TEL AVIV-- Tova Naaman, an earnest high school English teacher, stared up at the soldier suddenly hectoring her for documents. She fidgeted for a moment and fished for her wallet, handing over identification with an irritated shake of her head.
The soldier nodded curtly, waving Naaman into a slowly filling theater. The line behind her grew.
"I've never been at a checkpoint before," said Naaman, 54, who lives in the town of Ranana, just north of this Mediterranean city. "That was unpleasant."
Naaman's first checkpoint was only stagecraft, the brusque soldiers a pair of actors. But the disorienting entrance is a preview of what follows inside, where "Tangle," a new play, has been challenging audiences with the complexities and despair of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The production is the collaborative work of nine Israeli actors -- five Jews and four Arabs -- who prepared for their roles with field research and history lessons. It is part of a growing body of political fiction in Israel, generated mostly by young Jewish writers, that reflects a broader intellectual movement known as post-Zionism, which questions the validity of Israel as a Jewish state. The writers challenge the literary canon of early Zionist authors who celebrated the state's creation, sometimes at the expense of historical truth.
"The reason post-Zionism exists is because Zionism couldn't exist in its old form," said Yael Ronen, the production's 29-year-old midwife and director. "This is a new generation's quest to define our own identity as Israelis."
Although political theater has rarely enjoyed broad appeal here, "Tangle" is being staged at a time when many Israelis are newly focused on their old conflict. In leaving the Gaza Strip last month, the Israeli government set off a national debate over Israel's future shape and character that has helped generate interest in work like Ronen's. Soldiers, school groups and the simply curious have been filling the Cameri Theater's 165 seats several times a week for more than three months.
"Political themes were introduced into Israeli theater much more directly during the first intifada," said Abraham B. Yehoshua, one of Israel's most celebrated writers, referring to the Palestinian uprising that erupted in 1987 and ended with the 1993 Oslo accords. "What we are seeing now are the fruits of those earlier works."
Ronen, who wears her mass of kinky blond hair pulled back in a rainbow headband, was raised in conservative Jerusalem, in a household where politics was a topic of conversation but not a call to action. Her father was a director, her mother an actress, and she attended fine arts school in Israel. She also completed two years of compulsory military service, Israel's national bonding experience, as a correspondent for Army Radio.
Her political work is increasingly popular. "A Guide to the Good Life," which explores the occupation's influence on a group of twentysomething Israeli characters, is running at the national theater in Beersheba.
"Tangle" does not have a written script. In preparing the play, the cast members visited Palestinian towns, Jewish settlements and checkpoints. They distributed questionnaires about the conflict, first among family and friends, then to the public. Ronen said the actors also studied history together, drawing on Palestinian and Israeli texts to find out "what they didn't teach us in school."
"People are afraid to see the other side as human beings because it makes it harder to sustain a vivid conflict if they do," Ronen said. "I want this play to reach as wide an audience as possible. Our goal is not to convince the convinced."
