By Cynthia Citron

On paper it looks pretty interesting.  On stage, not so much.

The Arab-Israeli Cookbook, a new play by Robin Soans, is built around the idea that when people break bread together they can somehow engage in reasonable dialogue.  Or, to put it another way, it's hard to holler when your mouth is full.

In aid of this premise, ten actors, playing some 35 parts, roam around a colorful set actually cooking onstage.  And the dialogue consists of actual recipes, interspersed with personal tales of terrorism and war in the Middle East.  Spoken by all the usual suspects: a wealthy widow from New York who has made Aliyah to Israel---"if you don't go, they've won," she says; an Arab mother who is proud of her martyred son; a young student who has witnessed a terrorist attack on a restaurant patronized by both Jews and Arabs; an elderly Christian couple marooned in their apartment, afraid to go out on the street.  The stories are true, recorded verbatim by the playwright, and even though the actors do a wonderful job of relating them, the tales lack a certain poignancy.  We have heard them before, and the static recitation renders them as fables, rather than as moving real-life experiences.

"Uncertainty is a cruel and debilitating weapon," one of the characters notes.  And maybe because the lines are so clearly and immutably drawn in this play---there is no uncertainty in the dialogue or in the implacable opinions of the players---there are no surprises.  Thus, the weapons are made of rubber, not steel, and don't deliver any wounds that reach below the surface.

It was not the author's intention to deliver wounds, however.  He wanted, he says, to deliver a dialogue that was free from polemics.  "Everyone in the Middle East is passionate about food," he says, "and if they were talking about food it would stop them getting propagandist."  So even as they stuff zucchini and grape leaves onstage ("Arabs love to stuff everything," the food preparer notes), and make hummus and falafel and canafa (a pizza-like dessert topped with goat cheese and pistachios), giving us their recipes as they go, they also tell us their stories.  Which, as I've already noted, lose poignancy when they are accompanied by the acrid fumes of frying veal.

The Arab-Israeli Cookbook is a novel idea.  Unfortunately, it isn't a play.  It lacks suspense, resolution, climax, or change.  And even polemics, as the playwright planned.  But maybe polemics might have enlivened the proceedings and instigated some lively debate.  So that the audience would have something to discuss afterwards, as they adjourned for their after-theatre coffee and cake.  As it is now, what they've got is goulash.

The Arab-Israeli Cookbook  is directed by Louis Fantasia.  It will be  running at the MET Theatre, 1089 Oxford Avenue, in Hollywood through June 26th.