The First End and the Second End

For a long time, I couldn’t write about that evening, about the memory that challenged me in those hours of darkness. There were many who were surprised that I, the national songwriter, two of whose plays were included in the national treasury of Israel in a law enacted only a year ago, had not written about what happened that night.”

The plot of The First End and the Second End unfolds in one dramatic night, set in the very near future. Four characters, all highly temperamental and animated, find themselves trapped in the home of Avraham, a playwright and lyricist favored by the establishment, as a terrorist roves menacingly around the well-off neighborhood of Tel Aviv where he lives.

Avraham’s daughter Dana is wheelchair-bound after what may have been a suicide attempt; her rather odd mother-in-law Maggie, looks exactly like the actress Maggie Smith, and Dalya is an amusing former actress, a friend of the family, and a lover. The four characters both love and can’t stand one another. On this night, they confront everything that for years they have been trying to hide, even from themselves. Over them hovers the ghost of Adina, Avraham’s late wife, “the one who before her nothing existed” and who ties together the enormous love and pain felt by each one of them.

Under the cover of this night, Oren Gazit takes a shrewd, cynical look—one that is also loving and compassionate—at the world we live in, and a satirical, somewhat comical, look at a future that is neither entirely a threat nor unrealistic.