Israeli playwrights-directors Nissim Aloni and Hanoch Levin developed their dramatic patterns and performative conventions through a complex process of repetition and innovation within the Western theatre cultures. In their plays and performances they conducted two dialogues at the same time – one with western Mythology and the other with European, Jewish and Israeli History. In the seminar we will read Aloni's plays The American Princess and Aunt Lisa, and Levin's plays Shitz, Everybody Wants to Live, and Murder. We will discuss the plays in their historical context - social, political and cultural - as well as their dramaturgical and theatrical frameworks - the transformation of myth into drama and the design of the tragic conflict in the dramatic and theatrical conventions, while following the composition of comic and tragic effect in the plays and on the stage.