Arab Stages
ISSN: 2376-1148
Vol. 19 (Spring 2026), pp. 62-65
Hanna Eady’s Almonds Blossom in Deir Yassin is a haunting work of memory and moral reckoning, a four-character play that moves fluidly across time, psychic space, and geopolitical terrain. Rather than a straightforward historical drama, Eady constructs a piece that unfolds “in the Palestinian memory, in Gad’s head, in Israel, in Palestine, and on the site of Deir Yassin.” The result is a play that refuses temporal linearity and narrative comfort, embodying instead the fractured condition of a history too long repressed. In this production, the living and the dead share the stage as the massacre’s silenced testimony presses insistently against Gad, a former soldier who was present at the massacre, and his faltering attempts at justification and forgetting.
Seattle-based Dunya Productions deepens the resonances inherent in the text by situating it in the former Cherry Street Mosque, a nearly century-old building that has served at different times as a Jewish school, an Islamic school, and now as the emerging Cherry Street Village—a joint endeavor among interfaith and arts organizations. As the city’s Central District undergoes rapid transformation, the effort to restore this building as a community hub becomes an act of preservation and imagination, resisting the erasures that urban development often produces.
Set on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, the work insists that memory is not past; it is a present tense, a haunting that continues to shape those who survive and those who inherit. At its center is Gad, an aging Israeli man tormented by visions and memories he cannot control. He is the last surviving member of his military unit, which had been involved in the Deir Yassin massacre. His psychiatrist, Dr. Levi, accompanies him to the site of the former village, now a mental institution, in an attempt at therapeutic exposure and in preparation for a celebration honoring him at that site. Instead of resolution, the visit collapses the fragile border between hallucination and haunting, seemingly summoning Amal and Zidan, a father-daughter duo who initially appear as ghosts, but gradually reveal themselves as embodiments of history and truth.
Amal uses poetic and incantatory language to cut through Gad’s rationalizations as he denies his past acts. Her exhortation, “Come out of the darkness… show your bloody hands,” is both an accusation and an invitation to confess. As an audience member, I was not certain to what extent Amal was real; she seemed to always occupy a liminal space that defied categorization. Was Amal both a living 70-year-old woman and a ghost who haunted Gad? In my interpretation, she was simultaneously a ghost, a memory, a witness, and a child.
To have the main Palestinian character occupy this opaque space seemed odd, as the Israeli characters seemed to occupy very specific characterizations. Dr. Levi, a representative of institutional authority, attempts to manage Gad and his deteriorating mental state, offering medication and rehearsing the script he is expected to recite at the ceremony honoring him and his military unit. But her own encounters with Amal destabilize her certainty. Her insistence that Gad focus on his own mental well-being, divorced from historical reality, reveals the limitations of psychological frameworks that avoid political truth. The past demands to be confronted, through the presence of Amal and Zidan. The script’s interplay between the psychological and political gives the play its charge.
The dramaturgical structure slowly builds toward the play’s devastating reversal: Zidan, the elderly Palestinian man we think is Amal’s father, confesses that he is not what he seems. He reveals that he was once a Jewish Irgun fighter who participated in the massacre. Zidan was shot and abandoned by his fellow fighters, only to be rescued by Amal’s father, who placed a keffiyeh around his neck before being killed moments later. Mistaken for a Palestinian because of the keffiyeh, Zidan adopted a new identity, “Zidan Yassin,” raising the infant Amal as his daughter. Zidan’s confession thus resonates as both personal tragedy and collective indictment, exposing how violence reverberates across generations and identities. This revelation reframes the relationship between the two characters and transforms Amal’s presence onstage from that of a protected child into a living embodiment of the history Zidan carries. Amal’s final proclamation, “HOPE! That’s my name,” echoes through the theatre not as naïveté but as an insistence on memory and the continuity of Palestinian presence. Dramaturgically, this shifts the audience’s attention from the perpetrator’s confession to the persistence of Palestinian life, positioning Amal’s declaration as both a reclamation of narrative and a gesture toward the future.
Eady, who grew up inside the Green Line, belongs to a lineage of Palestinian theatre that uses fractured temporality to counter attempts at erasure.[1] Yet Almonds Blossom in Deir Yassin is distinctive in its focus on interrogating the psychological architecture of denial among its Israeli characters. In the United States, there has been a necessary dialogue on the representational discourse of plays from and about the SWANA world. While essential, these frameworks sometimes sidestep deeper questions of historical responsibility, narrative control, and the ethics of staging political trauma. Eady’s play pushes these conversations further. It challenges audiences, particularly American ones accustomed to consuming stories about the Middle East through a humanitarian or apolitical lens, to confront the structural and historical specificity of Palestinian dispossession.
Visually, this production was simple but striking. The stage was dominated by a single bare almond tree, its branches twisting upward like an arrested gesture. Leo Mayberry’s projections animated the tree in slow, subtle transformations; blossoms emerged, trembled, and fell. Mayberry expanded the visual field with images of Palestinian landscapes—terraces, stone walls, olive groves—and later with horrifying scenes from Gaza. These projections anchored the story within a broader continuum of violence. They reminded viewers that the ghosts of Deir Yassin are not relics of a distant past but part of ongoing dispossession and massacre.
Image 1: Nabra Nelson as Amal and Tom Wiseley as Gad. Photo Credit: Samia El-Moslimany.
The performances were uniformly strong, with Nabra Nelson’s Amal at the center. Nelson brought extraordinary depth to the role. Clad in a richly embroidered Palestinian thobe, she embodied Amal with paradoxical stillness and volatility: Her gestures were small but precise, her shifts between tenderness and accusation seamless (Image 1). Her voice, resonant and controlled, carried the weight of generations. She was not just a character; she embodied a lineage.
Tom Wiseley’s portrayal of Gad was also compelling. He captured the character’s oscillation between rationalization and collapse, his voice revealing layers of denial, fear, and yearning for absolution. Wiseley also designed the lighting and served as production manager, a testament to Dunya Productions’ collaborative ethos. Alyssa Norling’s Dr. Levi brought sharpness and restraint to her role, making the character’s clinical rationality feel both chilling and heartbreakingly inadequate. Bradley Goodwill’s Zidan, with his quiet gravitas and understated emotionality, grounded the play’s final confession with devastating clarity.
The sonic landscape, composed by renowned Palestinian musician Habib Shehadeh Hanna, enriched the production. The music was aching, ritualistic, and melodic, and it served as both emotional undercurrent and narrative guide. It marked shifts in time, underscored moments of confrontation, and imbued the performance with the weight of ceremony. Dramaturg Ed Mast provided accessible and essential context for audience members unfamiliar with Deir Yassin, available both in the program and in the lobby; this helped situate the play within a broader political and historical frame. On opening night, the post-show conversation led by organizers from No Tech for Apartheid extended the production’s reach, connecting the themes of historical complicity to contemporary technological infrastructures that enable state violence. The conversation echoed the play’s refusal of closure. It demanded that audiences remain unsettled, recognizing that the past is not dormant but animated, always insisting on return. In the end, Almonds Blossom in Deir Yassin offers no catharsis, nor does it attempt to redeem its characters through forgiveness. Instead, it insists on truth-telling as the precondition for healing. It invites audiences to bear witness not as passive observers but as participants in an unresolved story, one that continues to shape the present through its echoes, absences, and persistent calls for justice.
Bibliography, References & Endnotes
[1] “Inside the Green Line” refers to the territory that Israel took control of after the Nakba, demarcated by the 1949 Armistice Line, which was often drawn in green ink on maps.
About The Author(s)
Marina Johnson (Marina-Johnson.com) is a PhD candidate in TAPS with PhD minors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Certificate in Critical Consciousness and Anti-Oppressive Praxis. Prior to arriving at Stanford, Johnson received her MFA in Directing and taught at Beloit College for three years. Johnson continues to work as a director and dramaturg while also co-hosting Kunafa and Shay, a MENA/SWANA theatre podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons. During her most recent fieldwork, she directed several productions with Al Harah Theatre and taught directing workshops at ASHTAR Theatre.
Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora.
The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research.
