Abigail Akavia - 'Cassandra, Hecuba, and anti-Tragedy: Hanoch Levin's Theater of Suffering'

Abigail Akavia will present her work at a joint meeting of the Theater and Performance Studies and Jewish Studies workshops. Dr. Akavia is a Minerva Stiftung post-doctoral fellow at Leipzig University’s Institute for Theater Studies and has also worked as a dramaturg, actress, and theater director in Israel, Chicago, and Leipzig. Her paper will consider the aesthetics of suffering in two plays by Hanoch Levin, the foremost playwright of late 20th century Israel. Both plays offer a reformulation of Greek tragedy which foregrounds the body in situations of pain, grief, disease, and desire. The explicit physical dimension of these works complements Levin’s self-reflective use of the theater as a metaphor for life, wherein heroic action is impossible in the face of life’s senseless suffering and the relentless cruelty of mankind. The respondent will be Michal Peles-Almagor, PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature.