At the age of 95, author Amnon Kabatchnik has lost none of his enthusiasm and zest for life that has accompanied him through his storied career in the United States as an acclaimed director of dramas, comedies, thrillers, and musicals, and in his current avocation writing books about the history of murder and mystery plays.
Since his childhood in Tel Aviv, Kabatchnik, who today lives in the Los Angeles area, has harbored a lifelong affinity for dramas, mysteries, and suspense novels. He channeled his passion for reading mystery and suspense novels into collecting, and today, he has amassed a library of some 75,000 books.
Kabatchnik holds a BS degree in theatre and journalism from Boston University and a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama and served as a professor of theatre at numerous universities. In addition to his work in the United States, he directed plays at Habima and the original Hebrew production of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Several years ago, Kabatchnik began writing books about the history of plays about murder and mystery and has written a dozen works on the subject. He has received the Benjamin Franklin Gold Medal Award (IBPA), the Independent Publishers Book Gold Medal Award (IPPY) and was a finalist for the Agatha Awards and ForeWord Book of the Year Awards.
Kabatchnik says that his initial expectation was that these books would be of interest primarily to theatre students and departments of literature in high schools and colleges. To his pleasant surprise, the books became popular among the general public.
In a recent phone call, he was eager to discuss the Hebrew translation of one of his popular books, “Courtroom Dramas on the Stage Volume I,” which is now available in Hebrew at Steimatzky bookstores and on the Zameret website (zbooks.co.il).
The book analyzes more than fifty plays, ranging from Greek productions from the fifth century BCE through modern plays of the 20th century, all of which contain courtroom drama. “The common denominator of these plays,” explains Kabatchnik, “is a crime that finds itself in court, where we have a defendant and the lawyers, the courtroom, the judges, and the witnesses.” While all courtroom dramas have these common elements, he adds, each play is unique in terms of the different characters, motives, and the solution.
The book’s entries are presented chronologically. Each play includes a plot synopsis, production data, opinions by critics and scholars, as well as biographical sketches of playwrights and key actors-directors. Many end with a surprising twist.
“Courtroom Dramas on the Stage Volume I” includes synopses of plays, beginning with Greek works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, continuing to the Middle Ages, when anonymous playwrights wrote trial dramas about Joseph and Mary, Pilate and Herod, and women accused of adultery.
In the Elizabethan era, England’s royal courts inflicted justice in the dramas of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. Spanish theater presented trial scenes in dramas by Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderon. The French were not far behind with Le Cid (1637) by Pierre Corneille, The Litigants (1668) by Jean Racine, and Socrates (1760) by Voltaire.
America joined the fray with plays by William Dunlap, Germany with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, England with Lord Byron, and Russia with Nikolai Gogol. In the first decade of the 20th century, Europe was flooded with trial plays. Notable were Leo Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse (Russia, 1900), Alexander Bisson’s Madame X (France, 1908), and John Galsworthy’s Justice (England, 1910). The genre continued with mainstream playwrights penning dramas populated with judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, jurors, witnesses, and the accused, often charged with murder in the first degree.
Veteran mystery writers such as Gaston Leroux, Edgar Wallace, and Agatha Christie created courtroom melodrama, and even musicals have incorporated trial scenes, such as Can Can (1953), Chicago (1975), Sweeney Todd (1979), Les Miserables (1985), and Ragtime (1997).
Though he has lived most of his life in the United States, Kabatchnik has great fondness for the State of Israel and fought in the War of Independence, describing the time as “the greatest era that I can think being part of.”
Kabatchnik finds the courtroom drama genre particularly fascinating, which is why he selected Courtroom Dramas on the Stage for translation into Hebrew. Last year, he issued “Murder in the West End: The Plays of Agatha Christie and Her Disciples” and looks forward to translating more of his works. “I would love to have a whole series of my books translated into Hebrew. It would be very important for me.”
This article was written in cooperation with Amnon Kabatchnik