19/4/99

 A star is born (late)

    Sami Kamal has a habit of stealing the show.
    It was a night out for Jerusalem's South Africans, with one of their own, Bruce Oppenheimer, co-starring in a two-man South African play, Athol Fugard's “Playland.”
    "Bruce was great," went the post-show comments, "but that other guy!"
    "Who is that other guy?"
    Sami played Gideon le Roux, a crass redneck, opposite Bruce's glowering black watchman, in a story set at the end of the apartheid era. The play was staged by Jerusalem English Language Theater (JEST).
    Sami is not South African. He's never been there, "and I don't even know any South Africans." But for the couple of hours he prowled the stage, you could have been fooled.
    You wouldn't have guessed he's Palestinian.
    The thing of it is, Sami is just starting out. He's strictly amateur, entirely self-taught, and with so little experience and no schooling in theater, he's already wowing 'em.
    In real life, he's managing editor of the Jerusalem Times, Hanna Siniora's English-language Palestinian weekly. The paper is committed to Arafat's line -- Oslo and the peace process.
    Sami Kamal, 45, suddenly discovered he loves acting only a couple of years ago. It was purely by accident.
    "I fell into it. I have a friend who's an actor, and one day he had  to go to an audition; he asked me to come with. So we went to the Khan. It happened to be a two-character scene, and there was no one there to read with him. So Zipora Peled asked me to read the other voice. Before I knew it, she'd offered me a role. I never acted before in my life."
    He laughs. "I always wanted to know what actors do. Y'know -- what do they do? I always thought there was more to it than just appearing on stage and mouthing words. They seem to get so intense. So I was looking forward to it.
    "Was I nervous? No, I was too curious." He rethinks that for a moment. "Yeah, actually, I was terrified of forgetting my 10 lines."
    When a full-fledged role became available, he took a shot at it. Next thing you know, the Arab is a defrocked rabbi.
    An amateur, a rookie, out of his element, and here's what the Post's harsh critic Naomi Doudai had to say: "Sami Kamal was a tremendous hit in the role of defrocked rabbi. Not only did he delight with perfect, Shakespearean-standard English diction, his manipulation of a very wordy but intellectually stimulating text and his enchanting presentation of a maverick persona was excellent... His performance saved the evening."
    Playing characters that are overtly Jewish or South African, to audiences that are overtly Jewish or South African, don't you need some training?
    "I think you ought to!" he exclaims, jocularly implying disparagement of himself. "It was tremendously courageous on the part of the directors to entrust me with such demanding roles. I was very flattered and emboldened by the fact they had such trust in me. For example, [JEST director] Batya Casper, she gave me this huge role."
    Playing le Roux was a tremendous challenge for Sami. His part of the dialogue was heavily wordy, in a language not his own, in a thick accent you could break your teeth on. He was performing for an audience that is for the most part keenly familiar with the type of character and the accent. And it was a very energetic role: poor Sami had to dance and prance and leap and race around the stage almost constantly, physical punishment for a portly, middle-aged office worker.
    "Ha! You should have seen me two months ago, when I first got the role. I was a little more rotund than this. I was fat when we started out."

    Sami is engagingly warm and congenial, intellectually stimulating and quick with a laugh. (He must be: our interview lasted six and a half hours!) He looks like Mickey Rooney. He speaks English melifluously, in a refined accent I could not pinpoint.
    "I grew up in a school in Jerusalem that exposed me to a fair amount of British culture. It was a French school -- ha, ha! -- and the teachers were Palestinian and Armenian."
    Well, that certainly explains his mastery of English.
    "I love words. And what attracts me to acting is that it's the other end of words. You speak a different language, that of the body. This is communicating in a way that has nothing to do with words.
    "There's something liberating about working with an accent. It gets you into something else, a completely different dimension. Without the accent you really can't get fully into it."
    He's got an ear like an antenna, picking up on nuances of language in a city babbling with a multitude of patois. He's a born mimic.
    Suddenly he's David Levy, then Ariel Sharon. "Arafat is easy to do in English. It's like he takes scissors to every word and cuts them into syllables.
    "I used to do it in class, when I was a kid, mimicking the teachers."
    Both characters he has played are similar in that "they seek salvation, both le Roux and the rabbi. They seek redemption."
    The themes transcend narrow interpretation -- as does Sami Kamal himself. "I never thought of it as 'here's a Palestinian playing a rabbi,' or 'here's a Palestinian playing an Afrikaaner.' They're universalist themes." When I asked what his own religion is when he's not playing someone else's, he ho-ho-ho'ed resoundingly. "I leave such tangled questions to God. Ask Him."    

Update: After a marathon 6 ½ hour interview and several subsequent conversations, I thought I knew Sami very well. I was in for a shock. Months later, he called me, and he was crying. “My mother just died,” he said, “and I need a rabbi.” A what?! “My mother was a Jew,” he explained, “and I want her buried as a Jew, but I don’t know any rabbis. Please, can you help me?” I was stunned. The fuller story emerged: his mother was a Holocaust survivor; her entire family was murdered. At her funeral, Sami honored the side of his family he didn’t speak about, proclaiming each one’s name as a memorial in the city they cherished, Jerusalem.