When you're not a native English speaker, the English that comes out of your mouth isn’t quite English — it’s a hybrid language, shaped by your mother tongue, your education, your self-confidence (or lack of it), and the emotional weather of the moment. It can be alienating to speak in a language that isn’t fully yours — and yet, strangely, there’s something deeply you in it. The fractures reveal more than fluency ever could.
A PLAY IN BROKEN ENGLISH follows Ella, a young Israeli actress chasing her big break in Berlin, where she crosses paths with Valentyn, a rising Ukrainian director with just the right amount of tortured charm. As they fumble their way through mixed signals, translations, and cross-cultural chemistry, Ella begins to receive messages from home — fragmented, surreal, and terrifying. Israel, it seems, is vanishing, slowly and incomprehensibly, from the face of the earth.
Presented as a staged reading, this intimate format highlights the rawness of the text and the vulnerability of the characters, inviting the audience to lean in and listen between the lines. Through humor, longing, and disorientation, the play explores what it means to perform — as an actor, as a refugee, as a human being who no longer knows how to introduce themselves.
It’s a story for anyone who has ever had to leave, and for anyone who has ever struggled to be understood
Text: Amir Zloter
Directing: Kerem Hillel
Ella: Naama Manor
Valentyn: Ivan Doan
