A stage production entitled October 7 written by married Irish journalists Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney and based on survivor testimony of the Hamas-led attack on Israel will be staged at the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC.
The play, which uses verbatim testimony, premiered in New York City in May 2024 and has toured college campuses, will be performed in the US capital tonight.
McAleer said the work was designed to avoid narration or political framing and to let survivors’ words drive the performance.
The “verbatim” format affects audiences differently than conventional theatre does, according to McAleer: “When it’s verbatim, people lean forward a little,” he said. “They don’t want to miss a word.”
“When I produced the script for some people in New York, at the end of it, somebody said, ‘You know what this needs is a journalist character to put context in,’” McAleer added.
“The last thing it needs is a journalist character to put context in, because that just means distorting whatever these people are saying.”
The play’s creators described the production as a historical record drawn solely from first-hand interviews collected in Israel in the weeks after the attack.
“The first question was not, tell me what happened on October. 7,” McAleer said. “It was, ‘Tell me about your day on October 6.’”
“I wanted to show people at peace and a country at peace,” he said. “The horror came to them. They didn’t go looking for it.”
McAleer said there was “a bit of scepticism” in Israel about the play as Ireland is not known for its supportive attitude to the Jewish state.
“Normally, when you go abroad as an Irish journalist, being Irish is a real advantage,” he said. “Everyone loves the Irish. Whisky, Irish music and all that. It opens doors. People trust you.”
Israel is “the only place on the planet where I go, and I have to kind of go, ‘I’m Irish, but I’m OK, really.’”
He added that Israelis understood what he was trying to accomplish, however.
“Once we got talking and once they saw the questions I was asking, or really, the questions I wasn’t asking, they were happy enough to talk,” he said.
Editing the interviews into a 90-minute performance was difficult, he said.
“I remember the first interview I did. That was about three hours long, and I said, ‘Well, I can’t cut anything, any of this, right?’”
Asked what guided those creative decisions, McAleer said the play needed “cliffhangers”.
“There’s an off-duty police officer we met in Ofakim,” he said. “He left the house with a pistol and nine bullets, and he rescued a wounded rabbi, a wounded off-duty IDF soldier and a family of six who were hiding under a solar panel on their neighbour’s house, and killed two terrorists. So he’s a real hero.”
“We interviewed him, and I thought, ‘OK, we need to interview the rabbi, the soldier and the family because they all have stories,’” he said. “People don’t know that their stories are all going to meet up during the play.”
McAleer wrote the first draft, then brought it to his wife, who asked him to include certain characters, he said: “I went back and wrote it, and actually, to be fair, she was right,” he said. “Especially this one guy, an Orthodox Jew who rescued about 100 people. He’s a Coca-Cola installer, and he installed the Coca-Cola machines at the Nova Festival, so he knew how to drive there, how to get in through the back to behind the stage and get to the people who were hiding there.”
“He knew what way they would be coming out,” he said. “So he broke Shabbat and went and did about 10 or 12 runs rescuing people and bringing them out.”
The performance at the Kennedy Centre is dedicated to an off-duty police officer who fought terrorists and saved civilians on October 7. The officer, Itamar Alus, died earlier in this month after a brief illness.
McAleer and McElhinney said they were “so honored to meet Itamar and tell his story. “The world needs more Itamars,” they added.
“We pledge to keep telling his inspiring story.”
While touring university campuses, the play drew protests at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“I found UCLA very sad, because the security was massive,” he said. “It’s like, you need this much security to give Jewish people a voice in Los Angeles,” McAleer said.
“They put sniffer dogs through the theatre in the morning and in the evening of the event,” he said. “There were helicopters. It was just a really heavy, nasty atmosphere.”
McAleer also remarked that he was surprised to encounter antisemitism “because it’s such an old-fashioned thing to do.”
“You’d think that the young people would not want to do it,” he said. “Antisemitism was something our grandparents did.”
Asked what he hoped lawmakers and political influencers in the Washington DC, audience would take away from the production he said that “you can’t make any decisions about anything until you remember that October 7 happened.”
“If you think the war started on October 8, if you’re concerned with the war in Gaza but if you then acknowledge, well, actually this started on October 7, it changes everything,” he said. “That’s what I want them to take away – to remember that.”
He added: “I’m not in the policy business, but I am in the truth business,”
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