The 24 Hours Before Rabin's Assassination

"Yitzhak Rabin: Chronicle of an Assassination" is a hybrid theater piece, a memorial, and a meditation on loss – both personal and national – from the noted Israeli film maker Amos Gitai. Set in the 24 hours leading up to the assassination of the Israeli prime minister and based on Gitai’s long conversations with his widow, Leah Rabin, this work blends narrative, projections, and live music in a way that takes a transformative international moment of violence and turns it into one woman’s contemplation of the loss of her husband.

Two actresses, seated across a table from each other, narrate Leah Rabin’s story. Gitai also interpolates a moment from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: as Leah tells us, the prime minister woke up on the morning of November 4, 1995 and, just as Caesar does in the play, instinctively felt that he didn’t want to go to the demonstration.  

Gitai, who traveled with Yitzhak Rabin on his historic trips to Cairo and Washington, DC, is an inventive storyteller: in 2015 he released his film Rabin: The Last Day, which was a mix of documentary and fictionalized narrative. That film took a wide-angled view on the subculture of hatred in Israel that actually promoted the idea of killing the prime minister. This new piece is more personal and intimate. And like all of Gitai’s work, it is also what he terms “a civic act.”

The work receives its North American premiere at Alice Tully Hall on Wednesday night, July 19, 2017, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.