Dai (enough) (SoHo)

Iris Bahr’s Dai (enough) is a solo performance that deals with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It takes place at a Tel Aviv café only minutes before a suicide bomber enters. Here we are allowed entry into the lives of numerous inhabitants from all strata of Israeli society, as well as its observers and critics: eccentric, lost, hilarious souls whose lives, quirks, and neuroses are channeled through Bahr¹s remarkable characterizations and ability to bring humor to even the most dire and tragic of circumstances.

We meet Alma Yalin, wife of Moti (of Moti’s limousines, largest in tri-state area), who finds herself in Israel against her will to tend to her ailing mother, Svetlana, a Russian prostitute who gleefully forged documents of her Jewishness to work in Israel (“When in history this is happening I ask you?”); Trev Brodman, a Christian Dominionist in town to build a massive Rapture Center of sorts; Shuli, an extremist right-wing West Bank settler from Queens; Nijma Aziz, a Palestinian intellectual who is trying to moderate her sons’ increasingly violent views against their occupier; Uzi, a Zionist former general and peer of Ariel Sharon; and Jessica Mendoza, a Latina actress who just landed the role of the beautiful Israeli girl in the latest “Middle East Conflict” blockbuster. These are only a handful of the many characters Bahr brings to humorous and moving life, taking the audience on a singular journey through a land and a people who have managed to anger, fascinate, entice, and confuse most of the world’s population.