Abadai - The Jewish Theatre

About Abadai

Abadai - A comedy about loneliness, death and a little chick
Written and performed by Amikam Levy
Directed by Maria Blom

ABADAI a comedy about loneliness, death and a little chick blended theatrical performance and a self-revealing conversation. The audience was treated to a performance that hovered between grand comedy and matters most serious.

Amikam Levy, 54, resides in Tel Aviv where he works as an actor. He has already a very successful career behind him and is today also known as a host for a popular interior decorating program on Israeli television. Levy is full of life, intense and candid. When he took the stage at the Jewish Theatre, it was to tell a very personal story. It was at the same time complex and dynamic, where the expression of the performance can vary depending on the time, the audience and the mood.

The result of our encounter is a little bit like the meeting of a pulsating, warm, gaudy and emotional Tel Aviv and a strict, orderly, nice and doctored Falun, says theatre director Maria Blom about her collaboration with the actor Amikam Levy during rehearsals for ABADAI at the Jewish Theatre. Blom returned to The Jewish Theatre eight years after Jonathan Metzger’s box office hit Men i framtiden då? (But How About The Future?). Since then she had staged numerous other successful productions. Thanks to her theatrical as well as cinematic successes, she has attracted quite some attention as one of the most prominent contemporary directors in Sweden.

ABADAI touched on highly charged subject matters such as identity, sexuality, heritage and tradition, but not forgetting the ordinary everyday topics. The performance was a journey into a very entertaining and most personal story.

Maria Blom About the Script

When I initially read the script it struck me how pressing the subject matter is. The complex relationships with family and with parents in particular, how difficult growing up can be, how to realize oneself vis-à-vis one’s Mother and Father – and how to handle it all.

The script was also very tempting to me as a Director. It radiates a warmth that made me anxious to nurture it and bring it to the stage. He describes a world totally different from my own but despite that has many points in common – the difficulty and beauty of being a struggling human being perhaps?

Amikam takes the stage in order to deliver himself to the audience. He treats the audience to this exciting, mad, yet sweet person. The cool thing about this particular production is that it is a live encounter that changes daily. It’s dynamic! I hope the audience leaves with a sense of strength and joy.

About Amikam

I first met Amikam at the beginning of the summer and that’s when I decided to undertake the task of directing “Abadai”. It immediately felt like a perfect fit. He is unique in his commitment and his approach to people and we realized, almost immediately, that we shared a common view on how to interpret the script.

As a Director it is a challenge to work with an actor that is so empathetic and outgoing as Amikam. He returns what one offers and the process turns into a very exciting exchange. Amikam is a most interesting person, a real “mensch”. The result of our encounter is a little bit like the meeting of a pulsating, warm, motley and emotional Tel Aviv and a strict, orderly, nice and doctored Falun (provincial Swedish town). When our ways part I hope that Amikam has tucked some emotional storms/temperament/fire and water into my personal knapsack.

About The Jewish Theatre

It feels great to be back at The Jewish Theatre. To once again work with someone else’s material feels liberating and inspiring. The Jewish Theatre offers me another world than the one I’m used to.

By Maria Blom

Interview by Ingrid Lomfors with Amikam Levy

Maria Blom takes centre stage, again

Photography Siri Isgren

Repetition med Amakam Levy och Maria Blom

Published: October 2, 2009, 21.19 PM
Lars Colin, Svenska Dagbladet

Ten years ago she was one of the hottest talents in theatre in Sweden. Then she did “Masjävlar” and became one of the prime movie hopefuls. Maria Blom is now back on the stage, directing the tragicomic one-man performance “Abadai” at the Jewish Theatre.

Stuff. The Jewish Theatre is packed to the rafters with stuff. In Abadai’s case they function as memories. Amikam Levy is the 54-year old reason that Maria Blom despite a five-month old baby chose to hire a super-nanny and grab the helm of the director’s desk. Or rather to be a listener, and brake pad.

“The Jewish Theatre needed to suffuse the direction with a wacky sense of humour, which is why they called me. It’s a very humane and sentimental story that needs to be told, and it was the story I fell for in the script. One can say that Amikam reminds me a lot of myself and my struggles, but a hundred-fold. So now it’s me who has to reduce and ask for long pauses”, Maria Blom says sitting all curled up on a cowhide-upholstered sofa after the day’s rehearsals.

Despite having acted as a brake pad, she finds that Amikam Levy is impossible to curb. That’s why Maria Blom calls “Abadai” a performance and not a play. The background is his adolescence as a cantor’s son in a strictly religious home in Jerusalem, and his struggle to in many different personal levels come out of the closet. His theatrical training was supplied by the rough Israeli army, where Amikam Levy and nine other men and women belonged to the entertainment unit. There this very energetic Tel Aviv-based actor learned all there is to know about the stage. Somewhat like a Middle East version of the fictitious character corporal Klinger in “MASH”.

It’s been a very instructive rehearsal period for the normally rather control freak-oriented Maria Blom.

“To try and stay in control was just pointless. Normally I am the one who triggers the actors and lend life and form to the characters they portray. But here’s this wild and creative man who jumps around and shouts and wants to share his thing. I finally decided to just straddle his back and enjoy the ride”, she laughs.

Deep down there is a tragic story, which Maria Blom wants to tell and enhance. The ambition is of course to create a different and vivid performance, and to show how affected Amikam Levy, and the rest of us, are of our background.

It’s not the first time Maria Blom works at the Jewish Theatre. In 2001 she directed “Men i framtiden då?”, written by the young playwright Jonathan Metzger. She calls the diminutive stage on Djurgården a luxurious place where one can kind of do what one wants, as long as the idea is strong enough.

Maria Blom started her career at Stockholms Stadsteater’s experimental stage “Backstage” where she excelled from 1997 to 2002. There she produced very colourful plays that attracted much attention with typically Blom-ish titles such as “Sårskorpor / Scabs”, “Rabarabers / Rhubarbs” and “Dr Kokos kärlekslaboratorium / Dr Coconut’s Love Laboratory”. Since then she’s chiefly been associated with feature films. “Masjävlar” reached an audience of 800.000 and was awarded with three “Guldbaggar”. It was followed in 2007 by the story about the forever smiling stewardess Nina Frisk.

“A lot has happened since I was here last. Then I had a very young audience, but because of “Masjävlar” I suddenly reached a middle-aged audience.”

“Is this away of returning to the stage in Stockholm?”

“Absolutely. I’m beginning to feel an appetite. The time at “Backstage” was great fun, a great nursery where people were allowed to grow. But work-wise I’m now far in the future. The next step is to sit down and write, for film as well as the theatre. And there will be a piece for a stage in Stockholm too, Maria Blom confides in a whisper.

Lars Collin

“Levy has the energy of a whirlwind”

Review from Svenska Dagbladet
October 5, 2009

Abadai a comedy, The Jewish Theatre, Djurgårdsbrunn

Text, Performer: Amikam Levy
Director: Maria Blom
Stage Design: Josefin Åsberg
Costume Design: Nina Sandström
Dramaturge: Sandra Weil

Amikam Levy storms through the front door with his suitcases just as the audience begins to wonder if the performance won’t start on time. In one hand he’s holding a pair of women’s shoes, very large. He claims that he has just arrived straight from Tel Aviv, but is never the less ready to begin his performance right away. He makes an attempt but the cell-phone rings. His father has just died – and the performance becomes a high-geared dirge about a mute relation with his father, as well as a story about coming out as a Jew and a homosexual.

Amikam Levy is a 54 year-old whirlwind, erratic and immediate. With fine drastic details he tells the story of his childhood where he was the big hope – but also how, according to Jewish tradition, he has disappointed by living as a homosexual.

Now he’s about to read Kaddish, a prayer, for the father at the funeral since he’s the only son – but is he manly enough, won’t the sister read instead? He feels, like so many other homosexuals, as another gender, neither man nor woman.

Maria Blom has directed, read: tried to curb, this energy. In particular she has emphasised the close contact with the audience and the insecurity factor. Is this true, how much is made up? Levy flirts with the audience, wants to swap his shirt with a man in the audience, demands to be hugged and tells of a lifelong constipation and the interiors of a local gay sauna.

More and more furniture ends up on stage, a couch, lamps, curtains and slowly the lobby is transformed from a minimalist cold space to an Oriental home. That’s when Levy tells of the soldier that hugged him on a cold day in Jerusalem, a father surrogate that made him cry with gratitude. He reveals that his best friend was a chick, describes bullying and loneliness that thrive in the cramped apartment where the entire family slept together.

At the very end Amikam Levy comes out, literally, wearing a frock and stumbling on high heels toward the entrance, to the plane and the funeral. The last thing we hear is a long tirade in heavily accented English – before the applause begins. He is something all his own, even though he at times resembles Dame Edna. The hour-long, rather chatty performance excels in it’s immediacy – as well as in Amikam Levy’s story, of course.

By Lars Ring

”Abadai a comedy about loneliness, death and a little chick”

Review from Dagens Nyheter
October 5, 2009

Production: “Abadai a comedy about loneliness, death and a little chick”
Venue: The Jewish Theatre, Stockholm
Direction: Maria Blom
Text/Script: Amikam Levy
Stage Design: Josefin Åsberg
Performer: Amikam Levy
Dramaturge: Sandra Weil
Costume Design: Nina Sandström
Photo: Siri Isgren

Amikam Levy keeps the suspense alive in the hourlong performance in the lobby at the Jewish Theatre.
True or false? Amikam performs a monologue with breakneck irony.

A happy and bundled up individual makes his way into the lobby and disperses his belongings by the door as the audience awaits to enter the auditorium at the Jewish Theatre. It turns out to be the principal of the evening, the Israeli actor Amikam Levy, who makes his excuses for being late claiming that the flight from Tel Aviv was delayed.

The evening continues in the same improvisational style, a chatty and nervous stand-up pace, which makes us unsure whether he’s telling the truth or not. Is his sister really calling him on the cellphone? Has his father really just died? Has the performance actually started yet? Why can’t we enter the auditorium already?

We’re not allowed to, and that’s the whole point with Amikam Levy’s hourlong monologue. To keep the suspense alive. And he succeeds, despite, or maybe thanks to, the silly intimacy of the prelude, almost like children’s theatre for adults: “Hi, I’m here now! Are you sitting comfortably?” We are used to separating theatre from real life, stage and auditorium. On stage it’s all about “as if”, a make believe game which can be more or less serious.

Maria Blom’s direction takes advantage of the elegant lobby at the Jewish Theatre almost to the breaking-point. These conventions are mucked up by an actor who employs break-neck self-irony and sentimental persecution mania in climbing the walls telling of his loveless father and a religious environment where homosexuality is a mortal sin. That the father is dead is something we are made aware of, if not sooner, when Levy disappears and re-emerges in a frock and high heels. Finally he, the son, has the permission to be himself.

Fiction? Hardly. It’s like watching the proceedings in real time, and it’s very special. One feels that one gets to know him. In English, five weeks remain of the run.

By Leif Zern

“Monologue for man in strange cap”

Review from Aftonbladet
October 4, 2009

By: Amikam Levy
Translation: Sandra Weil
Direction: Maria Blom
Stage Design: Josefin Åsberg
In the role: Amikam Levy
Stage: The Jewish Theatre
Playing time: 1 h 20 min

The dazzling white, to the bone minimalist, lobby of the Jewish Theatre, where Amikam Levy performs his monologue (in English) is an unusually appropriate background for the frostily controlled, constipated family he portrays. A sharp contrast to his own twittering needy inner self.

He of course proceeds to fill the cold space with cosy comfort. He produces a carpet and a couch. Drapes floral fabrics, fetches candelabra, and finally hangs an entire garland made out of quirky small lamp shades all across the room almost as to just demonstrate how one can create forced warmth and a personality all by oneself.

Meanwhile the story is told of a sensitive boy, gay, forever searching for his father, a man so self-centred that he actually spends hours checking whether his socks are fitting just right across his toes. This in Tel Aviv where being a real man is of the utmost importance. Abadai means approximately “very masculine”.

Levy’s and Maria Blom’s method consists of letting his tightly wound, sharply urbane surface of charm and ironic joie de vivre suddenly erupt in small burst of great seriousness and childish loneliness. A dirty joke dissolves into tears. A glimpse of a schoolyard filled with dull juvenile cruelty. A facial contortion turns bitter at the memory of no one bothering to read him a bedtime story. The winds from his adolescence are quite desolate, and I believe him. But not all the way. This man appears to be somewhat more self assured than the text implies and some of the neurosis is well rehearsed to perfection. Levy seems the most honest when he speaks of another kind of manliness, as in the little dance in honour of the brave dick. Wearing a charming headdress fashioned into a little chubby upholstered penis covered in sequins, he confidently mimes to the singing voice of Liza Minelli that maybe tonight is his turn.

Great ironic melancholy, for all to be seen, such a deviating hat is just too embarrassing to bear.

By Jenny Teleman

“Abadai” at The Jewish Theatre, Stockholm

October 2, 2009

Amikam Levy is an actor, famous TV personality and author. He also runs a furniture store specialising in antiques and design in Tel Aviv. The activity is not exclusively with commerce of beautiful things, it’s also a meeting place for more or less spontaneous performances and productions as well as deeply personal conversations. He describes it as “A cultural centre for a small audience”. He will be performing his monologue “Abadai, a comedy about loneliness, death and a little chick” at the Jewish Theatre in Stockholm as of Saturday, October 3. The monologue premieres outside of Israel for the first time and has also been translated from Hebrew into English for the first time. He wrote the piece fifteen years ago.

“It’s about my life, about growing up in Jerusalem in a strictly religious environment, being surrounded by Jews hailing from Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and Syria. It’s about an intense wish and desire to be seen, and what it’s like to be different, to be an outsider.”

“I was angry when I wrote “Abadai”. I was angry with my father, with my entire neighbourhood.” Amikam is no longer angry today. He speaks of understanding, compassion and empathy, and even though he has accumulated much insight since he wrote the play fifteen years ago, he hasn’t changed a single word. He speaks of “coming out of the closet” not only in the sense of being gay, which he’s also done, but more importantly as being oneself. The price to be paid is often very high, but he’s always been prepared to pay it in order to be able to say “this is what I want”. “I have worked hard to love myself”, he says, “and to forgive, forgive, both myself and my parents”.

Amikam lives in the middle of a conflict area, but does not see Israelis, Palestinians or Arabs, he sees individuals, souls. “The word I hate the most is “enemy”. I’m naive. I want to be hopeful, I want to believe that we can love each other despite the fact that we come from different places and different cultures”, he says. “How can one not love each other and share human warmth?!” In Stockholm the performance has developed into a fruitful collaboration between Amikam and the director Maria Blom, Tel Aviv meets Falun. Amikam reveals that his director is a very impressionable and open person and that they have a great time together.

Amikam Levy is a seriously bad businessman, his main income stemming from television, a 150 episodes long series where he plays a director that threatens suicide every time he doesn’t get his way. In the script he’s supposed to be evil, but Amikam portrays him as confused and rather loveable. Without changing a single word in the script.

By Calle Pauli

“An Israeli Private Affair with an Israeli Jonas Gardell who Portrays Kim Anderzon”

Review from Expressen
October 4, 2009

ABADAI, By and starring Amikam Levy, Director Maria Blom, The Jewish Theatre, Stockholm

The audience murmurs in the lobby at the Jewish Theatre as they await the beginning of the one-man show by and starring the Israeli actor Amikam Levy. It’s a few minutes past the scheduled time, when a man in a knitted cap makes his entrance encumbered with suitcases. He makes his excuses for being late and we are led to believe that he is Amikam, but not that the show has actually already begun and that it will take place in the lobby for the next hour or so.

Seats are pulled into place, champagne is offered and Amikam gets acquainted with some members of the audience. Then he gets news of his fathers death on the phone, and the performance continues on the edge of the grave – the son must return to Tel Aviv, where he is expected to read the Kaddish for his father, being the only son among eight daughters.

The monologue tells the story of why he doesn’t want to read the Kaddish for a father that never loved him, a story that dissipates into anecdotes, self-disclosing confessions, some song and dance, heckling of singled out members of the audience. In short, what we witness here is an Israeli Jonas Gardell portraying Kim Anderzon. The monologue is delivered in a heavily accented English, which makes it not always easy to follow. I’ve read the script in advance and am therefor prepared for Amikam’s quick mood swings.

Maria Blom’s work as a director has probably mainly consisted of stage logistics – Amikam uses every nook and cranny, door openings and apertures – while he re-decorates the stark white stage setting with Oriental pieces of furniture and rugs. In principle he sticks to the private plane, for as much as one can do so being a homosexual Oriental Jew in Israel. The Palestinian conflict is hardly mentioned, neither is anti-Semitism. The performance is very much worth seeing, but one hardly leaves the performance into the autumn cold in a daze, having experienced something fabulous. Neither homosexuality nor broken relationships with fathers have the the power to shock anymore. At least not in Sweden.

By Nils Schwartz

“Three Variations of the Primordial Cell of Drama”

Review from SR (Sveriges Radio) P1 Kulturnytt (Culture News)
October 5, 2009

Yes, three women and a man. Or two young Feminists an older lonely woman and a homosexual man raised in a traditional culture. However one chooses to portray theses different notions, it becomes apparent that the monologue lends itself to the underdog’s perspective, where one can quickly shift between exposing oneself and testify, to fiercely joke or to be dead serious. And it’s the audience that is the opponent, and the contact is immediate and all important.

Lo Kauppi tells in “Undercover” with unbridled energy and lovely somewhat childish buffoonery, how she was a spy in her own Feminist conspiracy theory. She speaks American English, has time to wear both burka and bikini, but shows at the same time naively and quickwittedly how global oppression of women operates. After the intermission Anna Vnuk dances “Hårdare snabbare / Harder, Faster”, about her child’s birth, also a kind of monologue where she for instance thanks Liljeholmen’s city administration for the day care that makes her dancing and being a mother possible.

At Brunnsgatan 4 they’ve already become grandparents. In Kristina Lugn’s “Rena rama verkligheten / The Simple Reality” Anita Wall seems to have a problem being a grandmother, or rather with the loneliness. She implores the audience to execute a “plan of action” for her, and Wall is relaxed and amusing and has the experienced actor’s ability to render life to the text by Lugn, to all that lies between those linguistic Darlings.

Last but not least, Amikam rages around in a pea-green ski jacket and pink carry-on suitcase at the Jewish Theatre. He makes excuses for being late, but my father just died. His cell-phone rings, his sister can’t understand that he has to work now in “Estockoholmo”. And contact with the audience is just his middle name, once he starts no-one is safe. He is very adept at putting the fiction into question, getting hugs, jackets, cigarettes from the audience. God knows what if he only wanted to.

Abadai, Macho in Arabic is the name of the performance, and everything circles around the dead father, the little boy that grows up among the Arabic-speaking Jewish refugees in the “always dark and cold Jerusalem”, where the father, a cantor at the synagogue, wanted a real son, and where the son wanted real love. Amikam Levy and the director Maria Blom catch all the nuances between the macabre humour and the seriousness of the story, a life store in the Middle East, which with some adjustments could just as easily transpire in a religious home in Västerbotten.

Thus the world is intertwined in monologues, in the primordial cell of Drama, a human being recounts to us and the performances of this weekend show us then that it isn’t really that hard to lay down weapons.

By Maria Edström

“Eccentric entertainer”

Review from Nummer.se
October 7, 2009

Abadai by Amikam Levy

Stage: The Jewish Theatre
City: Stockholm
Director: Maria Blom
Stage Design: Josefin Åsberg
Lighting Design: Noa Lev
Costume Design: Nina Sandström
Performer: Amikam Levy
Dramaturgy and translation: Sandra Weil
Grade: 4 of 5

Maria Blom has directed the Tel Aviv actor Amikam Levy in his own 15-year-old production of “Abadai” at the Jewish Theatre. It’s an evening filled with Jewish humour “laughter through tears”.

It all seems slightly behind schedule. All the other members of the audience waiting to be admitted to the auditorium seem to have the same thought, as a stressed out gentleman wearing a cap and loads of suitcases storms in through the entrance. We realize that this is Amikam Levy even before he’s had time to hang his shocking pink suit (“Sorry I’m late, my flight from Jerusalem was delayed. Austrian Airlines delayed, can you imagine…”). The performance has already begun. Small unexpected surprises like this twinkle like a string of pearls throughout the performance. Or like the garland of lamp shades that eventually frames the minimalist white bar.

Before we leave Levy has managed to re-design the whole place using rich fabrics, candelabras, rugs, a couch. But first we meet this actor, owner of a performance club / furniture store, and television personality from Tel Aviv as the eccentric entertainer that he is. To prove this he needs no shocking pink suit. And what a meeting it is.

In this production Levy employs the improvisational techniques from stand-up comedy to reach the audience, garnishing with song and dance as he goes along. He selects his victims with a kind but dangerous glint in his hawkish gaze. He gets a witty repartee from the Stockholm audience at the Jewish Theatre who obviously master the subtleties of Jewish sense of humour as described in the program by the cultural journalist Jan Gradvall (Jerry Seindfeld, Larry David, Woody Allen).