Mosheh: Blog

Moses is a contemporary young man, alone in the wilderness of a foreign land. He is meditating on an image of a burning bush, which is burning with fire, yet not consumed. A message emanates from this apparition, commanding him to go on a mission.The magical events of his childhood and maturation are re-enacted around him, as if in a modern day, urban hallucination. One by one, the female figures of his early life appear, each singing an extended aria, in Hebrew. His sister, Miriam, sings a lullaby to her baby brother while he floats in a basket on the water of the "Nile" - the East River by Brooklyn, NY; his adoptive mother Bitia, Pharaoh's daughter, declares her possession of him and takes him into her realm - her "palace" is comprised of the colonnade supporting the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; his wife Zipporah saves him from a demonic manifestation of God by performing a ritual circumcision on him; his biological mother Yocheved, from the deep recesses of his memory, commands him not to forget her.
The mother-figure tableaus are framed by appearances of God, a harsh and fearsome father-figure narrator. God's voice is an androgynous chant, sung in unison by an alto and counter-tenor. God grants Moses an arduous gift. His commandments scar and isolate Moses, who is sustained in his mission only through his intimate relationship with God. In the end, however, Moses' supplication to God to reveal Himself, are only partially answered.