by dan pine
staff writer
It’s another pleasant, balmy evening at a Tel Aviv café, and the gang’s all there: a militant West Bank settler, an IDF soldier, a Christian evangelist, a Palestinian professor and a gay German furniture designer. One by one, they tell their stories, as a suicide bomber slips past the security guard.
Then the sirens wail.
That’s the premise of “Dai (Enough): Israelis on the Brink,” a one-woman show written and performed by Iris Bahr. Believe it or not, it’s a comedy.
“Dai” makes its West Coast premiere with a string of performances Jan. 10 to 13 at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. The presentation is part of Israel@60, a yearlong project of multiple Jewish cultural organizations in the Bay Area celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary.
Bahr takes on 11 personas in “Dai,” all of them characters she understands well. The Bronx-born actress is the daughter of Israelis and spent most of her teen and young adult years in Israel. She is 100 percent binational, bilingual and bicultural.
Her aim with “Dai” is not to persuade audiences that Israel is a fabulous place. Rather, she hopes to capture Israelis in all their noisy, blustery glory.
“Israeli society is misunderstood,” she says from her Los Angeles home. “Dai” was “a combination of creating a piece that explored [Israel’s] ideological spectrum and gives a visceral sense of what it’s like to live in place where suicide bombings occur and how that contributed to this ‘carpe diem’ attitude. Israelis are passionate, aggressive and suck the marrow out of life.”
Bahr’s play premiered in New York in 2007. She later took it to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, where it earned Bahr a U.K. Stage Award nomination for best solo performance.
Audiences “related on a universal level,” she says. “I had a Muslim woman tell me ‘You really changed my perspective.’ All I can do is open eyes. That’s the point of theater and art.”
Bahr has been in the game for several years, having developed a multifaceted career as an actress, author and standup comic. Before that, she gave neuropsychology a whirl.
A self-described “observer” of life, Bahr attended Orthodox Jewish day schools while growing up in New York, even though her parents were secular Israelis. Later, while living in Israel, she became interested in theater but did not pursue it professionally. Instead she served in military intelligence during her stint in the Israel Defense Forces, and went on to study science at Brown and Stanford.
A love of performing eventually won out, and Bahr settled in California to chase that dream.
Among the feathers in her cap, she has had a recurring role on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” guest-starred on “Larry the Cable Guy” and wrote a memoir, “Dork Whore: My Travels Through Asia as Twenty-Year-Old Pseudo-Virgin.”
At the moment, touring with “Dai” dominates her agenda. Last year, she performed the show at the invitation of Israel’s U.N. ambassador. The setting: the Dag Hammarskjöld Library at New York’s U.N. headquarters. More than 100 delegates and staffers showed up.
Later this year, she hopes to take the show to Israel, though she will perform it in the original English. “Israelis will just have to keep up,” she says.
Having lived in Israel and the United States, Bahr believes she has the perspective necessary to tell the kind of personal stories that unfold in “Dai.”
“Being exposed to so much, in a sense I understand a lot of different viewpoints,” she said. “Sometimes Americans are more in love with Israel than Israelis.”
“Dai (Enough)” plays 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, Jan. 10-12, and 2 p.m. Jan. 13 at the JCCSF, 3200 California St., S.F. Tickets: $18-$36. Information: (415) 292-1233 or online at www.jccsf.org/arts.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California