'Return to Haifa': Play on conflict stirs up plenty. The full story.
"Return to Haifa" at Next Theatre. Read the original review HERE.
About 10 years ago, a distinguished Israeli journalist named Boaz Gaon found himself in London, talking to an Iraqi writer. Gaon was complaining about the horrific way Jewish characters are typically represented in Arabic literature. It was Gaon's contention that this time-honored plethora of stereotypes contributed mightily to the violent opposition felt by many Palestinians toward the state of Israel.
"And then this man told me about this fascinating story," Gaon said, in a recent interview from Tel Aviv, Israel.That fascinating story started a chain of artistic events that has involved Israelis, Palestinians, Americans and British. It has provoked charges of creative theft and frantic attempts to salvage reputations. It is a cautionary tale of the need for artists to secure rights and permissions, especially when dealing with an incendiary work. And the fallout from the affair has almost destroyed a small but hitherto respected theater in Evanston, along with the career of its former artistic director, Jason Southerland.
The story was "Return to Haifa" by Ghassan Kanafani, a leading Palestinian writer and a former spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Kanafani was killed in 1972 by a car bomb in Beirut, an assassination that London's The Independent newspaper (and others) have said was "almost certainly" the work of the Mossad, in "an apparent reprisal for the PFLP-claimed killings of 26 people by three Japanese gunmen at Lod airport in 1972."
Penned in 1969, "Return to Haifi" is the story of two couples — one Israeli, one Palestinian — that ignites during the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, and it involves the Jewish couple raising a Palestinian baby, abandoned and forlorn in the wartime strife, as their own. In the play, the Palestinian couple returns to Haifa after the opening of the borders, following the Israeli victory in the Six Day War in 1967. They find their child fighting in the Israeli army, as well as the Jewish couple who were once themselves refugees and who surely saved the child's life.
"Even though he was writing not long after the Six Day War, this was an Arab writer who was able to treat Jewish characters very empathetically," Gaon said. " I was overwhelmed by it. It was known to the Palestinians, but it was not known at all to the average Israeli."
Gaon is a playwright as well as a journalist. After reading "Return to Haifa," he says he sought permission from the Kanafani estate — controlled by the writer's surviving relatives — to adapt the play for a Hebrew production in Tel Aviv. To his amazement, he said, permission for a Hebrew version was granted. And thus, in 2008, around the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, the respected Cameri Theatre opened "Return to Haifa," an Israeli writer's adaptation of a Palestinian novel, first in Jaffa, Israel, and then at its main theater in Tel Aviv.
There were major protests from both sides. "We had weeks of demonstrations with people dressed as Palestinians holding plastic guns," Gaon said. Meanwhile, some of those sympathetic with the Palestinian cause argued that Gaon's Hebrew version, authorized by the Kanafani estate, had made the Jewish couple much more sympathetic than Kanafani intended. For example, in the Gaon version, the Jewish mother is infertile after losing a child during the Holocaust. There is no such mention in the novella.
"(Gaon's version) was much more of a balanced story," said Ari Roth, the artistic director of Theatre J in Washington, D.C., one of America's best-known Jewish theaters. "But presenting this material at Israel's largest theater was still a huge achievement for Boaz." Roth was interested in bringing the play to America.
Enter Southerland, the newly hired artistic director of Next Theatre Company. Southerland was in Israel for the IsraDrama conference in 2008. He saw the show. And, as he told the Tribune earlier this year, he got hold of an English-language translation of the script that the Cameri Theatre provided him.
Roth said Southerland approached him about a co-production involving Washington and Chicago actors, and the two hatched a plan to bring the Gaon play — a translation of the Gaon play — first to Washington, then to Evanston.
But there was a problem. The Kanafani family would not grant the rights for the English-language version of the novella.
"They felt is should be adapted directly from the Arabic," said Gordon Dickerson, the estate's London-based agent. Through Dickerson, the Kanafani family was already working with a writer in Britain. As Dickerson explained it, the Kanafanis understood that the Gaon changes were needed to make the piece fly in Israel — with the attendant benefits for the Kanafani legacy and the Middle East in general — but an English-language production was another matter.
Printed copies of Southerland's detailed electronic correspondence with Gaon and the Kanafani estate were viewed earlier this month by the Tribune in the Chicago office of Gaon's attorney, Richard D. Harris of Greenberg Traurig LLP.
According to these records, Gaon alerted Southerland, via e-mail, that Southerland did not have permission to do the play. No rights to the novella had been granted. "There are political issues here," he wrote in early 2009, "and it may be easier for the Kanafanis to accept a joint Israeli-Palestinian project than a solely Jewish-Israeli project."
At that point, Roth dropped out. "The Kanafanis wanted a different script done," he said in an interview with the Tribune. "There were never performance rights given."
But Southerland refused to back down. "Our plan is to produce the play in 2010," Southerland wrote Gaon on Feb. 25, 2009.
"There is little we can do until the Kanafanis give us the OK," Gaon wrote back some days later.
In a subsequent e-mail, Southerland insisted that American practice was to announce a title and then get the rights. "Foundations," he wrote, "need a long time to approve funding for projects." He suggested that he announce the show for the Next Theatre season "subject to final approval from the Kanafani estate." And that's what he did.
Gaon was appalled. "I cannot grant permission to any production," he wrote, "until I hear from the Kanafanis." In his e-mails, he started using all capital letters: "YOU DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHTS."
Southerland replied that Gaon was not understanding "how it works quite often in the U.S." He told Gaon he had talked to New York producers interested in an off-Broadway production — and that he already had been given a grant to go to Israel to work on the project.
At that point, Anni Kanafani, Ghassan Kanafani's widow, got involved. "I am very surprised and upset," she wrote, noting that her family owned the copyrights to all of Kanafani's works. "Who gave you permission to go ahead?" Kanafani wrote. Dickerson wrote that he "hoped there was no truth to the rumors" that Next was thinking of doing the show.
But there was truth to those rumors. Southerland had put "Return to Haifa" on the Next Theatre season. Initially, the announcement included Gaon's name as adapter. But after Gaon's protestations, Southerland turned to another tack. He hired an Evanston writer, Margaret Lewis, to pen her own version of "Return to Haifa."
"We are not currently staging an adaptation of Mr. Kanafani's story," he told the estate in an e-mail. "(Lewis) wrote an original work inspired by the idea but also by dozens of other works. The play bares little resemblance to Mr. Kanafani's story."
That was hardly the case.
"It was completely brazen," said Roth.
The show, titled "Return to Haifa," opened in Evanston on Feb. 8 under Southerland's direction. It was well-received by critics and attracted the same diversity of audience opinion as had been the case in Tel Aviv. The reviews were read in Israel, Palestine and London, where it caused consternation.
And a threatened lawsuit.
In the legal complaint sent to Next Theatre by Harris, there is a side-by-side comparison of many of the lines appearing in the Lewis version and in the Gaon version. In several instances, they are the same. Moreover, the complaint lists several "themes" (the lost child being one) that appear throughout the Lewis version but are not in the novella — only in the Gaon script.
Lewis has insisted to several media outlets that she did not write the lines that were taken from the Gaon script, but that Southerland "inserted" those lines during the rehearsal process. "You have two writers here who did their job," Lewis told the Tribune, echoing comments made to the Chicago Reader and online publication Performink. "A third party (Southerland) was not respectful of the writers' job. We are both victims in this."
Lewis said she agreed to the addition of "eight or 10 lines" suggested by Southerland, "in the spirit of being an open collaborator." She said that she only discovered later that those lines were taken from the Gaon script.
Southerland, who announced his departure from Next on May 21, would not comment for this story. It is hard to discern what Lewis wrote and what Southerland did or did not add. Gaon said he has no way of knowing.
The legal complaint suggests Lewis was anything but a victim, arguing that the existence of the lost child, among other major themes common to the Gaon and Lewis scripts but not to the novella, meant that the duplication went a lot further than the addition of a few lines at the end of the play. Even if it's true that Lewis took nothing from the Gaon script — which would mean Southerland wrote a good chunk of the play — there is still no evidence that she was basing her work on "dozens of other works." And because no one had the rights to the source novel, let alone the Gaon adaptation, the whole project was unauthorized from the start.
Lewis insists she had no idea there was no permission to do "Return to Haifa," even if the adaptation was a new one. "I trusted," she said, "that would be taken care of."
Next settled with Gaon and his attorneys out of court.
It was agreed that no extensions would be granted to the production, that Lewis would no longer claim authorship of the piece and that all scripts would be sent to Harris' office.
Harris said that he had not been sent the scripts, as the agreement required, but he was told that they had all been destroyed. Lewis' attorney wrote to Harris that Lewis had erased every word of her project from her computer.
The agreement did not require Next to fire Southerland, but it did so anyway. "We felt," said Judy Kemp, chair of Next's board of directors, "that is was the appropriate thing to do." Kemp also said that Next, which had run up a deficit during Southerland's tenure, would soon announce an interim artistic leader. "We have a plan to recover," she said. "We're not panicked."
Kemp allowed that the Next board should have asked to see the permissions for "Return to Haifa," but she said that the directors trusted Southerland. "There is anger, disappointment, frustration, all of those things," Kemp said. "We are circling the wagons and are unanimous in our desire and decision to move forward." Late in the afternoon on Friday, May 28, Next dumped the bad news. The company put out the press release the out-of-court settlement required, apologizing to Gaon and admitting that its production "made unauthorized and unlicensed use of the title and both verbatim and paraphrased passages of dialogue from Mr. Gaon's acclaimed play ‘Return to Haifa.'"
Roth is moving forward too. With Gaon's help, he has put together a plan to bring the Hebrew-language production of Gaon's play to Washington in January, perhaps with surtitles. Although sympathetic to the notion, Dickerson said he had yet to grant the rights to the surtitles part. The adaptation and translation of "Return to Haifa" remain fraught.
"I have never," said Dickerson, "ever known anything quite like what happened in Evanston."
"This has all been so painful," Gaon said. "The whole production in Israel was a miracle in many ways. To be in touch with this amazing family, even as rockets were falling on our schools and Hezbollah was attacking our northern cities. This was a little flower of hope, a dialogue about a better future, an attempt to co-exist on a literary, honorary plane. Someone comes along and does basically what this play is all about — he takes this child, this creation. … If I was able to learn anything al all, it is to better understand what people, Israelis and Palestinians, go through in this play. Their frustration. This hope that something will happen to stop acts of injustice."