Hardheaded Folks [Difficult People]: Plays 1963-2010

Six plays in this collection are represented by ITHL:
Hardheaded Folks; Butchie; The Orchard; Elka’s Gold; Cooper; This Wide-Winged Sea

These six plays are among the finest by Bar-Yosef and range from the 1970s to the late 1990s. They present Israel from a variety of angles: in Elka’s Gold, a mother who rescued her two babies during the Holocaust still ties them to her in adulthood by teeling them stories of the past, and promising to save them through a family treasure hidden in European cemeteries. In Cooper – a dark, fierce tale about grasping and letting go – a daughter summoned home by her mother for her father’s funeral is shocked to find that he is still alive. Surrounded by the junk that her father has collected  throughout his life, the family finally settle their accounts.

The plays’ center of gravity is often the connection between two entirely different worlds: Noah Greenwald in This Wide-Winged Sea moves his wife Pnina from her stable ultra-Orthodox world to a modern present that flows and changes like the sea – her greatest fear and surprise. Hardheaded Folks, set in England, deals with a devoted brother’s attempt to make a match for his aging and capricious sister by bringing her a total stranger from Jerusalem, with disastrous results. Bar-Yosef’s plays also tend to portray warped relationships among family members: having failed in their lives or been unable to fulfil their dreams, the characters watch their chances slip away.