The story behind it

KATLOT grew out of an urgent need to make sense of an experience that was frightening, humiliating, absurd—and, at unexpected moments, very funny. Humor became a kind of shield: a way to preserve perspective and some sense of myself inside a system that was constantly defining me from the outside.

While I was in jail, many of the things around me did not seem funny at all. They seemed ordinary. Routine. That was precisely what interested me. Because of experiences I had been through before, and because I was already familiar with the idea of the “banality of evil,” I had learned to pay attention to the mundane: the forms, the procedures, the small conversations, the people explaining that they were simply doing their jobs. Only when I wrote these moments down—and looked at them from outside—did some of them become absurdly funny. I began to think of this as the “banality of amusement”: situations that are normalized from within, but whose absurdity becomes visible once you step outside them.

The subtitle, “Diary of a Schmatta Revolutionary,” comes from the same instinct. It is first and foremost a joke at my own expense. I am not interested in presenting myself as a heroic revolutionary, but as an unlikely antihero who finds himself, almost by accident, confronting institutions vastly more powerful than he is.

That tension is at the heart of KATLOT. The play asks what happens when a society shaped by historical memory, traditions of argument, and suspicion of arbitrary power begins turning the machinery of the state against dissent from within.

By combining documentary material with dark comedy, I want to make that machinery visible without losing the strange humanity inside it. The humor does not make the experience less serious. For me, it became another way of seeing it clearly.