Nola Chilton

Nola Chilton, born Celia Truger on February 12, 1922, in Brooklyn, New York, was an American-born Israeli theater director, acting teacher, and Broadway performer. The daughter of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, Chilton grew up in circumstances shaped by early hardship; her mother died of tuberculosis when Chilton was twelve, and her father worked as a jewelry engraver and food peddler. She died on October 8, 2021, at the age of 99.

Chilton trained as an actor under Lee Strasberg and worked at the Actors Studio, where she coached actors and directed. Her Broadway career included an appearance in 1948 in Skipper Next to God. In 1960, she directed an off-off Broadway production of Dead End, a play about poverty-stricken young people, in which Dustin Hoffman appeared. Her work during this period also served as an influence on The Open Theater, an experimental theater group founded in New York City by her students and active from 1963 to 1973, which drew on her post-method acting technique through a collaborative, politically engaged process.

In 1963, Chilton immigrated to Israel, settling initially in Kiryat Gat, a small town in the northern Negev. She worked briefly for the Cameri Theater before relocating, first to Kibbutz Ma'agan Michael and then to Kibbutz Yasur, where she adopted a two-year-old girl. Her Israeli directing credits at the Cameri Theatre included The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, and in 1965 she directed the Israeli production of Barefoot in the Park, produced by Giora Godik at the Nachmani Hall.

Beginning in the 1970s, Chilton developed a practice rooted in Documentary Theater, building productions through interviews, research, and ensemble work with a regular group of actors. During this period she directed Coexistence, which addressed the Palestinian issue; A Bicycle for a Year, focused on development towns; and The Coming Days, which examined aging. She also established a theater project in Kiryat Shmona that introduced new productions to the city, involving students from Tel Aviv University, among them Itzik Weingarten, Ofra Weingarten, Moni Moshonov, Sandra Sade, Shlomo Bar-Aba, Hava Ortman, Dalik Wollinitz, and Arnon Zadok. From 1973 to 1975, she collaborated with playwright Yehoshua Sobol at the Haifa Theatre on The Twentieth Night, a play developed through improvisations with actors that subsequently ran on numerous stages across Israel. In 1976, she directed Kriza in Haifa, one of the first Israeli productions to address ethnic discrimination against the Mizrahi population.

Chilton's later directing work spanned several decades and a wide range of venues and playwrights. In 1988, she directed Investigation at the Cameri Theatre, comprising two short plays by Daniela Carmi. In 1990, she directed John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men at the Habima Theatre, followed by Daniela Carmi's Israel Ten Points at the Haifa Theatre in 1992. In 1994, she directed A.B. Yehoshua's Last Treatments at Tzavta Tel Aviv, with a cast that included Gedalia Besser, Germaine Unikovsky, Shmulik Calderon, and Miki Mavorach. Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya followed in 1996 at the Sifria Theatre. In 1999, she directed Yehoshua Sobol's Strangers at the Habima Theatre, starring Moni Moshonov and Sandra Sade. She independently produced and directed What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, based on a Raymond Carver short story, in 2001, and in 2003 directed Itzik Weingarten's Homeless at the Tmuna Theatre.

Her work continued into the following decade with the bilingual children's play Samir and Yonatan on the Planet Mars by Daniela Carmi, directed as part of the 2004 Haifa Festival for Children's Plays. In 2005, she directed Sobol's Real Time at the Habima Theatre. In 2006, she directed Winter in Qalandia, based on a book by Leah Nirgad, at the Arab-Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa in cooperation with Seminar HaKibbutzim College. That same year, a tribute event was held in her honor at Tel Aviv University, with the participation of Oded Kotler, Moni Moshonov, Sandra Sade, Laura Rivlin, Shlomo Bar-Aba, Yehoshua Sobol, and Eli Gorenstein, among others; the event was later restaged at the Women's Festival in Holon under the direction of her student Daniela Michaeli. In 2008, she directed Mohamed Kacimi's Holy Land at the Khan Theatre, a play about a Palestinian family's experience under Israeli occupation, and also directed Bedouins that year. Darfur at Home by Sobol followed in 2009, and in 2010 she directed Samuel Beckett's Endgame at the Khan Theatre. In 2012, she directed Fima at the Herzliya Ensemble Theatre, an adaptation of Amos Oz's book co-written with Assaf Ofek. In 2019, she collaborated with actor Dalik Wollinitz on Here and There in the Land of Israel, a solo performance based on Oz's writing, staged on the first anniversary of Oz's death.

Alongside her directing career, Chilton taught in the Department of Theatre Arts at Tel Aviv University beginning in the early 1970s, holding the position of Senior Lecturer for more than four decades. In the early 1980s, she was granted the rank of Professor-Artist. Her teaching encompassed physical theater, acting and directing methods, and actor coaching. Following the Yom Kippur War, she staged two productions within the department: What I Think About the War, which received the David's Harp Award in 1974, an honor Chilton subsequently returned in protest over the omission of sections of the play from television coverage; and Friends Talk to Gidi, a 1975 work centered on a department student, Gidi Rosenthal, who died in the war. Chilton retired from teaching in 2017 at the age of 95. She was married to author John Auerbach, who died in 2002, and was a resident of Kibbutz Sdot Yam in her later years. In 2013, she was awarded the Israel Prize for theater.