Motti Lerner

Motti Lerner (born September 16, 1949) is an Israeli playwright and screenwriter.

He was born in Zikhron Ya'akov, a village south of Haifa, in Israel. His great-grandparents immigrated to pre-state Israel in 1882 from Romania and Russia, and became farmers.

He was educated at the local and regional schools. In 1967-1970 he studied mathematics and physics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1975 he began studying theatre at the Hebrew University, and continued in theatre workshops in England and the San Francisco Dancers' Workshop in San Francisco (1976)

In 1977-78 he founded and directed the Maduga Experimental Theater, as part of The Jerusalem Theater, where he produced experimental and street performances. From 1978 to 1984 he was a dramaturge and director at the Jerusalem Khan Theatre, where he directed his own play The princess and the Hobo, Gotcha by Barrie Keeffe, and Magic Afternoon by Wolfgang Bauer. He began writing plays and film scripts in 1984 and moved to Tel Aviv. Since 1986 he has taught playwriting at the Drama School of the Kibbutzim College of Education in Tel Aviv. From 1992 to 2007 he taught political playwriting at Tel Aviv University. In 1992 he wrote his first television play, Loves at Betania which was produced by Israel's Channel 1. In 1993 he was a Visiting Professor at The Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew and Studies, in 1997 was a Visiting Professor at Duke University Theater Program in North Carolina, and in 2006 and 2007 was a Visiting Professor at Knox College, Illinois. Motti Lerner is one of the pioneers of radical political theatre in Israel, and one of the country’s leading writers of documentary drama and television docudramas. In the 1980s and 90s, his plays Kastner, Pangs of the Messiah, and Pollard, and the documentary drama serials The Kastner Trial and Bus No. 300, placed him at the center of the Israeli theatre and television milieu, and aroused public debate on subjects at the heart of Israel’s political and ideological life: the Holocaust, the occupation of Palestinian territories, Israeli society’s moral ethos, and Israel-Jewish Diaspora relations. In 1997, The Municipal Theatre of Heilbronn, Germany, staged The Murder of Isaac, a play about the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. To date the play has not been produced in Israel, following claims that it is anti-Semitic. During a Knesset plenum debate, several Knesset members demanded that the government request from the German government that it close down the play. The Israeli government rejected this demand. Following The Murder of Isaac Lerner’s writing became more radical. Israeli theatres rejected many of his new plays, and staged only those not dealing with controversial political issues, such as Hard Love, (Haifa Municipal Theatre, 2003), and Passing the Love of Women, (Habima National Theatre, 2004). His more controversial plays have been staged successfully in Europe and the US, including Coming Home, Pangs of the Messiah, The Murder of Isaac, and Benedictus.

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