Israeli playwright Ido Netanyahu's play “Worlds in Collision” premiered in Manhattan. The play by Uzbek-American director Nabi Abdurakhmanov ran for four days on the stage of Theater-86 in New York. The production centers on the intellectual debate between Albert Einstein and Immanuel Velikovsky about science, history, religion and the structure of the world.
Ido Netanyahu is the younger brother of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The screenings took place on the new Theater 86 stage on West 39th Street. The main and only roles in the play were played by father and son Nabi and Obid Abdurakhmanov: the director of the production played Einstein, and his son played Velikovsky.
The play is based on a dialogue between two scientists who hold fundamentally different views on science and history. Einstein personifies a rigorous scientific approach, while Velikovsky, a psychoanalyst, historian and author of radical theories, tries to rethink the chronology of the ancient world and astronomy, including drawing on religious texts.
Through their dispute, the author also addresses history and Jewish identity after World War II. The play features themes of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, Israel and the biblical exodus of the Jews from Egypt.
For Abdurakhmanov, the current shows are a continuation of many years of work with the works of Ido Netanyahu. The director met the playwright and his father Benzion Netanyahu in Israel in 2009, where representatives of the Youth Theater of Uzbekistan came to the festivals of Israeli drama ISRA-DRAMA and modern dance International Exposure.
In 2013, Abdurakhmanov staged the play A Happy End based on Netanyahu’s play in Tashkent. It tells the story of a family of Jewish intellectuals in Berlin in the early 1930s who, until the very end, do not believe that the Nazis will remain in power for long and refuse to leave Germany.
Netanyahu later gave Abdurakhmanov the play “Worlds in Collision” in English. The director independently translated it into Russian and staged it in 2015 at the Youth Theater of Uzbekistan. The role of Einstein was then played by Albert Khalmurzaev and Khasan Salikhov.
In 2018, the production was shown in Israel, and four years later its premiere took place in Brooklyn – already at the ESSENCE Theater created by Abdurakhmanov. Now the play is premiering in Manhattan.
Abdurakhmanov explained the main idea of the production with an episode from a conversation between Einstein and Velikovsky.
“Once, while talking with Velikovsky, Albert Einstein said that the position of the chair in this room was an accident, but not their meeting: they could not help but meet. The greatest desire of a scientist, or any person, is to comprehend God’s plan,” said the director.
In the play, the confrontation between scientists is conveyed, among other things, through scenography. The action takes place in two offices: Velikovsky’s space is emphatically chaotic, while Einstein’s office symbolizes order and system. On the stage there are books, globes, a violin and a board with physical formulas.
For Nabi Abdurakhmanov, “Worlds in Collision” was not the first performance related to Jewish history and culture. Back in 1995, he staged Jerry Bock’s musical “Fiddler on the Roof” at the Youth Theater of Uzbekistan with the assistance of the Israeli and US embassies in Uzbekistan. According to Vassa Abdurakhmanova, the production lasted 120 performances.
On September 26 and 27, the ESSENCE Theater will present Moliere’s immortal comedy “The Reluctant Doctor” at Theater-86.
