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Nola Chilton (b. 1928) The most important woman in Israeli theater in the 1970s, and one who created a revolution there and in Israeli culture in general, was Nola Chilton, the first of the women playwright-directors (auteurs) in Israeli theater. Chilton brought the “Other” to the theater in a new dramatic language that corresponded to the need for portraying the problems that Israeli society repressed.

It was Chilton in 1963 who brought the documentary form to Israel for the first time; and for almost 40 years, in 13 of the more than 80 plays she has directed, Chilton has used it to critique the contrived myths of the country—like the ones foisted upon us in the Gaza evacuation—that tend to silence, marginalize, or distort the voices of those not in positions of power. In her documentary work, she has provided a space for these ignored “others”—Arabs, women, the poor, and the elderly—to be seen and heard, to tell their stories, and to emerge from the shadows to which they have been consigned by societal institutions that neglect or suppress them and by the media, which stereotypes or erases them. Chilton has no illusions about what such theatre can do. “It can’t change very much,” she often reminds her actors, “but it can at least bring people together. That is something.”4 (Drama Rev)

Since 1970, the American-born Israeli director and acting teacher Nola Chilton has used documentary theatre to critique Israeli myths and to provide a space where groups generally excluded from the Israeli stage—Arabs, women, the poor, the elderly—can be seen and heard. Chilton's pioneering "theatre of testimony" bears a striking resemblance to recent documentary theatre practices proliferating in the U.S. and Europe. (Ben Zvi)

Early Life
Chilton was born in New York City, the only child of Russian immigrant parents. Originally from Odessa, her father was a sign painter and her mother ran a small, successful business out of their Lower East Side apartment selling toy airplanes that she made herself from balsa wood. Chilton was interested in theatre from a young age and got her start by playing the old woman, Maurya, in John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea. In the early 1940s she began her career as professional actress in New York City, studying under Lee Strasberg, the actor, director, and and teacher of Group Theatre fame who first developed Method acting. Chilton was featured in one of Strasberg's Broadway productions with The Experimental Theatre, appearing alongside John Garfield as a steamship passenger in Jan de Hartog's Skipper Next to God in 1948, but after six years of training with Strasberg, she began to find that his insistence that an actors performance be predicated on his or her conscious plumbing of a personal, experiential world was "overly pre-meditated," and limiting to creation of challenging characters.

In her quest for a more spontaneous and socially relevant acting experience that carried with it the potential for political and personal change, Chilton joined a racially-mixed theatre troupe composed of black and white artists that was led by the celebrated African-American playwright Theodore Ward. The troupe combined their theatrical work with social activism, performing both on Off-Broadway stages and in the streets of New York City. In the 1950s, Chilton expanded upon this endeavor, founding a production company with her fellow director Lee Nemetz, the actor Yale Wexler, and opera singer John Howell. They called the venture Cuardo Productions, and created a series of successful variety shows such as Once Over Lightly (1955) and Watch the Birdie (1955) that were made up of socially-aware skits as musical numbers written by the likes of comedian Mel Brooks among others. Starring actors from multiple cultural backgrounds such as Sono Osato, Zero Mostel, and Jack Gilford, many of the shows took place in New York's Barbizon Plaza Theatre.

Around this time, Chilton also began offering acting lessons to young, inexperienced performers in the city, working with them to devise exercises and improvisations that might "help to break the solipsism that always returned them to their own experiences and ready-made cultural models." Though in her approach to acting, Chilton maintained a respect for Strasberg's careful and calculated Method, she focused her training techniques on the physicalization of emotions, insisting that the most effective actors begin not by working on the text of a play or notions of a character, but by working on themselves." This sentiment was re-voiced by one of her most well-known students, Joseph Chaikin in his actor training manual, The Presence of the Actor:

Acting is a demonstration of the self with or without a disguise ... . It is a way of making testimony to what we have witnessed—a declaration of what we know and what we can imagine.”

Throughout his career, Chaikin credited Chilton with shaping his approach to acting, calling her his "favorite acting teacher." According to Chaikin, "She taught a style of acting similar to what Lee Strasberg was teaching, but much better than his technique. I thought she was terrific." Her method, he asserted, taught him a type of self-awareness in a character role that went beyond concern for the material and freed the actor from what his fellow director and Chilton disciple, Peter Feldman, called "the constraints of realism.”

Chilton was frequently directing Off-Broadway productions, and her new work was beginning to increasingly reflect her growing agenda in support of social equality. In 1960, she staged an Equity workshop production of Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End, which included her students Dustin Hoffman, Ron Leibman, and William H. Macy. On reviewing the production for the Village Voice, critic Michael Smith noted that unlike other workshop performances of the period in which each actor “wants his bits to get the agent’s eye,” Chilton’s actor demonstrated a "tremendous sense of each other’s humanity; all are involved in the terrible process of living. Their violent loves and hates express their lives, not their theatrical ambitions.”

Among her students, Chilton had developed something of a cult following, so much so that when she announced that she was leaving New York early in 1963 for a trip to Israel, seventeen of her pupils approached Chaikin and asked him to helm a new acting company  founded on Chilton's improvisational experiments that incorporated documentary theatre techniques. At that time, Chaikin had been working with Julian Beck and Judith Malina at the avant-garde collective, The Living Theatre and, frustrated with what he saw as an increasingly regimental production style there, he agreed. On 1 February 1963 Chaikin held the first meeting of The Open Theater which, for the next ten years, would continue to credit Chilton for the foundation of their innovative productions and actor training methods.

Move to Israel
Although Chilton had only intended to travel to Israel as a tourist in 1963, she soon found that she had no desire to return to the United States. After an unsuccssful attempt at working with the Cameri Theatre, she settled in Kiryat Gat, and soon found directing work as well as a job teaching acting at the Tel Aviv University. After marrying an Israeli writer, John Auerbach, the two joined the Kibbutz Sdot Yom in the seaside town of Caesaria. From there, they began recruiting performers from kibbutz throughout Israel to train in acting and theatre arts for their so-called "Project Groups," a subsidized program foster an Israeli regional theatre system. In a 1969 interview from Tel Aviv that was reprinted in the New York Times, Chilton explained that she felt her theatre training could produce a greater social good in Israel that in the United States:

"I did not feel needed in New York where there were hundreds with my skills and knowledge. ... The kibbutzim are cooperating in trying to develop regional theater by freeing certain people one day a week for training. ... We offer them a three-year program of acting, speech and body training, plus seminars on dramatic literature. In September I shall train for a year, on a full-time basis, some 30 kibbutz members who have been freed from their work to attend acting school.

Collaborating with writers such as Yehoshua Sobol, Itzik Weingarten, Oded Kotler, and Hillel Mittelpunkt, she led a process that would come to be referred to as “Relevant” or “Documentary” theatre that made of “authentic” textual material from every day life such as interviews with Israeli Jews as well as Arabs, court documents, and the speeches of political leaders. These notions of collaboration, improvisation, and acquisition of found texts that were well-established in the American off-Broadway theatre scene dominated by groups like the Living Theater and directors including Chaikin and newcomer Richard Schechner, were completely novel in the Israeli theater. Taking these artist as her inspiration, she began to utilize theatrical conventions such as gesture, movement, make-up, costumes, scenery, songs and music over narrative as a way of intensifying the presentation of the specific social problem being presented.

By 1970 Chilton had established a place for herself in the Haifa theatre community. Having brought most of her former kibbutzim students along with several members of the theater department of Tel Aviv University, Chilton and her colleagues began to edit, adapt, and direct plays based on "found texts" from everyday life. Chilton's austere and episodic documentary theatre addressed what she perceived as Israel's most pressing social and political issue, the institutional discrimination against Israeli Arabs, Mizrahi Jews, women, and people from development towns. Theatre scholar Shosh Avigal commends Chilton for her activist bent, acknowledging that the director was the "first to foreground the images and problems of the the 'other' Israelis," but admits that "most of the plays had no literary value," adding that many critics categorically rejected Chilton's works, arguing that any drama which insisted on such close proximity to the scenes of daily life without and acknowledged aesthetic distance lacked any modicum of artistic merit, referring sarcastically to Chilton's work as "the tape recorder theater."

In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, Nola Chilton was a leading figure in four project groups that influenced Israeli theater as a whole. Chilton was the first to show Arab characters—in Coexistence (1970), elderly people—in The Coming Days (1971), and women during wartime—in What Do I Think about the War (1971). In Chilton’s most important work, Kriza (1976), which was of outstanding significance because of its presentation of the ethnic problem, the “breaking of realism” was effected through the absence of scenery and by songs, accompanied by group choreography, which interrupted the action and alternated Oriental and modern styles. The performance was constructed like television reportage, moving from place to place, interspersed with musical clips—a series of events that created a “dense description” of social reality. The three-hour-long show was comprised of two parts, the first dedicated to the “Fathers” and the second to the “Children.” The “Fathers” represented the generation of the great waves of immigration, most of them drowning in deep despair. Some worked in factories as simple laborers while others were unemployed; only very few managed to acquire any social status. The “Children” referred to criminal youngsters, to children absorbed by the kibbutzim, and to the experience of special education classes.

A paradox in some of Nola Chilton’s works is that despite their relation to the documentary-realistic genre, they are close to Bertold Brecht’s “epic theater” in the way the performance is organized in segments, in interruptions of the narrative by songs, and in abundance of characters (Kriza has 160!), the purpose of which is to present the ensemble as an archetype for a social group, rather than personal stories that might provide an “escape” from the problem. In Kriza, in accordance with Bertolt Brecht’s rules of “alienation,” the songs and choreography interrupt the flow that is so important to realistic narrative, thereby creating “gaps” that allow the viewers to process the social meanings of the “documentary” pictures (Urian, 2000).

Despite the critical pan, however, Chilton's plays found an audience. Her 1970 production, Coexistence (1970), subtitled "An Arab Conversation," ran for ninety performances at the Haifa Municipal Theatre. Coexistence, has five characters and is an adaptation for the stage of interviews with Israeli Arabs.

Arab characters were played by Jewish actors. Nola Chilton did not choose Arab actors because 'no Arab could stand up night after night and declaim these things as his own truth. We speak in their name and for them using their own materials. I believe that this is more convincing."

New style emerged in the 1970, an episodic documentary ...director Nola Chilton mounted a series of plays which uncompromisingly described and often condemned the Israeli Ashkenazi middle class. This was somewhat paradoxical considering that these exercises, like Levin's satires, were staged by a subsidied mainstream theatre.

Sobol attributes his love of documents in part to the influence of American director Nola Chilton, who showed Sobol the need for meaningful theater, more meaningful than was being produced in Israel at the time. Sobol started traveling across Israel, taping people recording their thoughts. The playwright and Chilton collaborated on Days to Come (1971) which focused on old people living in Israel. "...the country was living on a suppressed ocean of tears. All these old people were living with an imposed or self-imposed silence of shame and humiliation which had been suppressed and which Israel society could not allow to come out. It was the horrible experience of the Holocaust and of having survived 'shamefully.'"

Directed Yehoshua Sobol's Kriza in 1976, a series of monologues concerning second-generation Sephari immigrants. Criticized because it what the white middle class protesting the white middle class. "A collection of monologues concerning the second generation of Sephari immigrant families--[Kriza's protest] was aimed at members of the 'white' Ashkenazi establishment, but it was developed by members of that establishment rather than by the oppressed subjects of the exercise themselves. This is the anomalous face of protest theatre: the protest is perhaps no less valid when made on behalf of others, but it is less authentic." Chilton hung a banner accross the stage emblazoned with quotes from the Zionist founders if the Israeli state in an attempt to draw attention to the irony of Israel's discriminatory laws. "Some reviewers accused Chilton of exploiting the theatre propaganda, and also revealed Israel's discomfort at seeing itself portrayed with ugly racist overtones... Many critics detested the play, seeing themselves--the Ashkenazi intellectuals--as among the accused."

Director

 * 1961: ''A Banquet for the Moon," by John Cromwell. Theatre Marquee, New York, NY.
 * 1970: Coexistence: An Arab Conversation, Municipal Theatre of Haifa, Israel.
 * 1976: Kriza, by Yehoshua Sobol. Municipal Theatre of Haifa, Israel.
 * 2003: Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Nola Chilton. Adapted from the novel by Azar Nafisi. Tel Aviv University, Israel.
 * 2010: Endgame by Samuel Beckett. Translated into Hebrew by Yael Renan. Khan Theatre, Jerusalem, Israel.

Playwright

 * Naïm, based on the novel, The Lover, by A.B. Yehoshua
 * Endgame at Kiryat Gat, (with Itzik Weingarten), based on short story Endgame at Kiryat Gat by John Auerbach.

Producer

 * 1955: Once Over Lightly. Barbizon Plaza Theatre, New York, NY.
 * 1955: Watch the Birdie. Barbizon Plaza Theatre, New York, NY.

Her play. Chilton explains that the play is about several members of this second generation of Moroccan Jews, who set up a little theater in an effort to bring respect to their family’s name. Scott Richards plays the theater director and Ellen Finholt’s husband. In Chilton’s words, “a crazy hippy American” comes wandering through town and has the idea that he can get the theater to put on Samuel Beckett’s play, Endgame. He believes this modern generation of Moroccan Jews can relate to the “nowhereness, pain, and suffering” in the play. He does his best to change them, break them down, and make them feel these things. In the end, however, they are strong and he is the one that breaks down in sorrow and emptiness.

Additional Reading
Category:American dramatists and playwrights Category:Living people Category:1932 births