“Just imagine, paying someone to make a document saying you are Jewish. When in history is this happening? Never, never,” says Svetlana, a blowsy Russian prostitute.
“But in St Petersburg we pay a guy to make document that says we are Jewish. Is funny.”
Is very funny. So funny in fact that it has just been performed to a hundred international ambassadors and diplomats as a special show at the United Nations headquarters in New York. Comedy in the service of diplomacy. So funny that it is coming to Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival next month.
‘It’ is a one woman show called Dai (Enough), written and performed by the extraordinarily multi-talented Israeli American, Iris Bahr. Bahr is a writer, actress, stand up comedian and former medical student – think Borat only prettier, much prettier – currently enjoying huge success with her first book as well as the solo show. Originally scheduled for four performances only, it was immediately snatched up for a five month off-Broadway run. The production was nominated for two 2007 New York Drama Desk awards including Best Solo Performance, only to be beaten by Vanessa Redgrave.
“Well, she needed recognition” says Bahr compassionately.
Bahr’s talent is to observe carefully and then to extract humour and humanity in the most dire of situations. Dai is set in a bustling Tel Aviv cafe minutes before a suicide bomber enters. In approximately 8 minutes the audience gets to understand the fears, eccentricities, hopes and failures of each of the characters in what turns out to be their final moments of life. Even the American evangelist or the right wing settler has redeeming features. Iris won’t be drawn as to which character is her favourite and insists she likes playing them all, which she does with the help of nothing more than a different shirt and hat and an amazing array of voices. The one that most closely resembles Bahr herself is Rebecca, a young American orphan who came to Israel, volunteered for the army and eventually finds two long lost relatives. But the most important character of all is of course the splintered psyche of Israel herself.
“This is not about trying to make a political statement,” Bahr insists. “But of course it is political,” she admits in the next breath, just by virtue of it being set in Israel.
“I cannot bear over simplification, just because it is easier for people to digest. I am trying to explore humanity and explain the complexities of the situation. But there has to be humour and entertainment too otherwise you might as well go to a lecture.”
When I ask her views about the current UK boycott of Israeli academics she says she cannot even speak about it is so alarming, misguided, counterproductive and arrogant. Bahr’s strength is trying to understand people you don’t agree with, not shutting them up.
Svetlana, a character in Dai who has just taken on a new, independent life, explains that she came to Israel “because the men don’t smell like vodka and the coffee is fantastic… I hear under the macho bullshit they are very tender.” She gets a big laugh when she describes how her Russian husband, Maksim, refers to her vagina as a highway. What follows is not fit for a family newspaper but is funny, very funny.
The effect it has on an audience is so powerful that Gilad Cohen, Spokesperson for the Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations, arranged for Iris to give a special invitation-only, command performance of the show hosted by the Israeli Ambassador at the UN last month. “It’s a non-traditional means of addressing the fight against global terrorism,” he said.
“The UN is the main arena for discussions about terror. It’s where resolutions are formed. But although we have dozens of speeches on the subject how much do we really understand about the root causes or how ordinary people get caught up in killing?” Cohen says that no Arab diplomats attended the show, although they were invited, but that representatives from Indonesia and Pakistan, which do not have diplomatic relations with Israel, were there.
“This was very important for me” says Bahr. “Israel doesn’t exactly have a lot of friends in the UN and I was nervous of the reactions. One of the characters in the play is a German furniture designer who pitilessly states how tired he is of everyone in Israel ‘going on’ about the Holocaust.
“I was a bit worried about how the German ambassador would take this but he told me afterwards he was really moved by Dai.”
Bahr was born in New York and went to an orthodox Jewish school in the Bronx where she learnt Hebrew. But her parents – father a banker, mother a university registrar, both originally Bulgarian, were not orthodox. “So I guess that’s where my own splintered identity began. I’d be a devout believer by day and go to Macdonalds in the evening.”
Then, when she was about twelve, her parents divorced and Iris moved to Israel with her mother. “And that was strange, too, because I spoke Hebrew with an American accent and found all the Israeli kids hated God.”
Her understanding that we are all complex beings made up of many different parts, which she learnt the hard way as a child, is one of the first things she tells me. The second is about her brother.
“My older brother was severely autistic so I have been around mentally challenged people all my life. I guess this motivated me without my realising it. It keeps you grounded.”
Iris did two year’s military service in the Israeli army, as a sergeant, then travelled around Asia, the subject of her first book Dork Whore: My Travels as a Twenty Year old Pseudo-Virgin published in 2007. After Asia, she went to Brown University where, in addition to theatre, she studied neuro-psychology, conducted MRI research at Stanford University and cancer research at Tel Aviv University. But after graduating she moved to NYC and focused on acting and writing. No longer as devout as she once was, she says she believes in God and goes to synagogue from time to time. “But I keep my religion inside me now. It’s become more of an internal thing.”
Single and in her early thirties, she leads a crazy life shuttling between New York and LA, where she has a small house, cats and what she calls a mini kibbutz . “I grow tomatoes, have an herb garden and apricot tree and I do my writing here. It’s the most productive place for me, like a retreat. I’m less distracted than in New York. Israel, although I haven’t lived there for ten years, that’s home.”
What’s next for Bahr? She is clearly a driven person who wants to go on exploring human nature. Most days she works as an actor in a variety of television and film roles. She has a film in development in New York, based on an earlier solo show. She is writing another book. She has a weekly radio show in LA on National Public Radio where Svetlana’s cynical indifference can be heard giving an opinion on everything from politics to entertainment. As if that’s not enough, she says she’d like to direct her own play. “It gets kinda lonely doing a one woman performance as there’s no one else to talk to in the dressing room. Emotionally, this is a very big show for me. Every performance I give my heart out to it.”
Dai will run from August 1-27 at 16.00 in the Pleasance Courtyard as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Anne Sebba’s new biography Jennie Churchill: Winston’s American Mother will be published in September by John Murray.