Stage Animal / Wordplay

At the festive kickoff to Independence Day, before actress Yevgenia Dodina held her torch to the flame - one of 12 Israelis thus honored each year - she recited a Hebrew text that she had memorized for weeks. The words, she said ("Today I feel that I belong," Haaretz, April 28), moved her more than any theatrical monologue she'd ever performed: "I, Yevgenia Dodina, born in Belarus, daughter of Boris and Sarah and mother of Anna, a graduate of the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts, immigrated to Israel with a troupe of actors, with the encouragement of our teacher, director Yevgeny Arye, and together we established the Gesher Theater in Jaffa. Today I am a member of the national theater, Habima."

It truly is a moving text, and not only for Dodina. We must remind ourselves that the Hebrew theater, which eventually became the Israeli theater, was founded by immigrants, for whom Hebrew was an acquired language. This was the case for the founders of Habima, which became the national theater, and for most of the founders of the Cameri. Dodina is a shining figure in a long line of shining immigrant actresses (whose numbers vastly outstrips those of their male counterparts) who studied and gained acting experience in a foreign language, only afterward acquiring Hebrew and taking their place on the center of the stage in Israel.

The glamorous gallery of actresses, to name those who still grace our theaters, includes Hanna Meron, Orna Porat, Lea Koenig, Miriam Zohar, Ruth Segal, Gitta Munte, Rosina Kambus, Tatiana Kanellis-Olier, Natalia Manor, Helena Yeralova, and I hope I haven't left anyone out.

These actresses came to the Hebrew stage from the states of the former Soviet Union, with different varieties of Slavic accents, and from central and eastern European countries, mostly Romania. The exceptions have their origin in Germany. There was one with a French background (Florence Bloch) and as far as I know only one native English-speaker, Aviva Marks.

They all suffered in one degree or another from the difficulties of adjustment, depicted by Dodina in her short piece in Haaretz. Especially touching is her description of how she felt the first time she made herself understood, and reached the soul of a listener, in a language that was at first just a collection of strange sounds to her. "For months I acted in Hebrew without understanding a word. I did my Hebrew apprenticeship with Tel Aviv taxi drivers. They were my Israeli ears for whole theater monologues I wanted to commit to memory. They listened in silence without following the jumble of sounds I attempted to fashion into Hebrew sentences. 'I beg of you, make your peace with destiny, and stand up to the terrible trials that await you,' was the first sentence to which I received a response. The surprised cab driver pulled over, brakes squealing, and asked in amazement: 'But why, honey?'"

The stage isn't life

I am not belittling Dodina's accomplishment, acquiring a command of Hebrew, her primary work tool as an actress here. But I am willing to bet a generous sum that the cabbie hit the brakes suddenly not because she could speak Hebrew, but because she invested the sentence with emotions to which he felt compelled to respond. As a theatergoer I can testify that this is her great advantage as an actress (in addition to her other impressive characteristics), which was expressed on stage even when she didn't directly or immediately understand the sounds she voiced, but knew their meaning in her first language, Russian.

As Dodina pointed out, today she performs in the national theater, Habima. I last saw her there in leading roles in two productions. You might say that the plays were mounted in order so that Dodina could portray characters in "Anna Karenina" and in "Little Eyolf," for she is one of those actresses around whom theaters plan repertories. At Habima she appeared for the first time in an environment where Hebrew is the native language of the actors, and is not Slavic-accented.

There is of course a sort of historic irony in this: In Habima's early days, when its great actors spoke in foreign accents with broad Slavic pathos, actors who were born here, such as Yossi Banai and Gila Almagor, had to adopt this pathos, and even a bit of a Slavic accent and the expressionist acting style. Today the Hebrew spoken on our stages is no longer like this.

The issue of what constitutes "stage language" is complicated. One school holds that street talk should be imitated in style and in pronunciation (an idea that held sway in Cameri when the state was founded, where the thinking was that the theater should reflect spoken language). On the other hand, one of the special characteristics of a stage play, even in a realist mode, is that the theater is not life. In the theater one speaks in an artistic, artificial, "staged" way, even when imitating real life.

In other countries, richer in theatrical traditions than Israel, the norm allowed for an abundance of accents, reflecting the social background of characters on stage, but this approach never took root here. There was a transition from the Slavic pathos of Habima toward the everyday Israeli style of the Cameri, and that's about where the process stopped.

Over the years, with the blurring of the divisions between high and low culture and the increasing emphasis on original plays that imitate life - under an illusion of one-to-one correspondence between theater and life - the spectrum of what constituted acceptable, natural Hebrew on stage broadened, among other things in order to include the accents of different immigrant groups. Some of the immigrant actresses who were taken on by theaters had their pronunciation of Hebrew construed as a stage mannerism rather than as a foreign accent.

In my opinion there are two ways that Hebrew is spoken which are still considered foreign when they are heard on stage, despite the broad range of what is tolerated here, and that includes really sloppy speech. Strangely enough, these are two ways of pronouncing Hebrew we hear the most frequently in our daily lives: Russian-accented Hebrew and Arabic-accented Hebrew. Perhaps exactly because Russian and Arabic speakers belong to sectors of Israeli society living inside controversy and confrontation, each for justifiable reasons of its own, theatergoers who catch overtones of Russian or Arabic from an actor or actress respond as though their Hebrew is foreign, and even as if it grates on their ears.

The subject of Arabic accents deserves to be considered separately. I'll just point out that there are two Arab actors who speak Hebrew on stage that rings more truly than the Hebrew of many other Israeli actors for whom Hebrew is their mother tongue. Take, for example, Norman Issa or Yousef Sweid. Russian is a different story, paradoxically because of the phenomenal success of Gesher Theater.

As a group, the theater with its Russian-toned Hebrew was lovingly accepted here. Its members don't even really have accents, but rather a way of playing the language as though it were a musical instrument. This fact stands out when one sees native Israeli actors at Gesher who understand the words they pronounce on stage in a completely direct, unmediated way, but sound more superficial than their Russian counterparts.

The complete opposite happens with Dodina at Habima. The moment she treats her stage Hebrew as natural, which is effortless for her, her speech stands out in its foreignness, in relation to the rest of her colleagues on stage, and also in comparison to what she has achieved in the past at Gesher. There's a lesson here for all actors. They must never take the way they talk on stage for granted, even though they are occupied with all the other elements of acting: emoting, shaping the character's motives and so on. Dodina at Habima sounds more Russian than she really is.

None of this takes away from Dodina's accomplishments as an immigrant and as an actress. It is only to say that one of the dire needs of every theater and every show is someone in charge of "stage language" - the voice coach. In the tradition-rich English theater two of the people who have held this position are legendary: Patsy Rodenberg at London's National Theatre and Cecily Berry at the Royal Shakespeare Company. The task of the voice coach, or director of voice, is neither direction nor design, but rather strict daily supervision of actors on the quality of their speech, pronunciation, music, balance, and the correct use of voice of each actor separately and everyone together. In a country of immigrants so blessed with different accents, it is vital to the theater's wellbeing.