March 27 (Bloomberg) -- I expected to be greeted with placards and protests Wednesday night at the first New York reading of “Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza.”

Caryl Churchill’s 8-minute piece about Jews and Palestinians already enraged many critics last month at London’s Royal Court Theatre. One called it a “blood libel” against Jews.

Here in the East Village, however, I found a sharp, brief cry of rage defanged by “contextualization” and more polemics from the audience than anything spoken from the stage.

The New York Theatre Workshop arranged three performances of the play wrapped in discussions and audience participation. This so-called balancing act always sets off my baloney detector, and Wednesday night proved no different.

Churchill is a take-no-prisoners British playwright who has substituted political stridency for artistry in her recent work. “Seven Jewish Children” comprises seven swift scenes spanning the last century, in which Jewish adults discuss what to tell their (unseen) children about the current lives of Jews.

The early exchanges are set in Eastern Europe and then during the Holocaust. The later ones unfold in Israel, where Churchill’s Jews, once victims, have been transformed into Jewish victimizers.

The workshop assembled a stellar cast that included playwrights Jon Robin Baitz, Wallace Shawn and Michael Cristofer, actresses Kathleen Chalfant and Kathryn Grody and stage director Andre Gregory -- quite a tony crew for a work that fills fewer than 10 pages.

Air Strikes

In the most disturbing monologue, written in response to the Israeli air strikes against Gaza last summer and fall, a character says: “Tell her they’re terrorists. Tell her they’re filth ... tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them ... tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out ...”

The reading took place on a bare stage except for a table around which the actors, often barely audible, sat. Simple lighting cues separated the scenes. Whatever sympathy Churchill may claim toward Jews’ history of displacement and oppression gives way with astonishing speed in this compressed format to outrage over Israel’s brutal attacks. As polemic, it was simplistic; as theater it had a laserlike intensity.

Audience Plant

As fodder for a public forum, however, it was a dud. The “conversation” was led by Laura Flanders, a feminist writer and cable television host who made an unconvincing stab at neutrality (“It’s really a play for all of us”) before urging the conversation toward a pro-Palestinian point of view. She was abetted by an audience plant, identified as “Connie,” who helpfully described the U.S. as “the most rapacious empire the world has ever seen” and Israel as “an unsinkable aircraft carrier for U.S. imperialist policy” as if she were reading the menu from a nearby restaurant in Alphabet City.

Remarkably, her comments prompted neither pumped fists nor boos from a mostly docile audience.

Finally, Gregory, the emigre director of such films as “Vanya on 42nd St.,” took the stage and read aloud the entire script again. Weird or not, it was the most powerful statement of the 75-minute-long event. By taking Churchill at her words, this one actor lent real drama to the evening. Drama worth talking about over coffee -- anywhere but at the New York Theatre Workshop.

Tonight’s discussion will be led by media critic Mark Crispin Miller.

At 79 E. Fourth St. Information: +1-212-780-9037; http://www.nytw.org.

(Jeremy Gerard is an editor for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Jeremy Gerard in New York at jgerard2@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: March 27, 2009 08:42 EDT