A Winter Funeral
Chanoch Levin
A Winter Funeral
Schedule of performances
Poetic farce by the iconic Israeli writer Chanoch Levin has the most rewarding vantage point. A family is planning a wedding and a funeral. Yet the two cannot be held simultaneously. Four hundred guests are invited to the wedding, where eight hundred chickens are to be served. Should the wedding be cancelled just because an aunt died and her son promised her, on her death bed, that the entire family would come to part with her? Thus, colourful and accidental pedestrians or rather runners – intellectuals start emerging in the colourful story. For we all are more interconnected than we think: with each other and with miracles that are beyond us. Hence, the second part of the fantasy farce takes us flying over the Himalayas. Along with minute ordinary people we meet the angels of life and death. Wedding and funeral are metaphorical milestones of our pilgrimages, no matter how much we keep on resisting them. Nonetheless, at least one of them is impossible to sidestep. Yet even that doesn’t necessarily have to happen without laughter.
Chanoch Levin was a brilliant poet, writer, journalist. Nonetheless, first and foremost he was unique and inimitable as playwright and theatre maker.
By the time his condition catapulted him (in 1999) from his small world, he managed to write sixty-three plays. Sixty-three bitter comedies or funny tragedies that prided themselves with all colours of laughter – from a sad smile to roaring laughter of spectators worldwide.
Running time: 2 hrs 30 mins with one interval