What Happens to the Mind When There Is No Human Contact
"Something about Ildar Raphael’s character intrigued me. The way he spoke, this is someone whose appearance and fluency could be someone I meet every day," says actor and theater creator Doron Kokhavie about the former prisoner who inspired him to write "Klal," a one-man show that will premiere at the Teatroneto Festival during Shavuot, May 22 to 25, at Studio Nisan Nativ in Jaffa. Kokhavie, who plays the prisoner, also directed the play with Ari Folman, his uncle, the director of "Waltz with Bashir." "I was interested in the experience of isolation and how he got there, how he got into crime," says Kokhavie. "I contacted him on Instagram, I wanted to get to know him and learn what happened to him. The play is inspired by him, but it is not his story. It is an attempt to understand how someone like him ended up in these places, how he experienced them and how he is today. I thought a lot about the experience of what happens to you when you are locked up. Isolating a person is unimaginable."
Three years ago Kokhavie read about Raphael, a rehabilitated prisoner who served 8.5 years in several prisons and was released in 2013. He immigrated from Latvia as a child, went to live on the street at age 15 and got caught up in a series of property crimes for which he was repeatedly arrested. From age 18 he entered the prison system, and three months before finishing his sentence, he was transferred to solitary confinement, where he remained until the day of his release. Will Ildar come to the show? "Of course, he was rehabilitated. A person is a whole. In the play I show all sides of the prisoner. There are sides to crime, empathy and morality, and what I bring is the ability to hold complexity, which is what our country does worst. In our first conversation I was insanely anxious, it really shook me. It is critical to examine your violence and lack of empathy. There is a monologue about empathy that is why I am doing the play, because it is critical here in Israel. There is a lack of empathy here, both toward one another and toward what is happening outside."
Rehearsals for the play are taking place at the GRA Community Center in Tel Aviv’s Neve Sha'anan neighborhood. To convey the feeling of isolation, darkness and suffocation, he takes me to a shelter, and the experience becomes powerful and unusual. The isolated prison cell is marked by four horizontal bars, and inside it there is a chair and a lamp, everything that happens outside the frame is the dialogue with the audience. He will try to create this experience as well in the room where the play will be performed. "The play operates on two dimensions, the first is the isolation in the bounded space on stage, where the prisoner undergoes a mental process that begins with understanding loneliness, continues with immense and violent rage toward the system and ends in collapse. In the second dimension he stands before the audience and tells the story, from a precise account of the robbery he committed, through a high school love story to the relationship with his father. Flashes from life. Ildar said that in solitary confinement the prisoner reenacts his life in order to understand how he got there."
He sat in a small isolated cell in prison. The guard ignored him, he saw nothing but shadows in the slit under the door, insects, or damp stains on the ceiling. He was trapped inside his thoughts about the past, the present and the system that put him there.
Kokhavie, 33, was born and raised in Haifa. He lived in Rome for eight years, where he joined the ensemble of director Luigi Saravo. Together they wrote a play about his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, who died two months ago at the age of 103. "Luigi wanted to do something related to the Holocaust, his grandfather was in the Fascist Party. So we wrote a play about loss. We also did plays on social issues. I am interested in non actors, my theater is investigative theater." Saravo is providing remote artistic advice on "Klal."
Today Kokhavie lives in Israel, teaches several groups of actors, works with homeless people and former prisoners, and also teaches at the "Peima" theater school in Mitzpe Ramon. "I am doing a project with and about homeless people through the 'Migrash Beiti' association. I work with a theater group in which we reconstruct their stories to understand the mechanism that led them to the street. In the case of the prisoner I investigated what happens to consciousness when there is no contact with another human being. The brain feeds itself and creates things that do not exist because there is a huge lack of stimuli, and you are drawn into the abyss. Ildar told me, 'Sometimes I would make a mess so the guards would come beat me, just so there would be contact.' In other words, you need contact with something in order to exist. I think that was one of the elements that interested me most, what happens when that contact is absent, and how far our mind can go."
Kokhavie admits that sometimes he feels like a prisoner himself. "As time goes by, I understand that it is not about one prisoner but about prisoners in solitary confinement, which is all of us. During the war I felt like they were closing in on me, that decisions were being made for me, and now I keep checking the news to see whether war will break out tomorrow. Someone decides and I do not know according to what and on what basis, prisoners."
