The labor of life : selected plays / Hanoch Levin ; translated from the Hebrew by Barbara Harshav ; with an introduction by Freddie Rokem.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Levin, Hanoch.

Contributor:

Harshav, Barbara, 1940-

Series:

Contraversions (Stanford, Calif.)

Contraversions

Standardized Title:

Plays. Selections. English

Language:

English

Hebrew

Subjects (All):

Levin, Hanoch--Translations into English.

Levin, Hanoch.

Physical Description:

xxxv, 310 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, [2003]

Summary:

Israeli playwright and director Hanoch Levin was one of the most original and innovative writers of his generation. Although Levin is familiar within the Israeli cultural context -- and despite the steadily growing stream of literary and theatrical research on his oeuvre -- there are few resources on his work available outside of Israel. The present volume, containing a selection of eight of his plays, is the first comprehensive effort to present this unique playwright and director to a broad readership.

Levin's artistic credo was based on a constant urge to criticize Israeli society and its mainstream ideologies while simultaneously confronting the basic human and existential issues of life and death. A whole generation of Israeli theatre audiences has grown up on Levin's performances with all their paradoxical complexities. At this point, just a few years after his death from cancer in 1999 at the age of 56, it may not be possible to evaluate the full impact of his work. But this volume will contribute significantly to scholarship in this direction.

The plays included in The Labor of Life represent Levin's wide-ranging styles throughout his long career. Levin constantly used different inter-textual strategies, consciously referring to a broad variety of source texts, as evident in such works as "The Torments of Job" and "Requiem." "The Child Dreams" and "Murder" represent two examples of the fate of the individual integrated into the threats of the destructiveness and failures of history. Levin's later work, such as the domestic-genre play "The Labor of Life," examines lost hopes from the perspective of the older generation. Throughout the plays in this collection is the underlying question of how "threat" and "suffering" are transformed into theatre and spectacle. Altogether, the works presented here give a picture of Levin's understanding of the artistic medium of theater: the fine interplay between narrative structure, historical processes, and the struggles of an individual.

Contents:

1 The Rubber Barons (A Tale of 30,000 Condoms): A Play with Songs 1

2 The Torments of Job 51

3 The Labor of Life 93

4 The Child Dreams: A Play in Four Parts 127

5 The Whore from Ohio 173

6 Murder: A Play in Three Acts and an Epilogue 211

7 Requiem (Based on Three Stories by Chekhov) 245

8 The Crybabies 273.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-310).

ISBN:

0804737126

0804748586

OCLC:

52430804