A Private Meeting

Habait Theatre

Written by Maya Koren

Directed by Yael Goldberg Shimoni


The play describes a private acting class given by a well-known teacher to a young student. The encounter slips in and out of crossing professional and personal boundaries. 

The story is based on the method of a well-known Israeli theatre director, teacher, and artistic director. The show presents in a hyper-realistic way how the teacher invades the student’s soul, using her yearning for recognition and success, thus causing her to commit acts that go beyond her free will.

The choice of performance space is site-specific and not coincidental, as this is the actual space where these private meetings originally took place. This is a story about art and the fine, almost invisible, line between the legitimate and the illicit.

Maya Koren is a graduate of the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School’s Screenwriting Department (2022), and ERACM – École regionale d’acteurs de Cannes et Marseille (2019), where she studied acting. She worked with Laurent Brethome, Gerard Watkins, Guillaume Severac, Jeanne Sarah Deldicq, and Aurelien Desclozeaux. In 2017, she graduated from Nissan Nativ Acting Studio. She participated in a screenwriting workshop led by Asaf Zippor (2023), a playwriting workshop led by Roy Maliach Reshef (2020), and others.

She wrote The Teacher – a series currently in development with production company Endemol Shine. Winner of the Award for Best Script for a TV Series from YES TV.

She teaches acting at the Cameri Theatre’s New Generation Group, and at The Studio led by Gal Amitai.

Yael Goldberg Shimoni is a theatre director. She graduated from Tel Aviv University – Theatre Directing and Communal Theatre (2010). She directed Bomb Shelter Stories (Habima National Theatre, 2023), and Amiram (Acco Festival of Alternative Israeli Theatre, 2023; winner of the directing award); Singing with Ariela (Tzavta Theatre), Problems in the Philosophy of Morals (Habima National Theatre), Gently (Haifa Municipal Theatre), and Not Funny (Tzavta Theatre). Staged readings include, Don’t Tell Mama by Noam Gil (Beit Lessin Theatre), and My Wife by Arnon Weiss (Cameri Theatre).

Yael was a teacher and director at Platforma – an activist theatre for women who suffer from violence, and a member of the Tzavta Fringe Theatre Artistic Committee.