A Peace
of Histor
GIDEON KEREN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS
The first
Jordanian
theater
troupe to visit
Israel uses
humor to
tackle tough
issues.
Hisham Yanis as Yassir Arafat
and Nabil Sawalha as Yitzhak
Rabin in Peace Oh Peace.
theatrical phenomenon recently oc-
curred when, for the first time in the
history of the state, a Jordanian the-
atrical group toured Israel.
.
The Nabil and Hisham Theater Troupe's
Peace Oh Peace was sponsored by the Cameri
Theater in Tel Aviv, the Beit Hagefen Arab-
Jewish Center in Haifa and the Israeli Min-
istry of Foreign Affairs.
Peace Oh Peace is the story of a Middle East
filled with hatred and discrimination, the re-
sult of years of war.
"We try to satirize the idea of killing, start-
ing with Cain and Abel, with Joshua captur-
ing Jericho where the whole problem started,
and with Samson and Delilah — maybe the
first attempt at a love affair between the two
peoples," said Hisham Yanis, one of the
founders of the troupe.
To comment on more recent developments,
the sketches include Anwar Sadat visiting
Jerusalem in 1977, Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir
Arafat negotiating, and an interview with Shi-
mon Peres.
"We are here so Israelis and Jordanians can
get to know each other, to exchange culture,
theater and continue the march of peace," Mr.
Yanis said.
It took a great deal of effort just to get the
show off the ground. The Federation of Jor-
danian Writers threatened to expel the troupe
if the actors appeared in Israel. (Mr. Yanis was
in fact kicked out from the federation, for "be-
coming a propagandist of the normalization of
ties with Israel.")
Problems continued once they arrived.
Amal Dabbas, the female member of the
troupe, traveled to Jerusalem from her base
at the Dan Panorama Hotel in Haifa to visit
Yitzhak Rabin's grave and light candles in his
memory. Soon after, the Nabil and Hisham
troupe received a phone call from Jordan with
news that the Muslim Brotherhood had called
for a boycott of their shows, and even identi-
fied them as "Israelis."
Mr. Yanis isn't concerned.
"We shall continue writing plays," he said.
"Our theater (in Amman) is permanent, and
it's up to theater goers to decide if they want
to see our plays or not. But those people (fun-
damentalists) are falling behind the times, for
we are the winners because we are with life,
and they are with destruction."
The two stars of the troupe, though both co-
medians, are quite different. Both are well into
middle age, yet Hisham Yanis is the very pic-
ture of conviviality, whereas Nabil Sawalha
appears reserved.
Nabil Sawalha and Hisham Yanis: Addressing difficult issues through humor.
"What with all the media interviews (16
in 18 days), meetings and parties, people for-
get what we are here for — which is to give
shows. For that, we have to be tip-top" Mr.
Sawalha. said.
The audiences have been overwhelming.
Whereas in Amman their theater holds a max-
imum of 330, in Israel the troupe often played
to houses of 1,000 plus.
For years, Mr. Yanis watched as the Arab
media portrayed Israelis as evil, expansionist,
military supermen. Now that he has visited
the country, he has a very different under-
standing.
'It's easy to become friends," he said. "What
has really struck me is how hungry the Israelis
are for peace. The Jews' sense of humor is sim-
ilar to ours, and the more I hear Hebrew the
more I think — whether you like it or not and
irrespective of where you may come from —
that there is Arabism in the people here. If only
we can stop the prejudice on both sides, we
could have a very happy life together."
Mr. Sawalha, a founder of the Jordanian
National Theater Group in 1964, is one of Jor-
dan's foremost actors. Mr. Yanis' focus has
been writing. Since the 1970s, he has writ-
ten more than 70 series, dealing with histor-
ical and social issues, for Arab TV stations. He
also worked as a script editor for Qatar Tele-
vision, was head writer on the Arab version of
"Sesame Street," and starred in his own TV
comedy, "Amman by Night."
As democracy came to Amman, the two men
decided to start their own comedy theater.
Their first production, New World Order, was
so popular it continued for 18 months. It was
followed by a satire, Parliament and Budget,
and then Arab Summit, the story of Arab lead-
ers' relations with Israel from 1964 to the Gulf
War.
"We are trying to say that everyone handled
the 1967 and Gulf wars badly, and that they
could have had peace a long time ago," Mr. Ya-
nis said. "This applies to the Israeli leaders as
well, but essentially we portray the Arab peo-
ple waiting endlessly for their leaders to solve
the issue, and by questioning the leadership ,
we are in effect saying this is no time for dic-
tatorship any longer."
While Arab Summit was running, Yitzhak
Rabin and Yassir Arafat signed the first Oslo
Agreement. This lead to Mr. Sawalha and Mr.
Yanis' next venture, Peace Oh Peace, which
played more than a year in Jordan, then lat-
er in England, the United States and Canada.
Mr. Yanis described the idea of normalized
relations between Jordan and Israel as some-
thing of a thorny issue in the Arab nation.
"Everyone is for peace in a general sense,
but normalization has proved more problem-
atic," he said. "By laughing at these issues, we
try to get them into the open and help resolve
them."
The group's future plans include a return
visit this summer to Israel, at the request of
the Beit Hagefen Arab-Jewish Center in Haifa,
to perform 22 shows. There is talk of an Israeli-
Jordanian TV co-production. In Jordan, Mr.
Yanis and Mr. Nabil will present a new show,
Arab Human Rights, because, Mr. Yanis said,
"they don't exist."
Mr. Yanis' family wanted him to be an en-
gineer. Today, he is constructing bridges of
a different sort. He explained: 'We have built
our own personal bridges of peace here and
have opened channels with our audience." El
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