Draft:Doron Tavory

Doron Tavory (born July 2, 1952) is an Israeli actor.

He is one of the most prominent actors in Israeli theatre today. For the past five decades, he has participated in dozens of leading roles in all the major repertory theatres in Israel. He is also a professor of acting and directing at the Department of Theater Arts, Tel Aviv University. Tavory is also an acclaimed translator of plays from several languages to Hebrew (French, Norwegian, German, Spanish). During his career, he had the opportunity to act not only in Hebrew, his native language, but also in Arabic, German, and English. He also created, initiated and participated in many independent projects in the local theatre scene. As of 2024, he is part of Gesher Theatre ensemble.

Biography
Doron Tavory was born in Haifa, Israel. At age 11 he published a children's book Stories for Sharon (meant for his little sister Sharon). He graduated "Allinance" high school in Tel Aviv.

He trained briefly in acting at Drama Studio, London and then in private tutoring in London. On his return to Israel in 1974 he started his way in the theatre as an assistant director and props man in the newly established Beer Sheva Theatre, but soon started acting also in some major roles.

After seven years in Beer Sheva Theatre, he was invited by the artistic director of Haifa Theatre at the time, Omri Nitzan, to play the role of Otto Weininger in the first production of the play Soul of a Jew by Joshua Sobol, directed by Gedalia Besser and also to participate in the first production of his world known play Ghetto taking place in the Vilnius Ghetto, Tavory played the role of the SS commander Kittel. In 1984, he played the role of Lucky in Waiting for Godot in Arabic, with Yussuf Abu-Warda, Makram Khoury, and Ilan Toren as his partners, and Ilan Ronen was the director.

In 1988, he wrote a play for Haifa Theatre, The White Cult or Amar's Brother, after the case accusation of three Druze brothers being associated with The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine during the 1982 Lebanon War. The rehearsals for the play directed by François Abou Salem began, but the project was not complete. In 1989, Tavory appeared at the Beer Sheva Theatre in the play Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen, playing the role of Oswald. The actress Hanna Maron portrayed Mrs. Alving, directed by Michael Alfreds. Soon, in 1989, Tavory left Haifa Theatre after the quitting of Joshua Sobol and Gedalia Besser because of the aftermath of a scandal relating to the play Jerusalem Syndrome.

Between 1986 and 1991, he taught theatre to youth at the Culter Center at Umm al-Fahm.

In 1994, he realised all three parts of Aeschylus's Oresteia as a one-man show done in fringe frameworks. In 1995, Tavory portrayed Konrad in the play Kalkwerk by Thomas Bernhard, directed by the renowned Polish director Krystian Lupa, in the Beer Sheva Theatre version for this piece.

Tavory translated four plays from the cycle The Adventures of the Brave Bourgeois by German-Jewish expressionist playwright Carl Sternheim and initiated and produced a project to stage these plays at Habima Theater in 1998. Four directors (Gedalia Besser, Moshe Perlstein, Gadi Roll and American director Robert Woodruff) were chosen. The event ran for several performances only.

In 1999, he portrayed Hamlet in Haifa Theatre, directed by Steven Berkoff.

In 2002, he performed as a solo actor-singer at the Israeli Festival in the performance Poet in New York by Federico García Lorca, composed by Dori Parnes.

Tavory also performed additional musical works by composer Dori Parnes as a singer: 'Little Hut' – a cycle of children's songs by Leah Goldberg (The Jerusalem Khan Theatre 2001), 'YES' – love songs by E.E. Cummings (Voice of Music 2003), and 'Dances' with texts by poet Yaakov Steinberg (Israeli Music Festival 2018).

In 2005, Tavory was appointed artistic director of Haifa Theatre, but he was dismissed after only two productions because of disagreements with the general director, who claimed that Tavory's uncompromising artistic approach was causing financial losses.

From 2007 to 2009, he was the artistic director of Hazira, the interdisciplinary arena in Jerusalem.

In 2009, Tavory portrayed Gustav Mahler (in English and German) in a large-scale, immersive, site-spesific production directed by Austrian director Paulus Manker staged in Jerusalem, Prague, and Vienna.

In 2010, Tavory performed in the play In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, written by Bernard-Marie Koltès and directed by Yael Cramsky. This two-person play consists of two intercutting monologues between a potential client and a mysterious goods owner. Tavory completed the cycle of translating and staging all of Bernard-Marie Koltès' plays in Israel with this play.

For four years, Doron Tavory created the project "In the Land of Gilead" (June 2012) through research, editing, and adaptation in collaboration with video artist Yohai Avrahami. This project is an odyssey of the journalist, author, mystic, and British colonial official Laurence Oliphant. It is a work for actors and a PowerPoint presentation, attempting to examine the colonial DNA that nascent Zionism inherited from Europe's legacy at the end of the 19th century. Central to this project is Oliphant's book The Land of Gilead, in which he outlines his plan to establish a Jewish colony in the heart of the Ottoman Empire in eastern Jordan.

In 2011, Tavory also created the play Encounter at Infinity at the Herzliya Ensemble, again in collaboration with artist Yohai Avrahami. The play is a staged dialogue between two friends and brothers-in-law: the actor Gustaf Gründgens, who was in charge of the Third Reich's theatres, and the exiled author Klaus Mann, who wrote the famous novel Mephisto about an actor who sells his soul to the devil of the regime.

Tavory performed at the Itim Ensemble led by the Israel Prize-winning theater director Rina Yerushalmi. His performances included Krapp's Last Tape by Beckett, Exit the King by Ionesco, Peer Gynt by Ibsen, and most recently (2024), King Lear by Shakespeare.

In 2013, following his performance in Exit the King in Itim Ensemble, he was invited by director Yevgeny Arye to appear in The Dybbuk. Since then, he has been a member of the Gesher Theatre Company. He has performed in about twenty roles at Gesher, including in the following plays: The Oresteia directed by Yevgeny Arye (as Agamemnon), Lolita/Joan of Arc directed by Yehezkel Lazarov (as Quilty/Inquisitor), Retrial by Liad Shoham/Uzi Weil, directed by Amir Wolf, and more. Recently, he has appeared in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard (as The Actor), The Fathers and the Mothers by Meir Shalev (as Abraham), Richard III by Shakespeare directed by Itay Tiran (as King Edward and the Duchess of York), and in Salome by Oscar Wilde directed by Maksim Didenko (as Herod).

In the summer of 2018, Tavory cooperated with Naomi Yoeli in Thyestes by Seneca – a piece they created together – in the Carmel Market. They staged Seneca's play, which involves the eating of children, as a response to the killing of children in airstrikes during Operation Protective Edge. Tavory continued his collaboration with Naomi Yoeli, and in 2023, they presented Süss – Preparation for Viewing with Yoeli and Ruth Gvili. This performance recounts the involvement of prominent German filmmakers at the onset of World War II in the propaganda film Jud Süß initiated by Joseph Goebbels, which is supposedly based on historical events.

In 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, Tavory created A Mother, Her Son [And His Father] – a video work about the poet Anna Margolin, her husband for a year, the writer and dairy farmer Moshe Stavsky, and their son, the military governor of the Galilee, Naaman Shtavi, who was responsible for preventing the return of residents of the Galilean village of 'Abu Sinan [who fled in '48] to their homes and land. This was presented as part of the Jaffafest festival.

That same year, he also participated in the Residessert Art Festival at the Eilat Theater, where they staged The Maids by Jean Genet with Ala Daka, Amir Houri, and Alexander Fish, directed by Yair Sherman, in the heart of the date palm grove of Kibbutz Samar.

In 2021, Tavory played the role of "The Professor" in the play The Road by Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka. The production was staged by the African Theatre Ensemble, directed by Yafa Schuster.

Tavory mentored and participated (in the role of palaeontologist Gideon Mantell) in the piece In the Beginning by Carmel Yedid-Leibowitz, a video-theatre project which unfolds the true story of the initial discovery of the dinosaurs in the 19th century and its conflict with creationism as well as the rivalry amongst the period’s leading scientific minds, HaMiffal Jerusalem, 2022. He also participated in her work Rasputin, a spiritual encounter with Rasputin that attempted to address the theme of disinformation and Russian propaganda through tarot card reading. Jerusalem Design Week 2023 at Hansen House.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, he filmed Judas – Dan Wolman's cinematic adaptation of Amos Oz's novel. This marked Tavory's second collaboration with Dan Wolman, following his participation in the 1980 film Hide and Seek, which won three "Silver Rose" awards for screenplay, directing, and film. Hide and Seek is considered groundbreaking as it was the first full-length Israeli film to address homosexuality openly.

Tavory is one of the authors of the actors' letter against the performance of public theatres beyond the Green Line ("The Ariel Letter"). He was among the artists who withdrew from the 2017 Acco Festival due to the exclusion of director Einat Weizman from the festival's program.

Prizes

 * 1995, 1996, 1998, 2009 - Ada Ben Nachum Translation Award
 * 1979 - Meir Margalit Prize and Silver Rose Award from the newspaper Maariv
 * 1984 - David's Violin Prize
 * 1995 - Rosenblum Prize for Performing Arts for his role in the play The Changeling Beer Sheva Theater
 * 1995 - Klatzkin Prize for Acting
 * 2000 - Israeli Theater Award for Translator of the Year for the play Return to the Desert by Bernard-Marie Koltès
 * 2001 - Landau Prize for Performing Arts (first recipient in the acting category)
 * 2002 - Prime Minister's Prize for Translation