Tom Block speaks during the International Human Rights Art Festival in 2023. (Courtesy photo)NEW YORK (RNS) — Tom Block was feeling low. For months, there had been no movement on his play “Oud Player on the Tel,” after an initially positive reception to a January reading at a community arts center. But today, the call had finally come.
He had won a grant to help stage “Oud Player,” a play about an unlikely friendship forged right before the founding of the state of Israel.
“I had given up,” Block told Religion News Service in April, hours after he received the news. “I think the energy was there, it was just latent and dormant, and now it’s blazing back in.”
Soon after, Block began fielding offers for “Oud Player” to run in New York City sometime in 2025.
Since its premiere at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, Block had been fighting to fund a full staging to show more audiences what he sees as a first step toward peace in the Holy Land: to understand “there are two equally righteous narratives” in the displacement of Jews and Palestinians.
In “Oud Player,” written a decade ago and first read in 2014 at the 14th Street Y, Block imagines a friendship between two displaced people in 1947: a German Holocaust survivor and a Sufi villager who takes in the survivor and his son. The friendship, built over respect, a similar work ethic and an overlap between the Abrahamic faiths, can’t withstand the “forces of darkness” that ask people to choose a side.
“You must be willing to accept the veracity of the other side’s narrative — grudgingly and miserably though that may be,” he told RNS. “And at that point, maybe you, the audience, will stop being part of the problem, aligned with darkness and on one side or the other, and part of the light, a person who is moving beyond that ‘you or us’ narrative.”
Actors rehearse for a Jan. 25, 2024, reading of “Oud Player on the Tel” at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning in Queens, New York. (Courtesy photo)
At the JCAL reading, located in a majority Black neighborhood in Block’s home base of Queens, Block felt on top of the hill — or tel (in Hebrew and Arabic), he says, alluding to his play’s namesake. The crowd had hushed to the strings …
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He had won a grant to help stage “Oud Player,” a play about an unlikely friendship forged right before the founding of the state of Israel.
“I had given up,” Block told Religion News Service in April, hours after he received the news. “I think the energy was there, it was just latent and dormant, and now it’s blazing back in.”
Soon after, Block began fielding offers for “Oud Player” to run in New York City sometime in 2025.
Since its premiere at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, Block had been fighting to fund a full staging to show more audiences what he sees as a first step toward peace in the Holy Land: to understand “there are two equally righteous narratives” in the displacement of Jews and Palestinians.
In “Oud Player,” written a decade ago and first read in 2014 at the 14th Street Y, Block imagines a friendship between two displaced people in 1947: a German Holocaust survivor and a Sufi villager who takes in the survivor and his son. The friendship, built over respect, a similar work ethic and an overlap between the Abrahamic faiths, can’t withstand the “forces of darkness” that ask people to choose a side.
“You must be willing to accept the veracity of the other side’s narrative — grudgingly and miserably though that may be,” he told RNS. “And at that point, maybe you, the audience, will stop being part of the problem, aligned with darkness and on one side or the other, and part of the light, a person who is moving beyond that ‘you or us’ narrative.”
Actors rehearse for a Jan. 25, 2024, reading of “Oud Player on the Tel” at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning in Queens, New York. (Courtesy photo)
At the JCAL reading, located in a majority Black neighborhood in Block’s home base of Queens, Block felt on top of the hill — or tel (in Hebrew and Arabic), he says, alluding to his play’s namesake. The crowd had hushed to the strings …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]