PICKING UP STONES is very much a piece of pseudo-documentary theater that will continue to morph and change as the grim years march by. Initially conceived as a one woman show on the “moral dilemma” of the state of Israel (and tantalizingly as some kind of One-Woman Golda Meir découpé based on a handful of lines) it careens headfirst into a political, cultural, spiritual third rail after the events of October 7th
Writer/Performer Saundra Laub whips back and forth between a dizzying array of characters, both living and dead, real and hypothetical, to try and come to terms with unfolding horrors within Isreal, Gaza, and the West Bank.
The frantic array of voices presents a cacophony of opinions on the conflict. Laub grapples with both a sharp rise in antisemitic violence, and a right-wing Israeli culture that been whipped into a frenzy by decades of dehumanizing propaganda. Laub, and by proxy almost the entirety of Liberal American Judaism, is caught in the middle; desperately clinging onto some sort of hope that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Laub herself is fixated on the images of walls coming down, and less with the messy reality of who built those walls. On a liberal, democratic world order, not so much the machinations of the deranged madmen such a world produced.
To Laub the solutions to complex, thorny, questions are obvious. To Laub, if only cooler heads prevail than we can find a solution to this bloody mess. The show ends with a moving, almost eyerolling, chant of “Shalom Salam”, and the hope of one land and two peoples.
Cutting through all the noise, Laub is indeed a master storyteller, lingering on embodying Golda Meir and waxing on about the promise of a liberal, Jewish, peaceful state in the middle east. But for now, the promise is broken, the dreams have been shattered. All that’s left to do is go about picking up the stones.
The Independent Artists movement 