One in a series of conversations with some of our many noteworthy neighbors — people who call the city home or head this way to work or study. We grab a bite, talk shop, learn more about why Cambridge, and shoot the proverbial … well, you know.
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The playwright and director Ran Bechor steps into Beacon Street’s Café Saint Germain, at the corner of the Cambridge/Somerville line, flashes a boyish smile and greets me with a grace that can only be described as from another, gentler age. His manner is calm, light and unexpectedly unassuming. “You need to know I don’t speak English so well,” he volunteers with a shy grin. “I’m not reading a lot of things in English,” he adds. “Most of what I’m reading is in Hebrew, so this is a journey for me.” Language, he believes, may be a barrier for many people, including in a theater setting. “I think this is part of our conversation,” he suggests, “how to make theater without language. This is, I think, a real thing that we need to speak about.”
The café is quiet at this hour (9 a.m.) and the menu is limited, as well. Especially for those like Bechor, whose diet precludes gluten and coffee (also alcohol). “I never drink coffee,” he says. “I didn’t like it. Never have. And I don’t do things that I don’t like,” he says, adding “who does?” Another one of his offhanded smiles. Bechor politely directs an “orange juice, please” to the cashier.
I, on the other hand, am primed to take full advantage of the menu: cappuccino (large), and a slice of the densest chocolate chip banana bread pudding imaginable.
We settle into a corner table near the bar. We aren’t even seated before our conversation turns to his background and the many roles he has played in his short life (he turned 40 earlier this year): I know he’s been an actor in a telenovela. An award-winning playwright. A founder and director of a theater for young audiences. A Modern Hebrew preceptor at Harvard. And before any of that, the principal of a school of 1,400 gifted children in Israel.
As Bechor talks, I stab into my bread pudding followed by a slurp of my coffee. He arrived in Cambridge four years ago after his wife, Romy Neumark — a longtime Israeli television journalist who hosted her own nightly news show— won a Nieman fellowship at Harvard. He spoke very little English at the time. “I have the vocabulary,” he says, “but I didn’t actually speak.”
They only expected to stay a year. But Bechor found work teaching Modern Hebrew at Harvard and spent his spare time developing material to feed his theater passion. In 2023, he co-founded Adam Theater with executive director and designer Karin Sharav-Zalkind, with the goal of producing high-quality children’s theater.
This year he committed himself full-time to playwrighting and directing. I ask whether walking away from a stable, income-producing position at Harvard feels like a risk. He looks puzzled by the word. “Risk? No. It’s natural,” he counters. “[Adam Theater] is what I want to be focused on.” It is the most Cambridge-by-way-of-Israel answer one could give. The credentials are background, the work is foreground, and the calendar bends to the work.
The name “Adam” carries a double meaning for Bechor. Adam is the Hebrew word for “human being” — to be a person in the fullest sense, a mission he holds dear — and also the name of his 11-year-old son. Does his son know the theater is named after him? “Sure, he knows,” he chuckles. “Oh, sure.”
The company stages serious plays for young audiences on subjects most American children’s theater avoids: divorce, war, isolation, the shape of a self under pressure. Its inaugural production, “Library Lion,” opened at the Boston Public Library in 2024 with a life-size three-person lion puppet built by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, and ran again last winter at the Calderwood Pavilion, receiving generally excellent reviews. As a matter of artistic principle, none of the company’s plays end happily. “Instead, I bring hope,” Ran says. “Because it’s important to me that every kid feels like an owner in his journey.”
He’s working now on a new play, “The Flood.” The show brings together two children — a boy whose parents are divorcing, a girl who cannot bring herself to leave her room and watches the world through her own arrangement of security cameras. They meet, build a private Noah’s Ark out of cardboard and toy-camera projections, and try to decide together what is worth saving. “In my play, it’s not God who tells you to build the ark,” he says. “These two kids decide, themselves, to keep something.”
On stage, the girl’s micro-cameras will project miniature scenes — a finger, a tin animal, a doll’s house — into the world of the ark. He pulls out his phone to show me a rehearsal still: a thumb-sized camera tilted over a model with the gravity of a film crane. “Beautiful,” I say. He laughs, knowing what’s really involved. “It’s terrible to stage,” he admits.
Before he was a playwright, Bechor was principal in Israel of a school for 1,400 gifted students, in third through ninth grades, drawn weekly from mainstream classrooms across the region for one full day of one-on-one work with adults on individualized plans. He chose the gifted population, he says, because, for him it was an easy target to change for the better. “It doesn’t make sense that 60 percent of the kids are coming from the same neighborhood.” He was particularly annoyed that parents appealed their sons’ failed entrance results 75 percent of the time and their daughters’ only 25 percent. He and his colleagues reached out to mainstream schools to talk to the families directly. “Your girls,” he would tell them, “are not less gifted than your boys.”
They were less well represented by their parents, I offer.
“Yes,” he says. “Exactly that.”
As Bechor continues to talk, taking short sips of his orange juice, I begin to see a pattern. “Offstage,” the play that won him an Israeli fringe prize in 2013, took seven scenes from Greek tragedy — Oedipus and his mother in bed, Agamemnon murdering his daughter — and staged them across seven separate spaces, with the audience walking from one to the next. Their guide between scenes, the figure who escorted them between worlds, was a Palestinian man telling his own true story. People shouted. One staging, in which a bound figure had not yet been released when the next scene began, stopped the show until the actor was untied. “They thought we don’t understand the connection between Greek and Israel and Palestine,” he says. “Every show is asking something else. To think the whole world is just political — when you look at the world and see everything is pink, the problem is the world, or the glasses you put on.”
This, I am beginning to suspect, is the through-line: a teacher who won’t test for what doesn’t matter, a playwright who refuses to point at his own meaning, a director who, when telling a story about war, is not telling a story about a war. Boundaries, for Bechor, seem to be artificial designations that bring nothing but unnecessary divisiveness. Even his choice of this morning’s meeting spot – housed along the city limit separating Cambridge from Somerville – is just coincidence, not a statement. “I can only tell the difference by the street signs,” he says with amusement. “Green for Cambridge and blue for Somerville.” The distinction means nothing to him. As in his work, Bechor is simply observing the outlines while aiming for the heart of what might be true. It’s an act of constant reinvention and reinterpretation, infused with possibilities and hope, like the poster on his wall at home that reads “Please release me from my old narrative.”
“The Flood” is another example. The audience will see, simultaneously, the actor on stage, the camera in the actor’s hand, and the projected image of what that camera makes — three layers of the same moment. “I want to expose the mechanism of the theater,” he says. “But also, the mechanism of the soul of these kids without staying there.”
I suddenly notice the time, that our appointed hour is almost up. Bechor has had nothing to eat, although he has finished his juice. I have been too consumed by the conversation to give any more attention to my bread pudding or my coffee. In a deliberate attempt to close out our conversation, I ask him of all the things he is — playwright, director, teacher, principal, actor – which resonates with him most?
“I think I’m fortunate to be a lot of things in this world,” he says. “Every role gives me an opportunity to touch a quality I didn’t touch before.” A pause. “But if you ask me what I am most — it is father.”
Bechor is close with his own father. He has two older siblings and tells me with a grin that he became a playwright partly because he arrived late to a family fracas already in progress. “I don’t understand why people are fighting. I just came,” he laughs. He observed, took notes, and thought more. The family philosopher, if you will.
He continues to play that role, it seems, in his immediate, treasured tribe of three. He has been with his wife 15 years — they met around the time of the Egyptian revolution, “which I think about as a revolution, to fall in love” — and he describes parenthood as the thing that has rewritten every category in his head. People sometimes ask him whether Adam Theater makes plays for families. “No,” he tells them. “For kids and parents. Not for families. If you want to see how your son sees the world, come too.”
A stronger
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