A new play about the attacks of October 7 in Israel hopes to highlight the atrocities that will forever define the country’s modern history by highlighting the accounts of those who lived through it all.
Aptly dubbed October 7, the show, written by Phelim McAleer, is a verbatim play—that is, a staged documentary of sorts, entirely told through the transcribed words of survivors that were interviewed for this project in specific.
October 7 will have its world premiere at the Actors Temple Theatre at 339 West 47th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues, a 1920s synagogue that now operates as an Off-Broadway theatre, on May 2. It will run through June 16.
McAleer and wife Ann McElhinney, both Irish journalists, traveled to Israel in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks to document what was happening, interviewing all types of survivors while there.
“We hear from the wounded and the bereaved, but we also meet the heroes who rescued dozens or fought back and saved multiple lives,” reads an official press release. “We hear from mothers who hid for hours wondering if their family had survived, a policeman armed with a pistol and nine bullets who killed several Hamas and saved dozens of his neighbors. “We meet the off-duty soldier who picked up his gun, protected his village, and was shot five times by three different terrorists. We hear how young people enjoying a dance party had to flee for their lives as they witnessed slaughter around them.”
In Ireland on October 7, McElhinney and McAleer noticed the world’s reactions to the attack and decided to fly to Israel shortly thereafter to document what was going on.
“We noticed that, on October 8, conversations around the world were already shifting to Israel being the bad guys,” McElhinney said in a statement. “They were being condemned for turning off the electricity supply in Gaza—after the single worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust. It was like an episode of the twilight-zone.”
Those behaviors echo the sorts of episodes that have been seen across American college campuses in recent months—a fact that isn’t lost on the journalists. In fact, McAleer reveals that, following the New York run, he hopes the play will be put on at Ivy League colleges around the U.S., including MIT, Yale and Harvard.
The play’s creators are also planning on filming the New York performance, hoping to release the recording to a wider audience at a later date.
Tickets for October 7 are available right here
