Job’s Passion

Director David Willinger stages a new production of Job’s Passion, the controversial work by Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin with original music by Ithai Benjamin.

The play is a re-working of the Job story from the Bible. It brings the well-known Old Testament tale and combines it with the New Testament story of Jesus: where the biblical Job gets left on a dung-hill, this Job is impaled on a spit by Roman soldiers in a distortion of a crucifix.

Job – who starts off enjoying good health, a large, happy family and many successful business ventures – quickly gets knocked off his perch. As he gets assailed by plagues, his faith in God is challenged, although his Talmudic friends convince him to stay within his religion. However, when Roman soldiers arrive and proclaim a horrible death to whomever refuses to renounce their God, those same friends abandon him in order to save their own lives. But Job does not give up on God and is brutally killed by the Romans. As he is dying, a circus arrives, and the play takes a Fellini-esque turn. While the play is not as explicitly political as Levin’s other plays (Murder or The Whore from Ohio), it does contain numerous controversial ideas about anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, the existence and meaning of Israel, and more, all lightly embedded in the biblical anecdote.