENING NIGHT EVENT | A Night at the Opera
with Interactive Concert by City Opera Vancouver
November 4 | 7pm
Enjoy Marx Bros. classic with festive treats, glamour, costume contest, and live music by City Opera Vancouver.
Avi Liberman | November 20 | 7pm Israeli-American’s quirky style has made him a comedy club favourite. W/ guest Jacob Samuel and host Kyle Berger. Ophira Eisenberg | November 10 | 7pm Selected as one of New York Magazine’s “Top 10 Comics that Funny People Find Funny.” Iris Bahr | November 23 | 7pm Award-winning Israeli-American writer, actor, director, producer and podcast host performs her new solo show.
DANCE
Project inTandem | Deep END
& moving through, it all amounts to something
November 6 & 7 | 7pm Double-bill explores themes of female struggle and empowerment in its BC premiere. Shay Kuebler/Radical System Art | world premiere of Momentum of Isolation (M.O.I.) November 13 & 14 | 7pm
Promising to be dynamic, active, and refl ective of our current moment. Alexis Fletcher | Vancouver premiere of light in the rafters Ne.Sans Opera & Dance | world premiere of Solo for Orpheus
November 16 & 18 | 7pm Chutzpah Artists in Residencedancecompanies return with two stunning solo performances.
MULTIMEDIA
Tamara Micner – Old Friends | November 8-12
Theatre, Installation | Intimate, one-on-one experience inspired by the music of Simon and Garfunkel. Artist Conversation Series Throughout the Festival
Iris Bahr co-curates conversations with infl uential artists and intellectuals.
THEATRE/STORYTELLING
Lilach Dekel-Avneri & The Pathos-Mathos Company The Eichmann Project – Terminal 1 | November 8 | 7pm
Multidisciplinary stage event revisits Eichmann Trial and ensuing public storm. STORYTELLING WORKSHOP November 7 | 10am to 5pm
In-depth Sunday workshop to hone aspiring storytellers’ craft. Fee includes a ticket to the Storytelling Evening. The Flame– Home at Chutzpah! | November 17 | 7pm
Real People share their personal true stories in fi ery, grassroots storytelling series. With special musical guest Anton Lipovetsky. Presented by RBC Surplus Production Unit | A Timed Speed-Read of the
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Trial Transcript
November 21 | 6pm and November 22 | 11am & 7pm
With only a stopwatch and a stack of paper, and some theatrical magic, this true story comes to life in an immersive experience. Sponsored by Actsafe Safety Association
MUSIC
Josh “Socalled” Dolgin with Strings | Di Frosh | November 19 | 7pm
Rediscovered Yiddish songs with Dolgin accompanied by string quartet! Guy Mintus Trio | A Gershwin Playground | November 24 | 7pm
Magnifi cent Israeli jazz combo channels the legendary George Gershwin.
Tickets and Event Details: chutzpahfestival.com
Jewish Community Centre
CHUTZPAH! FEST Theatre artist delves into trial of Holocaust kingpin
by Charlie Smith
The world was riveted when one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, was captured in Argentina in 1960, taken to Israel, and put on trial. Journalists from many countries converged on the courtroom in 1961 to watch prosecutor and then Israeli attorney general Gideon Hausner dramatically illustrate the magnitude of Eichmann’s crimes by bringing forth dozens of survivors to testify.
For his part, Eichmann tried to portray himself as a bureaucratic functionary who was simply following orders after swearing an oath to Adolf Hitler. And after the highranking Nazi was convicted and hanged, one of the journalists in the courtroom, Holocaust survivor and philosopher Hannah Arendt, created a monumental uproar with her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann as an ambitious bureaucrat—a thoughtless “desk murderer” not emotionally driven by a hatred of Jews—was highly disputed in subsequent years. And her claim that the prosecution was more intent on characterizing Eichmann’s actions as a crime against Jewish people rather than a crime against humanity resulted in her being viewed in Israel as an example of “Jewish self-hatred” and as anti-Zionist, according to a lengthy 2019 Haaretz article by Holocaust-studies researcher Michal Aharony.
Aharony’s 2019 piece, “Why Does Hannah Arendt’s ‘Banality of Evil’ Still Anger Israelis?”, pointed out that the nowdeceased intellectual’s books have been translated into Hebrew after years of being boycotted in Israel. And that has led to some vigorous public debates.
Israeli theatre artist Lilach DekelAvneri is among those who are deeply fascinated by the various interpretations of Eichmann. She spent six years researching and writing a major interdisciplinary production with 21 scenes, which was going to be presented by her company, the Pathos Mathos Company. But when the pandemic struck, she had to revisit her plans.
The result is a shorter work created for the camera on video, The Eichmann Project–Terminal 1, which will be shown at this year’s Chutzpah! Festival: The Lisa Nemetz Festival of International Jewish Performing Arts in Vancouver. It revolves around three characters: Hausner, Arendt, and Israeli poet Haim Gouri, who was a journalist in 1961 covering the trial of Eichmann for the newspaper LaMerhav.
The playwright and director described the Gouri character as her version of the “Greek chorus” between the protagonist, Hausner, and the antagonist, Arendt.
“His language is more poetic,” DekelAvneri told the Straight over Zoom. “He is trying to tell the story chronologically, and they disturb him.”
The three characters rely on the texts of historians, but that’s just one of several layers, according to Dekel-Avneri. There’s also an exploration of the performative nature of the trial.
She emphasized that The Eichmann Project–Terminal 1 is not a reenactment and none of the survivors’ evidence is presented. Nor does this work erase or humiliate those who shared their experiences.
THIS IS NOT Dekel-Avneri’s first theatrical foray into the Holocaust. Far from it. Her interest in the subject began as a girl, listening to her grandmother’s stories of surviving the Second World War when so many other Jews were murdered.
“The questions that arose originally back then were mainly, ‘How can it be?’” Dekel-Avneri said. “‘How is it possible that a nation would follow such a crazy, insane idea?’ So during my youth, I started reading a lot about the system and about Hitler…trying to figure out the dehumanization that they did to human beings.”
Her first theatrical project in university was writing her grandmother’s story. It included a moment when her grandmother encountered a German officer. They spoke about theatre and opera. And that, according to the playwright, may have saved her grandmother from being murdered.
“He had an opportunity to kill her and he decided to let her go,” Dekel-Avneri said.
Since then, she’s continued researching evil for several years. Yet she still feels that she needs to deepen her understanding of this subject to comprehend what brings people to embrace an ideology that she feels is completely against human nature, morality, and the responsibility of citizenship.
This exploration of evil led her into directing Muranooo, which she described as a “black comedy” about the Holocaust by Polish writer Sylwia Chutnik. The heroine, a Polish grandmother, hears voices in the night. It sounds like a young boy crying out “Muranooo, Muranooo, Muranooo.”
It’s set in Muranów, which is a part of central Warsaw that was the Jewish ghetto in the Second World War.
“They say bones and stones were mixed together in order to build the walls,” Dekel-Avneri said. “So you can hear a lot of stories. Even my assistant in Warsaw, she told me that she rented an apartment in Muranów and after a few days she left it because she really heard voices.”
The play was performed in Warsaw. One of the Holocaust writers who has influenced Dekel-Avneri is K. Zetnik (pseudonym of Jehiel Dinur), a Polish-born Jew who survived Auschwitz and later moved to Israel. He testified at Eichmann’s trial.
She said that she admires his “performative writing”, showing the gritty details of the Holocaust up close. She also reviewed his testimony from Eichmann’s trial.
Another author who influenced her thinking is contemporary German philosopher Bettina Stangneth, who wrote Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer. This 2011 book documented Eichmann’s secret life, exposing his deception in presenting himself at the trial as some sort of small-time bureaucrat.
In fact, Stangneth revealed that he retained close links to SS members after the Second World War and he bragged about his mass deportations of Jews to concentration camps.
As a result, Dekel-Avneri came to conclude that while Arendt was correct in laying out her argument that evil can often be banal, it did not apply to Eichmann.
“It doesn’t mean her theory is wrong,” Dekel-Avneri said. “Her theory is very true.”
Moreover, she agrees with Arendt’s claim that what happened in Israel in 1961 was a show trial. And Dekel-Avneri criticized the prosecutor, Hausner, for not presenting a case that would lead society to ask the “important questions”.
“The trial was focusing on the pain and how we suffer,” Dekel-Avneri noted. “He was not focusing on the system that made that horrible period of time exist.” g
The Eichmann Project–Terminal 1 is the videotaped version of Israeli playwright and director Lilach Dekel-Avneri’s interdisciplinary look at various interpretations of the trial of Adolf Eichmann.
– Lilach Dekel-Avneri
Director Lilach Dekel-Avneri has been studying evil for many years. Photo by Shachaf Dekel.
The Eichmann Project–Terminal 1 will be screened on Monday (November 8) at the Norman & Annette Rothstein Theatre and online as part of the Chutzpah! Festival: The Lisa Nemetz Festival of International Jewish Performing Arts.
