Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?

Adam Klasfeld: Playwright of Good Fences

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, written by Adam Klasfeld, is an absurdist play about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Klasfeld is making a name for himself with surreal plays focusing on the human root of political problems -- his docu-drama about Mark Twain, The Report of My Death, was a New York Magazine top pick when it debuted last year, and it will soon begin touring in the tri-state area.

Of Klasfeld’s plays, I think Good Fences is his most challenging, dynamic, and politically charged. It follows Rosh, a writer in a country called "Arabia." Rosh's neighbors recently shot him in the arm, resulting in an amputation, but neither his wife nor his friends nor even his doctor can tell that he's missing a limb. Convinced he and his family are in danger, Rosh begins patrolling his house, and soon he is negotiating with an elf in order to protect himself from his neighbors.

Is Rosh seeing things? Is his pain real? I met up with Klasfeld to better understand the symbolism of his play and his feelings regarding the conflict. Despite his strong political opinions, Klasfeld has never been to Israel, but he's heading out on a Birthright trip this weekend, so I'll check back with him when he returns to see if the visit changed his mind.

What inspired Good Fences?

I was very obsessed with the news coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I was reading a lot of poetry at the time. In Robert Frost’s Mending Wall, he wrote:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down. I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly…

And I thought it was a funny image. Then I thought about what the elf represents, and I thought about seeing the elf literally. It’s hard to pinpoint where an artistic inspiration comes from, but I just had the idea of an amputee and no one believing his arm was missing. Then I started to consider it in a social context. The idea of an injury that no one seems to notice, while it seems like such an absurd idea, happens everyday, and in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular.

What made you want to write an absurdist play about Israel and Palestine?

I wrote this play because as an American Jew I knew that the politics of Israel involve me, yet at the same time I am not in Israel. It bothers me, the suffering that is going on in Israel and in the Palestinian territories. And I wanted to question myself about my own preconceptions about the conflict. I can identify with the feeling of an injury of something far away that in actuality is not there. I think that a lot of people are confused about the conflict and they ought to be confused -- it’s a very difficult thing to understand and I don’t pretend to. I wanted to create a play about the conflict that didn’t presume to make a grand statement because I knew that it wouldn’t be adequate.

Early in the play, Rosh, the main character, is shot in the arm, which is then amputated. His wife, her friend, and his doctor all act as if his amputation does not exist. It is ambiguous whether they can see Rosh’s pain and choose to ignore it, or if his amputation is imagined. How is this a metaphor for the situation in Israel and Palestine?

Israeli Security Fence Well, it’s realism. People choose not to see pain right in front of them. And this doesn’t just go for Israel and Palestine but for the world at large. We pretend in New York not to see people getting kicked out of their houses, we decide not to see that our criminal justice system is arresting more people of color for the same crimes also committed by white people. We choose not to see the suffering that is all around us. I want people to question what they think they know and sensitize them to individual suffering, and I think that if we went from that starting point, we’d be a lot better off than we are now.

Rosh builds a wall between himself and his neighbors, though what he sees as a wall, everyone else in the play sees as a fence. He views the construction of the wall as a thing of beauty and as something that will ensure his security, while he has evidence than many on the other side are suffering from its existence. How does this translate into your feelings on the Israeli security fence?

I don’t like the wall, or fence. I don’t like the fact that it’s there or that it’s being used as an argument by people who want to bring a similar thing to our borders. I don’t have feelings for inanimate objects but I do have feelings about how these objects affect people. Is it a wall, is it a fence? I mean, we're even negotiating over the language we use to describe it. As a playwright I don’t have set feelings about the wall other than the fact that it’s a set piece that divides these characters. I think people get fixated on the wall, when there is plenty more to be outraged about.

Throughout the play there is this idea that Rosh has constructed his own fate. He has either written the play that we are watching, or he has committed the actions that result in his demise. What are you trying to communicate with this?

The anxiety that most writers feel is that our writing does have consequences. All writers want to say the truth as we see it, when finding out the truth is not easy and is confusing. You have this anxiety: Is this right? Am I being honest? Will I be proud of what I wrote? Will my writing be helpful? It’s not "watch what you say," because that will stop you from saying anything. We can create the future that we want through our words and actions. But we need to wake up to the realities around us if we want to do it right.