Another stage in her career - Haaretz

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Thu., January 10, 2008 Shvat 3, 5768

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Another stage in her career

By Zipi Shohat

Tags: Helena Yaralova

There was a lot of uncertainty about her. But after an exhausting process of auditions that lasted five months, Helena Yaralova stepped into Hannah Rovina's big shoes in Edna Mazya's new play "Was it a Dream?" And these are very big shoes.

Ultimately, at the end of the first performance last week it was already clear to any spectator that Yaralova is the latest discovery in Hebrew theater. She is a versatile actress with a captivating stage presence, who succeeds in modulating naturally in accordance with changing moods from one scene to another in short, swift transitions. Omri Nitzan, the play's director and also the Cameri Theater's artistic director, says the theater needs to make sure an actress like Yaralova remains in the company. He aims to cast her as Yelena in Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" later in the season.

The role of Rovina was originally intended for another actress, Yevgenia Dodina, but at the last minute she was cast at Habimah for the role of Anna Karenina. Yaralova, who came to the Cameri just a year ago, to act in "This is the Great Sea," won the juicy part. But she refuses to get too excited about it. After a career in Moscow, many years in the Yiddishspiel Theater and a quick visit to Cannes after starring in Amos Gitai's film "Kedma" - this latest role, however prestigious, is just another stage in her career.

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And for Yaralova, her career is the result of a fanatic passion for the stage, just as it was for Rovina, her character, who in the play refers to the theater as "my eternal love, my comfort and my reason for living." Apparently this is also why Yaralova agreed to be a "guinea pig," as she defines it, during the audition period, which dragged on so long. "They auditioned me time and again and the partners who were slated to play alongside Rovina. Many young actors went through those auditions. In the end, Yehezkel Lazarov was chosen. In my heart I knew I was going to do it, but until they told me, on September 2, that I was going into rehearsal, everything was uncertain."

And how did you feel when they told you?

Yaralova: "I said to myself: Get to work, that's all. I always think productively. Only when we moved from Cameri Rehearsal Room 4 to Cameri Hall 2 did I start to get excited. That was on December 23, and I felt like a horse before a race, ready to charge, but still being held. And then I said to myself: 'Hang on a minute, calm down.'"

Mazya's play is a journey of people and dreams in their encounter with reality. Such an encounter, which blows up in the end, takes place between the young poet Alexander Penn and the actress Hannah Rovina, who had become a myth in her lifetime already. "Everyone knows or thinks they know who Rovina is, but no one remembers her from the 1930s, and even if someone does remember her, who knows what she felt? To play a myth isn't interesting or exciting. It is necessary to play a human being. Men don't fall in love with a myth, they fall in love with a woman and many fell in love with Rovina. I wanted to play Rovina the woman. Even in the play we meet her just before or after a performance. We don't see her performing on stage."

How did you prepare for the role?

"I read books, I looked at a lot of pictures, and not only from productions, and tried to understand who this woman was. I saw a woman who wore a mask all the time. Her look is hard. A tragic figure sprouted for me. However, it doesn't matter what you see in pictures. In the pictures her eyes are small and her lips are narrow. But she made us think that she was beautiful, that she had beautiful eyes.

"Yossi Graber, who performs the role of [poet Haim Nachman] Bialik in the play, also helped me a lot. He told me, for example, that he once escorted her home after a performance and in the dark she allowed herself to relax and walk with a slumped back. The moment they reached someplace that was lit, she straightened up. She was always playing a character."

Chosen profession

Yaralova was born 43 years ago in Kiev, Ukraine, the only child of doctor parents. According to her, Kiev is an anti-Semitic city. It was unthinkable to have a Jewish education. She had already chosen the profession of acting by the age of 6, when she saw "Carmen" on television.

At 18 she left for Moscow, was accepted to the Moscow Art Theater, which was founded by Konstantin Stanislavsky and for which Chekhov wrote plays. The Habimah troupe, of which Rovina was one of the founders, was the third studio to be established there. Upon completing her studies, Yaralova performed at the Sovremennik Theater, one of the most famous theaters in Moscow.

"In 1986 I performed in 'The Seventh Deed of Hercules,' written by a Russian playwright called Mikhail Roshen. In my role as the goddess of lying I said things against the government and the KGB investigated me for an entire year. Even to this day I don't chatter near a telephone that is hung up, because even when the telephone is hung up it is possible to eavesdrop on you."

Yaralova came to Israel as a tourist 14 years ago with her 3-year-old daughter Nina, the child of her marriage to a musician, whom she divorced. She met up here with an aunt and her grandmother, who lived in Jerusalem, and fell in love with Tel Aviv. After spending two weeks here, she decided to stay. And so the tourist became a new immigrant.

"The absorption process was easy, very easy," she says, "and I realized that if I accept the state, the state also accepts me." She moved into a one-and-a-half-room apartment on Tel Aviv's King George Street and was pleased because the place could fit her clothes and books. She learned Hebrew at an ulpan (a Hebrew-language school). Her parents later immigrated here in her wake.

One may have expected for her to be cast at the Gesher Theater. But that did not happen. "That group came here together from Moscow - I came to Israel later," she says. "Most of them were [Yevgeny] Arye's students - I wasn't. I remember that I attended a party in Moscow that Arye had organized before his trip to Israel, and I remember Yevgenia Dodina from the Mayakovsky Theater and she was wonderful. When I came here, I went to Gesher for an audition, but I think it was not successful. Arye told me that he didn't have anything to offer at the moment, maybe later. There was no chemistry between us. I felt like it wasn't the place for me. Instead, I went to the Yiddishspiel."

Yaralova went to see "I'm Not Rapoport" at the Yiddishspiel, and she was enchanted. A friend introduced her to the theater's director, Shmuel Atzmon, as an actress from Moscow. He asked her whether she spoke Yiddish, and she told him that she didn't, but that she could learn. "A short while later he contacted me and suggested that I replace an actress on a trip by the theater to a festival in Warsaw."

And so, until a year ago, the Yiddishspiel was her theater for 13 and a half years, "which is lucky for an actor, because there is a framework, and there is a salary, and this was a wonderful school. I thank my lucky star that this happened. To stand on the same stage as Yaakov Budo and Yaakov Halperin - this is a gift. I will never forget a play like 'Dzigan and Schumacher' with Gad Yagil and Budo. The whole evening I watched how they worked and I learned."

Today Yaralova lives in Givatayim and his raising her two daughters - Nina, 18, who is studying history in Rome, and Dina, 11, who was born from her marriage to actor Misha Teplitzky, from whom she separated six years ago. Yaralova and Teplitzky are co-founders of the Malenky Theater, alongside Igor Berezin. They are currently sharing the same stage in Yosef Bar-Yosef's "This is the Great Sea."

Yaralova always does several things at the same time. Perhaps this has to do with her being her family's sole support. She sings, she dubs advertisements, she translates. Here she is appearing in a main role in a film, there she is moderating a huge concert in a park or moderating a television program on the Russian channel. She herself says she is always seeking challenges. When Omri Nitzan offered her a part replacing actress Shiri Golan in the play "Brighton Beach Memoirs" on 24-hours notice, she agreed - even though "it was like agreeing to commit suicide." A month from now she will appear in a privately-produced Russian version of "Two for the Seesaw."

Would you be interested in appearing in a television series?

"Not at all. It is very hard to remain a good actor in a television series. Sometimes I think it might be possible to tempt me, because after all I am my family's sole support. But I wouldn't want to do it. It's not worth it. A great actress once told me: You waste the money, but the disgrace remains."

In "Was it a Dream?" which is set in part in the cafes of little Tel Aviv, overlooking the sea, the Hebrew language is a character in its own right. "I worked on this a lot with the speech coach Assi Eshed," Yaralova relates. "I don't have the right to drop the letters aleph, heh and yod that Israelis do have the right to drop, because people will understand them anyway. Assi said to me, look at how Edna [Mazya] writes, because she fully intends every comma and period. When I told this to Edna she was very excited. The biggest effort is in the bits from Penn's poetry I read. There I was lacking a picture of the world the poetry evokes. Therefore I forced myself to think about every word I was saying, much more than an ordinary text. But apart from diction there is also intonation, the melody of the language, and this is very different from Russian," she explains, demonstrating the differences, "and we also worked on this endlessly."

Aren't you afraid that you will be cast mostly in certain roles that need a Russian accent?

"I am realistic. I know that I can act in any classical play but I also know that I will not be able to play a native-born Israeli. If they think me capable of acting classics - I will be delighted. If not - there are three languages I act in - so this doesn't scare me."

Do you miss Russia?

"I left Ukraine at the age of 19 and I did not intend to return, and I also don't miss Moscow. Sometimes I miss people, places and the autumn with the fallen leaves strewn over the sidewalks. The globe is so very small - and just a few hours of flight separate places. When I ask myself whether I want to travel there, the answer is no. There are places I want to travel to before Moscow. If home is the place you want to raise your children, then my home is here."

But you still dream in Russian?

"Yes, I read books in Russian and my associations are in Russian. But ever since the play about Rovina, and dealing so much with the text and the poetry, Hebrew has been bursting out in my dreams from time to time. It doesn't ask me, it just bursts out."

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