(New York Jewish Week) — Veteran journalists and producers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney — best known for their films attacking abortion, questioning the science on climate change and exposing “Biden family corruption” — have lived in Los Angeles for 15 years. But they happened to be in their home country of Ireland on Oct. 7, 2023, the day Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking hundreds hostage.
While in Ireland, the married couple, who are Irish Catholic, noticed that their friends and people they admired, as well as a general Irish public that is historically pro-Palestinian, seemed to immediately turn their attention to the Israeli military’s response in Gaza.
“On Oct. 8, they had moved on already,” McElhinney told the New York Jewish Week. “People were talking about how the electricity had been turned off in Gaza. They talked about electricity. And we really were shocked. We were like, you know, there was a massacre yesterday, the largest massacre since the Holocaust of the Jewish people. And people didn’t know, because the media in Ireland had immediately segued on to talk about something else.”
McElhinney, 60, and McAleer, 57, said they had “zero” relationship to Israel prior to that day. But the narrative, as they saw it, seemed like the kind they liked to tackle: Together the couple runs a nonprofit called The Unreported Story Society, whose mission, according to their website, is “to tell the stories that the mainstream media ignores through art and modern media.”
They’ve now added a pro-Israel project to a body of work that led the Belfast Telegraph to dub the couple the “Irish culture warriors who became darlings of the American right.” In November, McAleer and McElhinney traveled to Israel, where they spent three weeks interviewing survivors of the gruesome Hamas attacks. The result is “October 7: In Their Own Words,” a “verbatim play” that opened on Monday at the Actors Temple Theater in Hell’s Kitchen, an off-Broadway theater housed in the historic synagogue since 2006.
How do the Oct. 7 attacks fit into their oeuvre? “We like to tell unreported stories, and we like to be skeptical — which is what journalists should be. Nobody wanted to report on the Gosnell story out of Philadelphia,” says McAleer, referring to the duo’s book and play about the doctor Kermit Gosnell, who was convicted on three counts of murder for botched late-term abortions. “It was an unreported story, just like Oct. 7 was an unreported story. Same with climate change. That’s a massive worldwide movement. It’s going to change the lives of hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people. And nobody is putting their head up and saying what’s really going on here.” (“Not Evil Just Wrong,” their 2009 film, claimed that proposed solutions to climate change are more dangerous than global warming.)
Featuring a cast of 14 under the direction of Geoffrey Cantor (an actor known for “Daredevil” and “The Punisher”), the play tells the story of what happened Oct. 7 through the words of the survivors, from those who lived on kibbutzes near the Gaza border to those who were attacked at the Nova Music Festival. Amid a soundscape of gunshots and rockets, audiences hear visceral details from people like Zaki, a religious Jew who suspended his Shabbat observance to shepherd dozens of festival goers to safety, and Shani, an army medic who spent hours hiding in a tree.
“Every word that’s said onstage is taken from interviews that we carried out, so there’s no added dramatization, there’s no editorializing,” McAleer said.
Yet the transcriptions, which were translated from Hebrew into English, are woven together to highlight “thematic threads,” as McElhinney calls them. “I was very moved by the fact that almost everyone that we spoke to, people who were very religious, and people who were not religious at all, like the people at the Nova party, said the Shema,” she said. “They found faith in the darkest moment in their lives.”
The play is one of a number of efforts to assert the stories of Oct. 7 at a time when the aftermath, Israel’s punishing war against Hamas in the Gaza strip, is the center of attention. Other examples include a different installation in Manhattan, a meticulous reconstruction of the Nova festival site, and the highlights reel of Hamas footage that pro-Israel advocates have screened for influential audiences and on college campuses.
The play, too, is meant to redirect the conversation. Focusing solely on the events of Oct. 7, there’s no mention in the script nor in the play’s printed program of the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in the ensuing war.
“Everyone in Gaza has been talked to by some journalist from some part of the world,” McAleer told the New York Jewish Week. “The world’s media is focused on Gaza. They’re focused on the Palestinians. They’re focused on the starvation, on the electricity, on their dogs and their cats. Every story that could be told about Palestinian and Gaza has been told, and is being told every day, on and on. No one is talking about Oct. 7.”
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Characters in the play use language like “savages” and “dark creatures” to describe members of Hamas. When asked if the translations they chose might be seen as inflammatory, McElhinney responded: “It’s not our word [savage], but it does seem like kind of an appropriate word, no?”
Many of their past films have proved controversial, and the two have been accused of “trafficking in the occasional alternative fact,” as a profile in The Daily Beast put it. Do they worry that their interest in a country to which they previously had “zero” relationship might contribute to further polarization around an already divisive subject? “If Israel swings to the right, it’s because of Hamas, not because of our play,”McAleer said. “And going to the right is not a bad thing, if it’s guided by the truth.”
Still, McAleer noted that it was difficult to find a venue in New York that would agree to put on the play. He blames anti-Israel sentiment, not concern about their reputation as right-wing culture warriors. “I think a lot of venues are running scared,” he said. “It was difficult getting a venue, and then we were worried about getting a venue and them canceling under political pressure.”
When reached via telephone, a representative from the Actors Temple Theater, who chose to remain anonymous, responded, “Sometimes people get politically motivated to cancel. We don’t discriminate, we don’t censor. The script was not objectionable in any way.”
“October 7” has been in previews since May 4, and opening night went off without a hitch. Still, McElhinney and McAleer are girding themselves against protests and violence. “There are barriers permanently outside the theater, ready to be deployed if there’s protest,” McAleer said. He reported that there were five NYPD officers present at Monday’s opening, as well as a police vehicle and private security — though no protesters.
The play runs in New York through June 16, and then they’re planning to take the production on the road. “We are going to take it to every Ivy League campus in the country,” McAleer said. And if their intended audiences choose not to attend? “That’s an amazing statement in itself,” McAleer said. “I think an empty room is actually more powerful than a crowded room. If they choose not to go, that says much more. They don’t want the truth.”
