Actor-playwright developed semi-autobiographical monodrama with Yaakov Buchan, the son of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele’s secretary.
BY JESSICA WERB
The Chutzpah! Festival presents Whistle at the Firehall Arts Centre November on 14 and 15 at 8 pm
WHEN STIR CAUGHT UP with Israeli actor, comedian, and playwright Hadar Galron for a Zoom interview last month, she was not in her home country. Instead, she appeared, framed in a rectangle of screen, from temporary lodgings in Zvolen, Slovakia, where she had opened a play mere hours after Hamas terror attacks in Israel on October 7.
“I got up on stage after the show, and in tears, I just told them what had happened that day in Israel,” Galron shares. “With no mercy on the packed audience, I just told them what had happened. Everything, the rapes, and all that I knew. I didn’t know the most awful things then. I told them about the kidnaps, and the rapes, and the massacres, and the real pogrom that it was. I said, ‘I want you to remember this day.’”
Those words caught the attention of local media, and within days, Galron, whose flight to Israel had been cancelled, and then cancelled again, found herself becoming something of a spokesperson about the conflict, appearing on Eastern European TV, radio, and podcasts: “I began speaking at colleges and universities here.…and I have a meeting planned with the president of Slovakia in order to explain, to do hasbara, of the situation.”
When she arrives in Vancouver this month, it won’t be as a spokesperson, but as a performer, presenting her monodrama Whistle for the first time since violence erupted in the Middle East. Galron developed the play with author Yaakov Buchan, whose mother was Nazi doctor Josef Mengele’s secretary, and adapted it into a semi-autobiographical work.
Credit: https://www.createastir.ca/articles/chutzpah-festival-2023-whistle-hadar-galron