NY Review: 'Israel Horovitz One-Acts'

Ethikos Productions, a recently formed group of young theater artists, does a commendable job in its inaugural effort, mounting three short works by a veteran playwright under the unquestionably apt if not especially imaginative umbrella of "Israel Horovitz One-Acts." The evening, directed by Mia Walker, really takes hold in the final piece, "Beirut Rocks," Horovitz's powerful play from 2007. It depicts four American college students of diverse backgrounds trapped in a supposedly "safe house" hotel room during the Israeli bombing of Beirut. They face terror, mortality, and age-old hatreds as two of them—a woman of Palestinian descent and a Jewish guy from the Bronx—clash in what seems an insurmountable conflict.

Horovitz packs a lot of political commentary into the script, but it's character-driven, and under Walker's tight direction the four actors—Hunter Thore, Dan Catomeris, Lyle Friedman, and Julie Asriyan—give it terrific veracity and immediacy. It's gut-grabbing theater, heightened by Tasha Guevara's sound design and Jonathan Cottle's lighting. You can almost feel the theater shaking as bombs explode and lights dim around the cowering students.

The two other plays provide an interesting jump across the breadth of Horovitz's career. "The Bump" is new, a slight but telling curtain raiser, an amusing lamentation about lost opportunity and fickle fate. Two strangers wait in a passport office for the credentials that will allow them to go on their respective honeymoons. They discover quickly that they may have been made for each other, but after some bumpy attempts at kissing, they decide to leave that possibility unexplored for the sake of others. Asriyan and Thore were an engaging duo at the performance reviewed. (The roles are double cast, with Friedman and Catomeris taking them on alternating evenings.)

Young strangers coming nervously together are again evident in the show's longer middle section, "It's Called the Sugar Plum," written, program notes tell us, when Horovitz was 17. Two Harvard students collide and conjoin in the aftermath of a fatal accident. Joanna's skateboarding fiancé has been run over by Wallace's car, and she has come to his digs to confront him. However, after lots of talk and some violence she winds up in Wallace's arms. There is great dark humor in the piece, which was first presented in 1968 in a career-making Off-Broadway production that paired it with the playwright's "The Indian Wants the Bronx." But the plotting takes a turn that needs pitch-perfect acting to be convincing, and this rendition isn't ideally cast. Despite his attempts to inject some goofiness into the role, Brian Rice's sturdy, good-looking persona works against his portrayal of Wallace, a poetry-writing loner basking in a misbegotten flush of media attention, while Jenna Ciralli's self-dramatizing but still distraught Joanna is more self-composed than she should be.

Nevertheless, the evening as a whole makes for a rewarding event, watching a new generation of aspiring artists interpret with relish and understanding a playwright whose work often seems underappreciated by the American theater establishment.

Presented by and at the Flea Theater, 41 White St., NYC. July 6–15. Thu.–Sun., 7 p.m. (212) 352-3101, (866) 811-4111, www.theatermania.com, or www.theflea.org.