Meir Kahane is alive and behind bars on the L.A. stage
Onstage, the Colombian journalist squirms in her cell, her resistance to her American jailers weakened by the salmonella bacteria they've slipped into her food. In an adjacent cell, an American-born rabbi turned Israeli Knesset member suspected of being behind a series of Brooklyn bombings hunches over in agony after he has been beaten with rubber hoses and his insulin has been deliberately withheld. He is called Chaim Agunier, but is clearly based on the late Meir Kahane. That's the scene set by "Hospitality," a two-act play written by American-Jewish dramatist Allan Havis about civil rights abuses by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), playing through the summer at the Odyssey theater in Los Angeles. The play is based on the real-life experiences of Patricia Lara, a reporter for the Colombian daily newspaper El Tiempo, who claims she was victimized (including poisoning) by the INS during a visit to the U.S. in 1986. Lara had flown to New York to receive an award at Columbia University, and when her name appeared on an INS "lookout list" she was arrested, detained and deported, in accordance with a subsequently repealed McCarthy-era law called the McCarran-Walter Act, which was intended to prevent the entry of "subversives" into the U.S. The Reagan administration charged that Lara, the author of a book on the Colombian terrorist organization M-19, was in fact its liaison with the Cuban secret police.
Lara, who later sued the INS for $ 10 million and earlier this year had her visa reinstated as part of a settlement, claimed the charges had marked her as a target for right-wing death squads in her native country. "In writing 'Hospitality,'" says Havis, "I was mindful of several political realities as we journey through the Reagan-Bush years. Similar to the Iran-Contra gang, the INS has acted, at times, as a surreal shadow agency." Havis, a 39-year old playwright and drama teacher at the University of California at San Diego, chose to contrast the experiences of the Lara-like character with those of the Kahane-like character. "There are degrees of racism and anti-Semitism within an organization like the INS that suggested making the play a dialectic on the right and left," he says, adding that he liked the fact that in the end the Kahane character and his INS tormentor come to recognize that they have much in common. In "Hospitality" Havis was clearly not interested in just crafting a docudrama. Although the real Kahane did have problems with the U.S. government regarding his frequent fund-raising trips to the U.S., the Kach leader was never detained or beaten by the INS in New York. During the period in which "Hospitality" transpires, he was fighting in Federal Court to retain his American citizenship, which the Justice Department was seeking to strip from him on the grounds that it was improper for a U.S. citizen to also serve as a member of a foreign parliament. Kahane eventually won the case, prior to his assassination in New York last year. Chaim Agunier, as played by Mark Margolis, a film and TV actor whose Broadway credits include the recent "The World of Sholem Aleichem," is smoother (if balder) than the late Kahane. Although the character's rants and demeaning wisecracks are off-putting, Agunier's audacity can be seductive. "There was something paradoxical in having Agunier saying things that were very problematic and terrible to hear," acknowledges Havis, "and yet having his discourse mitigated by the fact that he was so candid. As a Jewish-American author, I believe that the broad history of Jewish progressive democracy and egalitarianism supports a point of view quite different from that of the fictional Agunier. Given that, I was comfortable in delineating a repellent aberration." Havis has previously touched on Jewish themes in his plays "Lilith" and "The Road to Jerusalem," and with the aid of a recent Rockefeller Foundation grant is now preparing a drama based on the recent court-martial of Givati Brigade soldiers convicted of beating Palestinians during the Intifada. "Hospitality," scheduled to run through the summer, has received mixed reviews from Los Angeles critics, with some praising the dialogue and performances while also calling the play somewhat shallow and uninvolving. But Havis says he has been approached by a noted Israeli translator intent on bringing "Hospitality" to the Hebrew stage, which means that Meir Kahane - at least in the form of Chaim Agunier - may be poised for a return appearance on the Israeli scene as well.