[etni] Fw: Idea for a play / Yet another Barry Silverberg piece.

Nature----- Original Message ----- From: Barry Silverberg (and family) - barisil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Idea for a play / Yet another Barry Silverberg piece.

Here is the rough draft of another play:

….I SUPPOSE THEY WERE

The outline of a play
By Author Miller and Barry Silverberg

The PLOT: Highschool teacher teaching all my sons reminisces about his student days, when he himself acted in a student production of the play under the direction of a driven young American lecturer. He decides to stage a reunion, and starts hunting down the original actors, starting with an appeal over the ETNI site.
He gets a few responses, at least hints about where some of the cast members are, and starts to ferret them out. One link leads to another, and he soon has most of them located.
Of course, thirty years have passed, and those who survived are deeply entrenched in the dramas of their own lives. Their own children, for those who have children, are for the most part older now than they were then; they have all had their share of carreer shifts, passion and loneliness, triumph and failure, personal tragedy, illness, disruptive marriages, and all the other goodies that flesh is heir too, though most of us would like to contest the will. Some are living fairly conventional lives as you would expect of Bar Ilan graduates; one lives in the Haredi community, another has just seen her home torn down by the IDF, one is a reclusive millionaire in Belgium, and one has undergone a change of gender. Yet, to a man, or woman, once they are located, they are entranced by the idea. They agree to do an "All My Sons" reunion, dropping for a few months whatever obligations or ties that they need to drop. After all, Israeli students haven't had a chance to see a live production in a dozen years. No matter how amateurish it will come out, there is a captive audience.
Once again, they assemble in a classroom in an abandoned lecture hall, using old texts adorned with the picture of their long dead teacher, who has found a way to communicate his dictatorial demands to them. They begin to prepare for production. But as the rehearsal unfolds, the characters cannot separate the roles they are playing from the life roles they have taken on. The tension between the characters of the drama – Chris and his Father; the love between Chris and Ann -- are intensified by who the players have become and the passions that they feel. All are swept along towards an inevitable climax.

{ Now that I've got that off my chest,-- does anyone know the whereabouts of Jay Morgenstern, Debbie Aber/Hen, Johnathan Lesser or (I have to think who the others were) really anyone else who studied English at Bar Ilan in '74? I've already tracked down Steve (in a Mitspeh in the Gallil). I'm told that Kate is a Chabadnikit in Ireland, Only today did I get word of Sue (apparently a recent expulsion victim). I myself was at a wedding with little Bert ( a headhunter in the gay section of Chicago) just last summer; and Jim I see all the time (in Kiriat Shmona).

Now, where did I leave my pipe?

September 20…

PS: If you remove the letter T from the plot of "Trifles" you get the PLO of RIFLES. If we only could have seen this back in 1974.

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