Bs"d Dear Cherry Lawn teachers and friends, Peace and blessings!

My personal answer to the cls xmas pageant is a play about Haman (the villain from the Purim story): The Barber of Shushan.

The play's source, Megilat Esther, is the key to Israel's (and the world's) past and present existential survival. I wrote it at my daughter's request, for our Negev settlement of about 40 families, a mishmash of people from India, Yemen, Morocco, Germany (and I'm from New York).

Dimona, on which my fictional Haman plans to drop a bomb, has a nuclear reactor that Iran threatened recently, half an hour's drive from our place.

I read the legends and then looked for the characters' core. I never liked Haman, but when my son read the part I found lovable qualities and couldn't bear to hang him (he's hung at the end of Megilat Esther}. In the character Esther I found a shy girl with hidden superpowers. The "three Cohens": We have three families here, all named Cohen. In the play they stand for the Jewish People—at first each tries to upstage the other, and at their best they work together to upset Haman's plans. They play a raucous game of basketball (as everyone does here after Shabbat)to steal Achashverosh's scepter that Haman is guarding, and while Haman builds the gallows for Mordechai the Cohens hide under Achashverosh's bed to wake him.

We try to get the audience involved in answering the riddles Esther uses to distract Achashverosh, and in the songs and psalms to the beat of taraboukas, which all kids play.

Eventually, we want to take to the street. Right now we have no crowded streets in the Negev—mainly camels. Rather than send the kids by bus to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, we performed the play in our small prefabricated structure in the sand, and hoped the streets and crowds would appear (they haven't yet}. The stage is divided in three: The palace, ou tside the palace, and Haman's house. We turn the lights up and down. We break a lot of dishes. We don't pass a hat—not yet.

I have never done street theater, but feel pulled toward it. The sense of street theater is: I pull kids in off the street, so to speak. I take kids that nobody expects could do anything, and then people notice and say, hey! This is a great kid! And that I've been doing for about 35 years. Haven't we learned that in Cherry Lawn?

Please come see us in the Negev!

Peace, Elise Samelson Teitelbaum