Tmu-na Ensemble presents: "The Teacher", or: How I Was Fired from the Ministry of Education?

On bus number 2 to Poland, a young teacher joins thirty-seven seventeen-year-old students for one week. The audience boards with them, wears headphones, and sets out on a journey. But this journey is going to get complicated, in more ways than one...

"The Teacher" — the play written and directed by Odem Reday — takes one of the defining phenomena of the Israeli education system, the annual youth delegation to Poland, and turns it into a theatrical arena of memory, repression, and the surfacing of trauma. Through headphones worn by the audience throughout the show, a hyper-realistic cinematic sound is heard, bringing the viewers into the teacher's thoughts: into the cynicism, the forbidden, funny, and surreal thoughts, and also, gradually, into an uncontrollable mix of thoughts, memories, voices, and times.

Each viewer's personal listening experience turns the play into a dual experience, simultaneously public and private, allowing movement between different narratives: that of the trip to Poland and that of the journey happening here and now. Everything slowly blends together. The audience doesn't just watch the teacher from the outside — they live the days and nights of the journey with her, the history told in their ears and the history pushing to emerge. We constantly hear historical information and tours of extermination camps, and we, along with the characters in the play who bind themselves in a complex web of cover-ups and repression, pay devastating prices and are dragged with them into a non-stop wrestling arena between national and personal traumas.

This is a play that asks how Israeli collective memory is shaped: What enters the national narrative and what is pushed out? How does the education system function as a machine of mediation, monitoring, and control? And what is the personal price paid by teachers, students, and parents within the system?

All this in a sharp, heartbreaking black comedy that mixes dark humor, white lies, and a truth that demands its place.

Performance Dates:

Monday 18.5.26 at 20:00 – Tmu-na Theater

Tuesday 19.5.26 at 20:00 – Tmu-na Theater

Tuesday 16.6.26 at 20:00 – Tmu-na Theater

Wednesday 17.6.26 at 20:00 – Tmu-na Theater

Written and Directed by: Odem Reday // Dramaturgy: Itai Doron and Rotem Elroi // Artistic Mentoring: Nava Zuckerman and Erez Maayan Shalev // Writing Mentoring: Maya Arad Yasur // Sound Design: Ohad Manor // Set and Costume Design: Ariel Tal Aviv // Movement Design: Ilan Zakharov // Lighting Design: Rotem Elroi // Assistant Director: Dan Ben Dor // Compositions and Piano: Tal Yaniv // Poster Photography: Mor Alush // Featuring: Sia Dreigor Kadman, Yariv Cook, Chantal Cohen, Mor Alush, Guy Birger, Yaakov Ohana, and Avrom Horowitz

Duration: 90 minutes

Tmu-na Theater

8 Soncino St., Tel Aviv, Tel: 03-5611211

www.tmu-na.org.il