Stage Review - The Israeli-Palestine Conversation (The Interview Game)
Stage Review - The Israeli-Palestine Conversation
Presented By: The Interview Game @ West of Lenin - Seattle, WA
Show Run: December 04 - December 07, 2025
Date Reviewed: Saturday, December 6, 2025
Run Time: 90 Minutes (with moments of pause for audience interaction)
Reviewed By: Sameer Arshad
I am always interested in productions taking bold risks. With this one, there are several risks being taken: a touring production coming from smaller cities in Colorado, carrying controversial geopolitical topics, presenting in an immersive format, featuring bitter dramatic moments of moral discourse and a potentially-confusing re-suspension-of-disbelief mechanism.
In Ami Dayan’s “The Israeli-Palestinian Conversation”, we are brought into a fictional talk-show, where we are audience members watching a debate play out. We are introduced to five characters, “Sergio” the moderator (played with commanding intrigue by Mark Collins), who runs the proceedings in a manner that interrupts and recrafts the narrative repeatedly. We have “Reema” (played by Duygu Erdogan Monson in a sublime performance), an eloquent Palestinian woman attending the proceedings, who has family members who perished in the Gaza genocide. We have “Ariel” (played vociferously and vividly by Ami Dayan), a grizzled Israeli military veteran also in attendance, who has family members who perished in the Hamas terrorism of October 7th 2023. We have Barbara (played with subtle multi-dimensionality by Mare Trevathan) a white American woman who is concerned but less-informed about the Israel-Palestine conflict, regularly putting her foot in her mouth as she struggles to understand where people are coming from. And finally, we have “Sam” (performed with quiet powerfulness by Mel Schaffer), a non-binary college student who is very knowledgeable about the history and current affairs of Israel-Palestine, who is able to engage with vast amounts of information in an empathetic mindful way.
The interactions between Reema and Ariel play out as you would expect them to, with Barbara clumsily interjecting with cringe-worthy emotional appeals for “reason”, “compassion” and “coming to peace”, encouraging “both sides to own their shit”, while Sam interjects in persuasive bursts of factuality and cross-examination, with appeals to ethics, rationality, logic and actual fairness.
The moderator tries to defuse tensions and as the show progresses it is very clear that each character is not a real person, but an archetype (and some would say, a stereotype) in the general conversations that occur when people in North America talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Sergio places the four characters in various seemingly contrived situations, attempting to apply their archetypical role to novel thought-experiments, to reveal new perspectives. I suspect that this is for the benefit of highly opinionated members of the audience who are not interested in hearing “Perspective 1” from “Archetype X”, but are definitely interested in hearing it from “Archetype Y”. In this manner, the play summarizes the various talking points that exist in the current conversations that usually occur about Israel-Palestine, with examples being presented from even recent events, indicating that the script is a living one, updated with whatever has been happening in the news during the run of the show.
This is not theatre for first timers. Without over-revealing and spoiling it for you, I can tell you that the narrative structure of this play is challenging, not only to the audience but to the actors as well. If one steps past the struggles that the production runs into here, we can see the intentionality of the work, to bring an actual “getting on the same page” moment for the audience, many of whom may not have been closely following this international conversation, or the details of the ongoing conflict or even the moral argumentation around it.
That being said, I struggled with several moments in this play. Ariel’s vigorous anger presented against Reema’s desperate appeals for humanity really disturbed me and several members of the audience. The strange angles used by the moderator to control the proceedings were also something that put me off, especially when he interrupted in moments where actual solutions were about to be discussed by the two characters most impacted by this conflict.
I appreciated the inclusion of the works of other artists, such as those of an Israeli playwright and a Palestinian poet, being used to juxtapose viewpoints that allowed for a greater coverage of the moral space being referenced, in the limited amount of time that the actors have with the audience. However, several elements felt rushed and bewildering. I still took these moments in stride in order to understand what the goal of this work really is: this is a play that tries to bring the anti-Palestine crowd in, to demonstrate how some of their ongoing argumentation violates well-known and well-accepted ideas of human rights, while also holding space for their concerns, while still demonstrating the horrifying facts of the current genocide in Gaza. This is a difficult balancing act that may not even need to be performed in the first place, and it leads to the play trying to be everything to everyone.
Reema, as a character, speaks with graceful strength, compelling pathos and admirable conviction. But the lines given to her make me wish that the Palestinian perspective in this play was presented in a more coherent way. It seems like multiple Palestinian voices are coming out of Reema’s mouth, which confuses the audience, while the Ariel character, who also is of many minds, feels more believable and coherent.
I appreciated the depiction of Ariel struggling with his own conscience, indecision, double-standards and ambivalence. We learn more about how his morality has changed: a former peacenik interested in Palestinian human rights who becomes swept into a frenzy of warmongering after October 7th. His verbal and non-verbal posturing terrifies the audience as Reema’s character patiently navigates gauntlet after gauntlet thrown down by him (and annoyingly by Barbara as well) to present her own case that Palestinian human rights are non-negotiable.
There are awkward moments where Sergio tries to comfort the audience in subtly coercive ways, after difficult scenes transpire, even though many of us can see clearly that something quite disturbing is happening to Reema and Sam as the play progresses. I saw these moments as the play demonstrating to us the insidious ways that Western media, Western discourse and Western gatekeepers, in the form of the Barbaras and Sergios in our communities, work to dehumanize the Palestinian condition to make space for the comfort zones of the Ariels we have among us, while the Sams of this world try valiantly to bring truth and accountability to the conversation and the Reemas run themselves ragged trying to convince skeptical people that Palestinians are actually human beings who deserve human rights.
In a world where the conversation includes contributions from Israeli cabinet members proclaiming that “there are no innocent people in Gaza” as they sign off on bombing campaigns that kill thousands of children, I can appreciate how Ami Dayan, from the Jewish Israeli perspective, is able to see how awful this zeitgeist has become and wants to come forward with a play like this.
I also appreciate the intent of the production where it recognizes the clumsy imbalance between an Israeli demand for coercive dialogue versus the Palestinian demand for restorative justice, in a context where only one side enjoys rights, dignity and wealth while the other is oppressed, dispossessed and killed in overwhelmingly disproportionate numbers. The residents of the Holy Land continue to be attacked by terrorists trying to behave like states and also by states trying to behave like terrorists.
With this production, I wanted to see conversations about pressuring our elected officials and economic institutions to stop enabling the Netanyahu government’s military-industrial complex in their mission of genocide and apartheid. I wanted to see conversations about bringing fair and equitable programs for housing, healthcare, education, jobs, free movement, reparations, and full citizenship for Palestinians inside any state that respects them as human beings and maintains their connection to their homeland.
Instead, the play mostly stayed at the surface-level of “the conversation” and familiar talking points. The audience segment that seems to benefit most is the subsets of the anti-Palestine crowd being nudged toward empathy, while audience members who are already closely following the violations of Palestinian human rights walk away without being enlightened about new strategies or tools for impact.
For a show that successfully obtains so much community attention, I am concerned that they were not able to fully make use such a rare opportunity: the risky, inventive format is exciting, but the content feels aimed at casual observers and bad-faith observers, not politically well-informed mindfully-engaged audiences in a city like Seattle that has largely moved beyond the “is this really that bad?” stage.
In trying to sit between agitprop, theatre-of-the-oppressed, and advisory theatre, this show, with so many hard-hitting moments, still ironically ends up going too soft in all directions, repeatedly veering away when real solutions come into view.
We can do more with a show like this, especially when there are already so many existing works from contemporary award-winning Palestinian intellectuals, artists, and activists publishing rich, practical visions for the future (some of which are made in partnership with Israeli artists and writers), that can be used as inspiration for making shows like these more impactful. Including only a single powerful Palestinian poem, while appreciated, still feels insufficient when the show could instead have foregrounded the ongoing proficiency of Palestinians in articulating viable solutions, sending a crucial message to anti-Palestine audiences who will not seek out this material themselves. Palestinians are not just victims to be pitied. They are thinkers and builders with concrete blueprints for justice and reconciliation, and any work that summons this much attention has a responsibility to include more under-platformed Palestinian ideas, which can plant more seeds for real change.
This production has the potential to have impact in communities where anti-Palestinian narratives dominate, pulling hesitant audiences “into the light,” but for many pro-Palestine viewers it offers little beyond frustration at seeing the conversation just being summarized for the enlightenment of viewers who still need this material to grow in a conscientious way.
The Israeli-Palestine Conversation has closed, but for more information on events coming up at West of Lenin, visit https://westoflenin.com/.
Photo credit: Kevin Steele
