It isn’t easy killing Leon Klinghoffer every night, over and over, in front of an audience of 4,000 — but it’s been an eye-opening experience for the Jewish-American actor who plays the pivotal Palestinian terrorist in The Met’s controversial opera.
“This opera has provided me the opportunity to see both sides of a conflict that, for the majority of my life, I haven’t seen,” dancer Jesse Kovarsky tells Gawker.com in a sometimes humorous, often moving personal essay about starring in “The Death of Klinghoffer.”
Kovarsky plays the young, naive terrorist named Omar, the man who killed Klinghoffer in 1985 during the hijacking of the cruise liner Achille Lauro.
At each performance throughout the production’s month-long run, the dancer fires the fatal shot into the back of the helpless man’s head in a role he originated at the English National Opera before reprising the role for The Met.
The opera, which closes Saturday, “has gained infamy for its subject matter, attracting scores of picketers claiming [the show] is either anti-Semitic [or] anti-Palestine. On opening night, the opera attracted a crowd of 500 protesters charged with a mission to disrupt the evening’s performance,” Kovarsky writes in the essay.
“For me, the sight of all those protesters outside of the Met was frightening, empowering, and humbling.”
Kovarsky kids that his entry into the production must be credited to his “talent for growing ample facial hair,” first discovered in elementary school, “when my mother would trim my neck hair before I hopped on the school bus.”
He was sporting “the heftiest beard I’ve grown to date” in the headshot he sent in with his resume, but “as the audition for ‘Klinghoffer’ progressed, it was clear that the creative team saw something in me beyond my beard,” and he was cast in the important, though non-singing, role.
“It was an interesting honor to be given such a meaty role, especially as a dancer,” he wrote. “Dancers don’t often get recognized in the opera scene. But I must admit it was a strange phone call to my parents (not opera fans) to let them know I had gotten a leading role in a controversial contemporary opera playing the part of a Palestinian terrorist. As a liberal Jew from the northern suburbs of Chicago, I never imagined those words would come out of my mouth.”
Director Tom Morris immersed the cast members in the literature of “the 1948 war, the Yom Kippur war, the Gulf War, the Klinghoffers aboard the ship, the terrorists aboard the ship, the crew on board, the Palestine Liberation Front and Palestine Liberation Organization,” he writes.
The opera has been criticized for sympathizing with and humanizing terrorists — “But terrorists are human,” Kovarsky wrote.
“I wanted to present Omar as a multi-dimensional young man who is dedicated to a life’s mission, yet in the moment of fulfilling that quest, he ultimately questions his actions and finds himself in moral dilemma — should he kill Klinghoffer or no?” he wrote.
In his interpretation of Omar, the terrorist struggles with what he is about to do, an act Kovarsky describes as personally inconceivable, given that he’s a “millennial” without any extreme beliefs.
“When it came to psychologically inserting myself into the role where I’m holding a pistol behind a man’s head in front of 4,000 audience members, I had to identify with a mindset that was seriously foreign to me,” he writes.
“In order for me to gain access to that frame of mind, it ultimately came down to the last five minutes I had to myself before going on stage. That’s when I put my AK-47 around my neck. I felt its weight, its power, and its significance, and I begin to convince myself that everything I did from that point on was for a higher cause.”
It was an eye-opening stretch for “a slightly apathetic, ethnically ambiguous, culturally-identifying Jew who can grow wickedly solid facial hair.”