‘War Was Visited Upon These People’: Play About Oct. 7 Comes to DC

After his first interview of a survivor of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, playwright Phelim McAleer says he knew he had to write a play telling the true story of that day.

Following performances in New York City, the play “OCTOBER 7” will be performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 28.

“I just realized this is like a movie, a bad movie, and I knew after the first interview, we had an amazing story,” McAleer, a journalist, playwright, and filmmaker, told The Daily Signal.

McAleer and his wife, Ann McElhinney, reside in Los Angeles but are originally from Ireland. They happened to be in Europe when Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking another 251 people hostage to Gaza.

Playwrights and journalists Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney (Unreported Story Society)

The couple observed how Europeans immediately talked “about the tragedy of the electricity being turned off in Gaza,” and watched as anti-Israel protests formed in the U.S. less than 24 hours after the attack. They quickly prepared to travel to Israel.

As journalists, McAleer says he and his wife were concerned that the true story of Oct. 7 was “going to be missed” and would not “be reported properly.”

“They talk about journalism being the first rough draft of history, and you know, we were just concerned that no one was going to write that draft. It was more about the journalism than anything else,” he said.

They arrived in Israel only a handful of days after the attack and began conversations with survivors of the NOVA music festival, family members of deceased victims, and heroes who jumped into action to save others.

One interviewee is Itamar Alus, an off-duty police officer who left his house with his pistol and nine bullets on the morning of Oct. 7 and managed to save the lives of an off-duty IDF soldier and a rabbi. He then rescued a family hiding on a roof and also killed two terrorists that day.

Israeli Command Sergeant Major Itamar Alus (Herzl Yosef)

Alus survived the Oct. 7 terrorist attack but tragically passed away of “medical causes” at the beginning of January.

The Kennedy Center performance is dedicated to Alus, and is a dramatized staged reading featuring 14 actors and drawing directly from survivor interviews.

McAleer says finding the stories was easy, but the biggest challenges were telling the story of Oct. 7 in a way that “didn’t edit out the truth,” and including as many details as possible in roughly 90 minutes.

“That’s a lot of editing and a lot of crafting of a story,” McAleer said.

The central mission of the performance, according to the playwright, is to “show people that the war was visited upon these people, that they didn’t start the war, that there would have been no war in Gaza without October 7.”

The play’s tour has included three universities: Princeton University; the University of California, Los Angeles; and Bowdoin College in Maine.

The performance at UCLA on Oct. 7, 2024, was “one of the saddest experiences,” according to the playwright, as “protests on the campus” opposed the performance and security measures included “hundreds of police officers” and “bomb-sniffing dogs in the theater.”

“And it was just, it was very sad to see that people telling the truth about their experience, Jewish voices needed that much protection at UCLA.”

McAleer says his hope is that the play will next be performed in Ireland, and ultimately that it will “live forever.”

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