In 1997, after many invitations, David Hare, a fifty-year-old British playwright, finally visited the fifty-year-old state of Israel while his play Amy's View was in rehearsal in Tel Aviv. During his visit, he traveled around the country, and his discussions with Jewish settlers encompassed the idealism, contradictions, and paranoia at the heart of modern Zionism in the wake of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. In the play that resulted-written to be performed by the author himself-Hare offers a meditation on this extraordinary trip to both Israel and the Palestinian territory, questioning his own values as searchingly as he examines the powerful beliefs of those he met.

Accompanying Via Dolorosa is Hare's lecture "When Shall We Live?," which also focuses on questions of art and faith-the same questions that have been interwoven throughout all of his extraordinary plays and have placed him in the first rank of dramatists writing today.