Do you consider yourself primarily a Jewish playwright who happens to be living in Canada or a Canadian playwright who writes about Jewish issues?
EF: First of all, I do not consider myself a playwright, but a poet who has adapted poems/texts for performances. I feel it is important to make this distinction because I have high respect for the art and craft of playwriting and know that I do not write plays. I do however use elements of theatre, text and movement/dance, to create the theatre of poetry. Most of my books have been books of poetry. However, from early on, I have collaborated with artists from different disciplines and have “put on performances.” I have written texts for seven voices, for dancers, and for a contemporary composer, among others. My most recent collaboration, for the last four or five years has been with a theatre director, Liz Valdez, and Surviving Wor(l)ds is as theatrical as it is because of her.
Now as to the Jewish/Canadian aspect of your question. This is also something I do not think I can give a simple answer to. First of all, having fled Hungary has forced me to think consciously about being Canadian. In many ways, I think I have integrated very well. However, having been exiled (forced to flee my native land) meant that I have always had a part of me that feels like an outsider. My children who were born here, obviously, have no such perspective or problem. So for me, being a Canadian is a conscious condition. After I finished my last book, In The Worshipful Company of Skinners, I thought: “This is my Canadian book. This is my citizenship certificate.” I have written about Jewish experiences in my first poetry book Szerbusz and in my seventh, Surviving Words (which I adapted into the play Surviving Wor(l)ds). However, I really do have a wide range of topics and poetic styles. I have not really felt part of the traditional Jewish community, and, though I share an eastern European consciousness, I don’t share their fear of integration. In many ways I’d like all religions to go away, to disappear, to transform themselves into a humanistic tradition based on responsibility for one’s actions and to make value judgements not by which myths one believes in (the differences) but by commonality. And one major one is being human. So I am a writer who takes the worlds within and without as his subjects.
What are the central topics that you do or plan to concentrate on in your plays?
EF: I drew on my parents’ and my own lives for Surviving Wor(l)ds. And though it was about the Holocaust, it was really about the desire of The Will (which I see as external) to dominate and impose its vision and The Individuals who become its victims. Of course, the myth of the Third Reich was the power of the will and what inhuman things are done in its name. In Voices, also a 3 voice text, I deal with the moment of decision; the moment of choice. Two of the voices are the interior ones but not the simple angel and the devil on the shoulders. They have their own complexities and anxieties. Murders in the Welcome Café is an early ‘performance piece’ (again adapted from a chapbook of mine of the same name) that uses the 1940s hardboiled detective novel as a structure for a surrealist poetic mystery. Mise au Jeu/Face Off is a contemporary dance and poetry piece in the form of a hockey game that deals with the issue of separation/independence of Québec from the rest of Canada. My most recent ‘theatrical’ performance was in April. Promecards from Chile is a monologue/travelogue/soliloquy on the topic of the role of the poet in the world. As you may gather by now, I don’t want to be limited by labels because they don’t really work for me.
Would you mind commenting briefly on stages in the development of your career as a dramatist?
EF: I started out as a poet of the page but early on was introduced to sound/performance poetry. I hung out with contemporary dancers. They taught me the importance of body and movement and I worked with some of them and combined sound and language to make it theatrical/dramatic. I started to see my poems in performance, kinetic, language and sound as a character and setting, movement as plot in a play. I then was asked by a small theatre company producer to “do something.” This was the beginning of my collaboration with director Liz Valdez. Since then my performance pieces have had more of a theatrical structure and I became more conscious of images, space, silence, stillness, action, pacing, light & sound etc. But I want to stress again, that I do not think of myself as a dramatist (not yet).
To what extent did the life and experiences of your parents or grandparents impact on your work?
EF: My father is a natural storyteller and his stories are about his poverty in Hungary and the Holocaust. And he retells them often. I remember being a teenager and not wanting to hear them. They embarrassed me because they were often told when Canadian friends were around. And though I resisted, of course they affected my actions, professional and personal. However, because of my interest in the avant garde/experimental, I do not feel restricted by it.
What made you write for the theatre, and do you have a special audience in mind?
EF: To some extent, I think I have answered this question. Since I even deal with the traditional topics in a non-traditional manner, my audience tends to be made up of those who are interested in the new. And since I never thought about writing for the theatre but text for performance, it seems like a natural continuation.
Being Jewish in Canada at the beginning of the new millennium: What are your personal experiences?
EF: Again, because I don’t define myself as ‘Jewish Canadian’ and because most of my acquaintances are a mélange of backgrounds, our religious/ethnic backgrounds are more of a cultural interest than articles of faith. And as fundamentalism seems to be on the rise, I find it more important to counter it with a more open attitude.
From your point of view, how have plays on Jewish issues been received in Canada in the recent past?
EF: I haven’t seen many and I haven’t read reviews or heard discussions about the ones that there may have been, so I can’t really say much on the subject. I did recently see one in Montréal, Rose by Martin Sherman. It was a one person show and it was wonderfully simple but powerful.
To what extent does the Holocaust and its aftermath figure in your dramatic work?
EF: It figured very strongly in Surviving Wor(l)ds – obviously. Indirectly it informs my world view. My existence came very close to not being because of it.
Which of your plays would you suggest for introducing a European audience to your work as a dramatist?
EF: Surviving Wor(l)ds is the most ‘European,’ but Voices might be most accessible because of its contemporary, psychological and urban nature.
Plays written by contemporary Canadian playwrights on Jewish issues seem to me to have the advantage of being reflections on, rather than documentations of, what happened during the Third Reich and what is happening in today’s Israel. What is your opinion?
EF: I really don’t feel qualified to answer that. However, if I were to hazard a Canadian guess and assume that this was the case, then I might say it might be because we are so removed from it (at least in the geographical sense) and maybe because of the political myth of Canada as a mediator, perhaps those playwrights respond to those issues in a meditative way.
