Sometimes a play comes along that’s so seemingly simple, so low-tech, yet so intense, that it reminds you how little is needed to unleash the magic of live theater.
Such is the case with Golden Thread Productions’ drama “The Return,” by Hanna Eady and Edward Mast. A deeply moving, beautifully acted and directed two-hander, it is now onstage (well, not really on a stage, just in an upstairs room with the audience seated lengthwise on two sides of the playing area) at American Conservatory Theater’s Toni Rembe Theater in San Francisco.
Only 70 minutes long, and directed with control and precision by Eady himself, it is a story that gets increasingly complex as it goes along.
A Jewish Israeli woman arrives at an auto body shop in Israel after hours but she’s apparently not there to have her car fixed. She seems to know the cautiously polite Palestinian mechanic who’s the only one on duty this evening, but he denies recognizing her. She’s been away, in the United States, for 13 years. “A lot has changed,” she says.
Indeed a lot has changed in the Middle East since 2014, when this play was first performed (in Haifa), yet “The Return” feels in no way dated. As much as anything else, this is a story about love and loss—of land, of autonomy and personhood. It’s about guilt and shame, and it’s painful to watch these two characters bare their souls.
The woman says she’s Talia, calls him “Avi,” and asks what happened to the tattoo that used to be on his arm—a tattoo of his grandmother’s ancestral Palestinian village in what is now Israel. She at first appears self-confident, maybe manipulative.
He’s soft-spoken, seems cautious, uncomfortable, maybe paranoid, suspicious of her motives, denies ever having met her before, says he’s not Avi.
Slowly, steadily, things change.
Because Elissa Beth Stebbins and Nick Musleh are such convincing actors, it’s hard to tell, during the first few scenes of the play, who is lying, who is telling the truth and what’s at stake. The acting is so precise, they’re both listening and watching each other so carefully in real time, that it feels like a private peek into the essence of the actor’s craft.
When Talia says, “I think I committed a crime against you,” her words are haunting.
“The Return,” as it happens, is running simultaneously with “Home?,” Hend Ayoub’s solo show about growing up Palestinian in Israel and struggling to establish her identity and, later, to find her place as an actor in America.
Leaving home, returning home—whether in reality or in your dreams—has got to be one of the most haunting themes in literature and theater. The complexity and intensity of “The Return,” in which concepts of “home” and “love” intersect, belies the power and simplicity of this unadorned production.
Golden Thread Productions’ “The Return” continues through Aug. 24 in The Garrett, Toni Rembe Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $30-$130 at goldenthread.org.
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