SPAR DRAMA CENTRE

65 MINS

FRI 1800

SUN 1000

R 90

One of three theatre gems from Israel. See also My First Sony and The Timekeepers.

VOLUNTEER MAN is an exploration on the right of a patient with an incurable illness to choose to end his life.  It is also a meditation on  the “rightness” of the decision another person makes  to aid in the suicide.   

The story is straightforward: a gentle, introverted gay man volunteers to visit a tough drug dealer who is dying from AIDS in a NYC hospital before the advent of life prolonging drug regimens.  They come from different worlds, with different outlooks on what is “right” or “wrong,” but over time they find a common cause.

VOLUNTEER MAN is an Obie award winning play, and it  also received a G.LA.D.D nomination for Best Play of the Year.

According to the New York Times, VOLUNTEER MAN is a confrontational play that is “filled with laughter but leaves you feeling [like] Mike Tyson has landed one on your chest.”  The reviewer from “TimeOut New York” called it “one of the bleakest, most confrontational – and one of the best plays – I have seen in a long time.”

As he did in "TimeKeepers", playwright Dan Clancy manages to combine humour, serious dilemmas and poignancy with remarkable skill. 

"VOLUNTEER MAN is one of the bleakest, most confrontational - and one of the best - plays I have seen in a long while… Playwright Dan Clancy has crafted a corrosive play that serves as an antidote to all those mawkish Aids melodramas; he mines his material's conflicts with a sharp hyperrealism that makes the audience feel like eavesdroppers…The journey is awfully good, a skillful meditation on the sorrowful privacy of trying to die with dignity" TIME OUT NEW YORK

"A play that is filled with laughter but leaves you feeling like Mike Tyson has landed one on your chest. Dan Clancy's VOLUNTTER MAN is a daring exploration of fear, despair, Aids and assisted suicide… Listening to their enormously intelligent, funny, combative talk, one comes to know these men, value them and admire them. It is painful at last to watch them put out the light on what was a very bright moment" - NEW YORK TIMES

By: Dan Clancy
Directed by: Roy Horovitz
Music: Daniel Salomon
Costumes and set: Inga Barba
Starring: Ezer Kalmovitcz, Roy Horovitz, Ora Meirson