Visit to:
Gesher Theater, Jaffa
Participants in the conversation:
1. Olga Barzin, 59, manager of the accessories department. 30 years at Gesher
2. Roman Kabtner, 63, chief producer and one of the founders of the theater, 32 years at Gesher
3. Alon Friedman, 42, actor, 20 years at Gesher
What are they talking about?
where are we: On Yerushalayim Boulevard in Jaffa, in the Gesher Theater founded by the late director Yevgeny Aryeh, and artists from Moscow. Every year, 22 plays run in the theater, currently only in Hebrew. The theater employs about 150 people.
The founding generation: “It all started in a small apartment: there were no actors or anything yet, but we started formulating an idea,” says Roman, who was one of the founders of the theater in the 1990s. Two years later, Olga joined the group: “I saw an article in the newspaper about a bridge. That day I drove from Haifa to Tel Aviv, knocked on the door and asked for a job.” From the hasty meeting, she left with the position of director of the accessories department, which did not yet exist. While Alon joined after his studies at Nissan Nativ, And he says, “As an 18-year-old boy from Hari, I dreamed of performing here.”
Morning: Alon comes to rehearsals from Ramat Gan on an electric bike, “It’s a trend I despise, but it’s effective: it takes me 20 minutes.” He misses the days when he lived in Jaffa, near the theater: “I would wake up 10 minutes before the rehearsal. Yevgeny would scold me for seeing that I had just woken up.”
scenery: Olga arrives early to design props for the show. Her money time takes place in the evening – when props need to be changed on stage: “And everything happens in seconds during the show, in the dark.” As in a series of rehearsals, sometimes the director decides to change the scenery from moment to moment, “and me and the crew work all night so that it will be ready the next day”. But Roman emphasizes that everything has a meaning, “it’s not just a director’s whim.”
Faults: “In the theater, one thing is clear – at eight o’clock the show must start,” explains Roman, the main producer. According to the pressing deadline, “a large part of my day is devoted to putting out fires – replacing a sick actor, a set malfunction, there is no time to linger.”
Behind the Scenes: Although the audience is only exposed to the actors, about 70 production personnel work at the bridge. “For each actor there are 5 employees who put on a show – technical staff, props, lighting,” Roman explains. “Before I entered the theater, I didn’t know what a crazy hustle and bustle there was behind the scenes,” admits Alon. “What’s amazing is that everything happens live – everyone holds their breath for two hours.”
noon: Olga sits with the department’s employees in the basement of the theater for coffee breaks during the day: “They like capsules, but I prefer mud, Turkish.” She prepares the lunch at home, but sometimes “invites Walt with the young people, when there is pressure”. Alon also brings food from home, “because everything is so expensive.”
livelihood: The stage business is not very stable and rewarding, Roman testifies: “There is a lot of difficulty, also financial, you have to love it very much to engage in the field.” Olga, for her part, doesn’t imagine anything else: “It’s like a drug in our blood. I can’t work for money in a job that bores me. The special moments of my life happened in the theater.”
encore: The audience doesn’t always take it seriously: “The cell phone screen glows in the dark – we see you’re on Facebook during the show,” Alon emphasizes and adds that the theater lives on the love of the audience: “Sometimes I go out to a bar after the show, and someone from the audience sits next to me and an unmediated conversation develops over a glass of wine . It’s cool”.