“I grew up literally thinking Germans were going to come through the window and kill me and my family,” playwright Israel Horovitz says. While he’s the right age for such fears — he was born in 1939 — the Nazis failed to establish a stronghold in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Still, when Horovitz penned Lebensraum at the dawn of the new millenium, he used his childhood angst and cultural memories as building blocks for the play. Amidst the Syrian refugee crisis 15 years later, Lebensraum’s themes take on a new relevancy.
“It’s now become a much more important play for our time, because it really deals with immigration and how people respond to immigrants at this time in history,” Horovitz says. The immigrants in the play are Jews from all over the world who are invited to settle in Germany after the German chancellor, wracked with war guilt, invites 6 million of them to emigrate.
“Lebensraum, which is the German word for ‘living space’ — in fact, it’s a German word that’s illegal now, you can’t use it in Germany, or you’re not supposed to — was what Hitler promised the German people when he said he was going to go out and conquer the world,” Horovitz says. But in his play, wherein three actors play 60 parts, the tables are turned, and it’s Jews — a dockworker, an Auschwitz survivor, a teenager, alongside many others and their families — who are offered refuge, work, and citizenship in central Europe. The results are both comic and tragic.
The plight of refugees in Europe is of real importance to Horovitz; he lives part of every year in France, co-leads a theater company in Italy, and teaches in Scotland. In addition to his scores of U.S. productions, he’s the most-produced American playwright in French theater history, and has recently been decorated as Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France’s highest honor for foreign artists. He’s written over 70 plays, has been produced in 30 countries, and is the author of the longest-running Off-Broadway play in New York, Line. His plays and screenplays have received a long list of awards.
So how is it that this globetrotter is coming to Tampa for the January 8 opening of a play that has already pleased audiences in Philadelphia, Paris, and the Czech Republic?
“The thing I love most in life,” Horovitz says, “besides my kids and my grandkids, is going to places and seeing my plays being done, watching audiences watch my plays. I think Jobsite came about because my plays started to get done in Florida a lot in the winter time, maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and little by little I started coming down in the winter time… And I came upon Jobsite, and it really reminds me of my own little theater in Gloucester, Massachusetts — I founded a theater called Gloucester Stage 36 years ago. Jobsite, like Gloucester Stage, lives on the edge of catastrophe constantly, but it’s a brave little theater that does really interesting work and really thoughtful work. And I think I sent [David Jenkins] a note saying, ‘Do you want to try to do something together?’ So I came down [in Feburary 2015] and workshopped Sins of the Mother — and I liked it. And so when I was down there I said, ‘Let’s really do something, and I’ll come back’.”
Horovitz has several plays in the works at Florida theaters, and is so taken with the Sunshine State that two years ago he bought a small property in Lake Worth.
”It’s a great hideaway for writing,” he says. “So I plan to come down for weeks at a time when I really need to lock up and get work done.”
Does Horovitz feel audiences and theaters abroad take him more seriously than in the U.S.?
“From time to time, somebody will write, ‘Oh, he’s much more popular in Europe than he is in America,’” he laughs, then adds: “I don‘t know what that means.” He no longer runs the theater in Gloucester (he was artistic director for 28 years and saw 30 of his works produced there), and he admits to having lost some interest in American regional theater, where a major time commitment often adds up to nothing more than three weekends of performance.
“How about if I do a play in the Czech Republic and they keep it in repertory for 12 years?” he said. “I have three plays running in Paris right now, and they’re running in substantial theaters, and they’re open-ended runs.”
Lucky Parisians! Still, we in the Bay area can see Lebensraum in Tampa from Jan. 8-31. An added attraction: Horovitz will be on hand for a talkback on opening night.
Show up and chat with this remarkably cosmopolitan American original.
A TIMELY TALE: Lebensraum playwright Israel Horovitz.
Lebensraum opens January 8 and runs through January 31 at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts (1010 N. McInnes Place, Tampa). Showtimes are 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 4 p.m. on Sunday. Call 813-229-STAR for tickets. $28.
This article appears in Jan 7-13, 2016.