A verbatim stage production titled “Oct. 7,” written by married Irish journalists Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney and built from survivor testimony of the Hamas attack on Israel, is scheduled to be  performed on Jan. 28 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Directed by Jeff Furner, the play premiered in New York City in May 2024 and has toured college campuses. It is described as “the story of Israel’s darkest day, but it is also a story of survival, hope, resilience and fighting back against the forces of darkness.”

McAleer told JNS that the work was designed to avoid narration or political framing and to let survivors’ words drive the performance. 

The “verbatim” format affects audiences differently than conventional theater does, according to McAleer. “When it’s verbatim, people lean forward a little,” he said. “They don’t want to miss a word.”

“When I produced the script for some people in New York, at the end of it, somebody said, ‘You know what this needs is a journalist character to put context in,’” McAleer told JNS. “The last thing it needs is a journalist character to put context in, because that just means distorting whatever these people are saying.”

McAleer initially resisted adding a post-show question-and-answer commentary. “I felt like, why am I telling people what to think about this play?” he said.

“David Mamet, who knows a thing or two about playwriting, he finds you if you do Q&As after plays,” he said. “He says, ‘I’ve got plays where there’s fights in the car park. That’s a good Q&A.’”

The play’s creators described the production as a historical record drawn solely from firsthand interviews collected in Israel in the weeks after the attack.

“The first question was not, tell me what happened on Oct. 7,” McAleer told JNS. “It was, ‘Tell me about your day on Oct. 6.’”

“I wanted to show people at peace and a country at peace,” he said. “The horror came to them. They didn’t go looking for it.”

McAleer said there was “a bit of skepticism” in Israel because he is Irish given how anti-Israel many Irish officials and artists are.

“Normally, when you go abroad as an Irish journalist, being Irish is a real advantage,” he said. “Everyone loves the Irish. Whiskey, Irish music and all that. It opens doors. People trust you.”

He told JNS that Israel is “the only place on the planet where I go, and I have to kind of go, ‘I’m Irish, but I’m OK, really.’”

He added that Israelis understood what he was trying to accomplish. 

“Once we got talking and once they saw the questions I was asking, or really, the questions I wasn’t asking, they were happy enough to talk,” he said.

McAleer said editing the interviews into a 90-minute performance was difficult. 

“I remember the first interview I did. That was about three hours long, and I said, ‘Well, I can’t cut anything, any of this, right?’” he said.

Asked what guided those creative decisions, McAleer said the play needed “cliffhangers.”

“There’s an off-duty police officer we met in Ofakim,” he said. “He left the house with a pistol and nine bullets, and he rescued a wounded rabbi, a wounded off-duty IDF soldier and a family of six who were hiding under a solar panel on their neighbor’s house, and killed two terrorists. So he’s a real hero.”

“We interviewed him, and I thought, ‘OK, we need to interview the rabbi, the soldier and the family because they all have stories,’” he said. “People don’t know that their stories are all going to meet up during the play.”

McAleer told JNS he did the first draft, then brought it to his wife, Ann, who wanted him to include “her favorite characters.”

“I went back and wrote it, and actually, to be fair, she was right,” he said. “Especially this one guy, an Orthodox Jew who rescued about 100 people. He’s a Coca-Cola installer, and he installed the Coca-Cola machines at the Nova Festival, so he knew how to drive there, how to get in through the back to behind the stage and get to the people who were hiding there.”

“He knew what way they would be coming out,” he said. “So he broke Shabbat and went and did about 10 or 12 runs rescuing people and bringing them out.”

“I thought, well, we don’t want two people rescuing people,” he said.

His wife told him to put the hero back into the play.

“Him and the off-duty police officer—they’re the core of the play in some ways,” he said. “The moral core.”

McAleer told JNS that Itamar Alus, the officer, died earlier in January after a brief illness. The performance at the Kennedy Center is dedicated to Alus, who leaves behind his wife, Esther, and four children.

McAleer and McElhinney said they were “so honored to meet Itamar and tell his story. “The world needs more Itamars,” they told JNS. “We pledge to keep telling his inspiring story.”

‘Antisemitism was something our grandparents did’

McAleer told JNS that the live performance has had a particular impact on younger audiences who have mainly encountered news on TikTok or Instagram. 

“People forget the power of the live event,” he said.

McAleer said that the play has toured college campuses, drawing protests at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“I found UCLA very sad, because the security was massive,” he said. “It’s like, you need this much security to give Jewish people a voice in Los Angeles.”

“They put sniffer dogs through the theater in the morning and in the evening of the event,” he said. “There were helicopters. It was just a really heavy, nasty atmosphere.”

McAleer is surprised by antisemitism, “because it’s such an old-fashioned thing to do.”

“You’d think that the young people would not want to do it,” he said. “Antisemitism was something our grandparents did.”

Asked what he hoped lawmakers and political influencers in the Washington, D.C., audience would take away from the production of “Oct. 7,” McAleer said that “you can’t make any decisions about anything until you remember that Oct. 7 happened.”

“If you think the war started on Oct. 8, if you’re concerned with the war in Gaza but if you then acknowledge, well, actually this started on Oct. 7, it changes everything,” he said. “That’s what I want them to take away—to remember that.”

“I’m not in the policy business, but I am in the truth business,” he said.

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