The political complexities of the Middle East conflict have been pared away in Israeli student Ilan Hatsor’s 1990 drama Masked, the gripping tale of three Palestinian brothers bonded by blood, but alienated from each other by a lack of trust.
The densely packed, 70-minute play was produced off-Broadway in 2007 and is now receiving its South Florida premiere at Coral Gables’ GableStage, where director Joe Adler mines it for maximum visceral impact.
Masked takes place in a West Bank butcher shop whose hanging carcasses and blood-spattered walls foreshadow the violence to come. It is the workplace of youngest brother Khalid (Abdiel Gabriel), who receives an unexpected visit from middle brother Na’im (Nick Duckart), a rebel freedom fighter who had taken to the nearby hills to elude Israeli soldiers. They are eventually joined by Daoud (Carlos Orizondo), their older brother, suspected of being a traitor to the Palestinian cause, and soon to be interrogated and tortured by guerrillas.
So Na’im has an hour to arrive at the facts, learn of his brother’s allegiances and possibly save his hide. But the truth is a shifting reality, as the three of them circle each other, peeling away layers, leading to a conclusion which is both unexpected and inevitable.
Hatsor – whose play was translated into English from Hebrew by Michael Taub — keeps the focus on the personal, avoiding the issues that have kept the Israeli-Palestinian tensions simmering for decades. As a result, Masked takes on a universality of any two warring nations, and, of course, there are many to choose from.
Adler has a solid three-man cast, led by the versatile Duckart, a steely combatant whose emotional shifts are mercurial. Orizondo is even more hard to pin down, as he reveals his character’s shadings. And keep an eye on Gabriel, the seeming pawn in the family struggle, who grows before our eyes.
While only a little more than an hour, Masked is a full evening of theater, a wrenching experience in the GableStage manner.
MASKED. GableStage at the Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables. Through Sunday. Tickets: $47.50. Call: (305) 445-1119.