Via Dolorosa

As part of its 2016 Next Rep Black Box Festival, the New Repertory Theatre is staging a pair of sure-to-be-controversial one-man (or woman) productions. The one I'm reviewing here is David Hare's "Via Dolorosa Latin for The Way of Sorrow, a path in Jerusalem that Jesus supposedly walked on his way to Calvary, the Cross on his back; the Via Dolorosa leads to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, a church built on the site where, tradition has it, the crucifixion took place. Within the same structure there's also a structure that's claimed to be the tomb of Jesus, or at any rate, to stand at the exact spot as his tomb.

But nothing about history -- and religious history in particular -- is exact; the passage of time, the loss of information, the distortions of institutional and cultural memory all ensure that doubt and approximation forever remain key factors in any account, be it of events long ago or the ongoing chains of strife that roil the world today.

Nowhere are resentments ancient and modern so tangled and sharply, perpetually acute than in the Middle East, and when screenwriter and playwright David Hare went to Israel, in 1997 (the year he and that nation had both existed for a half-century), he found himself keeping company with an array of individuals of all ethnic and political persuasions -- people in authority, people on the street; Jews and Arabs; conservatives and liberals.

Hare turned his experience into a 90-minute monologue, and performed the inaugural productions himself. It's another David -- David Bryan Jackson -- who takes the role of Hare, but it's hard to imagine that Hare himself could have done the show better; Jackson portrays not only Hare, but the various people with whom Hare has political, historical, cultural, and religious discussions. Among them are settlers on the West Bank, as well as Arabs who detest what they see as a land grab by the Jews -- but, even so, detest Hamas just as much. Then there are the Jews who worry that having gained a homeland has pushed the Jewish people away from their spiritual roots, a tradition in which land and buildings mean nothing, ideas are all-important, and human life is overwhelmingly sacred.

Jackson doesn't just deliver Hare's words, he paints a vibrant picture of nations and peoples. I've never been to Gaza, nor to the places Hare went where he encountered various Palestinians (again, of varying status, including a prominent politician), but I have been to Jerusalem, several times; it's become my favorite city in the world. When Hare's narrative arrived at the latter locale, I could almost see, thanks to Hare's descriptive language and Jackson's expressive performance, the narrow streets of the old city around me and the view of Jerusalem from the Temple Mount. When Jackson described the Holocaust Museum, I felt shivers -- the same ones I'd felt as I took in its exhibits and wandered its grounds.

Set designer Ryan Bates, too, brings the location to us vividly, depicting the Holy Land with just a couple of well-chosen flourishes. The back of the black box performance space echoes the Western Wall (also known as the Wailing Wall), and in front of the wall, to the side, a massive girder seems to thrust its way through the floor, its lower half red -- with blood? With heat? -- and its upper reaches blackened, as though scorched. This tells us what we need to hear about a land so harshly riven for so many centuries.

The sound design is equally minimal: Rumblings and ambient noises that sketch in a sonic environment. There are only occasional hints of music - including, fittingly, a brief snatch from Pete Gabriel's soundtrack to 'The Last Temptation of Christ.'

Hare's monologue is littered with hard, scintillating observations and head-scratching complexities, not least among them one man's complaint that Western civilization has taken its principal religions from Jerusalem and its immediate environs only to turn around and revisit those same faiths back on the Holy Land in a distorted form -- that of violence.

In another passage, a Jewish character laments that Jews are enjoying a swimming pool while Palestinian children lug drinking water through poverty-stricken streets: "It's un-Jewish!" he cries.

The Six Days' War crops up in conversation again and again as a sort of touchstone, a watershed moment that challenged history, set a new and not entirely hopeful tone for the future, and transformed Jewish culture -- maybe even Jewish faith.

But the play's deepest, most insistent effect is one of despair. Circling all around deeply felt sentiments of faith are the chill and calculating coils of politics growing ever tighter. Hare's words depict a situation warped and twisted like a Moebius strip, offering only illusory progress but no real way out of cyclical spasms of violence retribution, and ever more entrenched cultural identities based on conflict. "Via Dolorosa" may not lead to answers, but its a tour through a landscape of questions that's worth taking, a tour both depressing and humanistic.

"Via Dolorosa" continues at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown through Jan. 21. For tickets and more information, please visit http://www.newrep.org/productions/via-dolorosa