REVIEW: TO THE GOOD PEOPLE OF GAZA: THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

TO THE GOOD PEOPLE OF GAZA: THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE. By Jackie Lubeck and Theatre Day Productions. Edited by Samer Al-Saber. London, UK: Methuen Drama, 2022; pp. 282 +vii.

By Marina Johnson

The title of the anthology of Jackie Lubeck and Theatre Day Productions’ plays, To the Good People of Gaza, speaks back to a world that has seen the dehumanization of Palestinians in mainstream media for centuries and, in the past year, seen an escalation of this during the genocide on Gaza. The anthology, edited and with an introduction by Samer Al-Saber, allows readers a glimpse into theatrical productions in Gaza from 2010-2015. Theatre Day Productions in Gaza had an agreement with the United Nations Refugee and Works Agency (UNWRA) to give students a “theatre day” during the summer of 2010 as a summer camp. Summer camps at the time were filled with activities like sports, painting, and music, but did not have any theatre, arguably one of the more complicated summer camp programs because theatre necessarily requires rehearsal time, a performance venue, and additional storytelling elements like props, set, and lighting. Once it began, this camp continued in 2011, 2012, and 2013. The Israeli attacks on Gaza prevented a summer camp from happening in 2014, but Lubeck worked with the students during the academic year of 2015 instead. To the Good People of Gaza: Theatre for Young People contains the plays that were produced during those trying years. This anthology is more than a historical record of Gazan theatre—it is a testament to the vital role performance plays in shaping identity, resilience, and community under siege. In this review, I examine how Lubeck’s plays engage with daily life in Gaza, balancing humor and hardship, and consider the anthology’s significance as both a cultural document and a call to action.

The creation, rehearsal, and performance of these plays in Gaza demonstrates the dedication of Lubeck and the team behind Theatre Day Productions. The education system in Gaza is complicated, with not enough buildings to accommodate all students simultaneously. For that reason, students would often attend school in shifts. Theatre Day Productions adopted this shift model, rehearsing in multiple locations across Gaza with two completely different groups of students per day. Over the course of the 10- to 16-week program, they reached tens of thousands of students each summer. In a four-play series, each play was performed by three separate teams, with two performances daily for audiences of 200 to 250 children, six days a week for several weeks. This anthology, for the first time, presents these plays, which capture dual forces shaping Gazan life—an urge for joy and freedom alongside the pervasive presence of destruction and death.

To the Good People of Gaza provides theatremakers, educators, and those reading the collection with a privileged view into life in Gaza from 2010-2015. These plays reflect elements of daily life that the makers deemed important for the youth to participate in, grapple with, and process through live performance. Reading them now honors the creative and educational forces behind each play, as well as the youth performers who invested their time and energy into plays that speak directly to their life experiences.

Jackie Lubeck wrote the plays herself and then made edits based on the actors’ contributions in the rehearsal room. In the anthology, the plays are divided into five sections by the year they were written, and several plays comprise each section. They were performed by and for Palestinian refugee youth. While they are each worth reading in their entirety, I want to note two stand-out pieces, The Electricians and The Shop. The play The Electricians begins with a King responding to emails he has received from his subjects. The Wazir is a comedic character whose first answer to any problem is to threaten arrest. The King calls for the Wazir as he wonders why his emails won’t send. After threatening to arrest the computer mouse, the Wazir reveals that there is a power outage. The King and the Wazir head to people’s homes directly to respond to their emails in person. The first man they visit, Man with the Event, is proposing an event in response to the King’s past request to keep the kingdom clean. His event will focus on education around sorting garbage and proper disposal of materials such as batteries and medicine. Next, they visit the Shopkeeper with Extra Candy who has ordered too much candy and wants to distribute it to children to make them happy. After all: “Life is not only bitter. Life is sweet. And candy makes it sweeter” (123). The King and the Wazir finally visit The Brothers Electric who are a site to behold. The first brother is holding potatoes connected by wire and the second brother has a garden hose wrapped around his body and holds a large watering can. Both of them have cables attached to their ears. They seek to find new sources of electricity to make life easier in the kingdom. They inspire the King and Wazir to keep trying to find ways that they can make the kingdom a better place to live, by using their hearts and minds. The play is an allegory that deals directly with issues that people face in Gaza. Power outages were not unusual in Gaza as Israel has limited electricity and water usage in Gaza for years, so this moment would have resonated with the audience. Lubeck wrote Man with the Event as a character who both entertained and educated the audience about keeping the country clean as the responsibility falls on them as citizens since the Israeli siege makes even supposedly simple matters like garbage disposal complicated. It is easy to imagine the play inspiring those who participated in it and saw it to think twice about alternative sources of energy and their own roles in keeping their cities clean.

Other plays are more directly related to life under Israeli bombardment during that time and are set more literally in Gaza, like the play The Shop, which features three girls who are making a video for their father who is presumably hospitalized after his shop is bombed. Three of his daughters go about cleaning the damage and debris in order to be able to re-open the shop for customers, all the while reassuring their father, via the video they are recording, that life will go on and that Salwa, the oldest sister, will be able to get married once their father is well enough. As they search through the debris, they bring the reality of life in Gaza to the forefront, as many in the audience would have been intimately familiar with the circumstances shown in front of them. The Shop shows the destruction that has become normal in Gaza as an area besieged by Israel while also reflecting on the Palestinian resilience and hope that has long been a defining feature of the Palestinians in Gaza.

The last series of plays in the anthology are grouped together under the collection “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Inspired by the Wallace Stevens poem of the same name, Lubeck picked thirteen images to explain Gaza that would resonate with residents: “siege, religion, family, sand, prison, birds, noise, sandwiches, depression, sea, heat, smiles, and phones” (viii). Lubeck adds in her preface, “to these qualities, I add a stubborn desire to hope, to go on, and to assume that something might one day change” (viii). The plays in this section are One Thousand Questions, The Snow Trip, The Boys in the Mirror, and The Boys Who Can’t Sit Still. Like the poem with whom they share a name, these plays engage with a multiplicity of perspectives, contradictions, and paradoxes to provide a minimalist and occasionally surreal view of Gaza. The texts in this section invite the reader to grapple with the literal and metaphorical reality of life in Gaza alongside the youth who performed the pieces.

When the summer camp project with UNRWA began in 2010, Gaza had been under siege since 2007, leaving the two million plus people there virtually trapped, and the 2008-2009 Israeli bombardments of Gaza, which lasted for 22 days and killed approximately 1400 Palestinians, were still fresh in everyone’s minds.[1] In the preface, Lubeck writes that she felt herself and those around her become sick of complaining about their circumstances and the “dire political situation” in the Gaza Strip.

Lubeck wanted to write plays that recognized the “good people” of Gaza with whom she lived and worked daily. Not originally from Palestine, Jackie Lubeck arrived in 1972 and worked there until her recent retirement. In 1995, she co-founded Theatre Day Productions with her husband and collaborator, Jan Willems. Lubeck’s nearly five-decade career in Palestinian theatre meant that she was deeply embedded in the community, writing Palestinian plays with and for Palestinians.

Jackie Lubeck is a playwright who writes across genres in a witty, nuanced, and deeply heartfelt way; her plays show a deep engagement with the children of Gaza. Written between 2010 and 2015, these plays amplify the heart and soul of the Palestinian youth who performed them. These plays remind the reader of the realities that Palestinians in Gaza have known for years as they faced death and destruction and, simultaneously, these texts highlight the longing for laughter and freedom they felt, too. The collection serves not only as a testament to the strength of Gaza’s youth, but also as a powerful tool for humanizing a population too often reduced to headlines and statistics. Through these plays, the voices of young Palestinians emerge with clarity and force, inviting readers to engage with their personal stories, dreams, and struggles. To the Good People of Gaza ultimately calls on its audience to witness, reflect, and, perhaps most importantly, to act—to recognize the humanity that endures in the face of immense hardship, and to stand in solidarity with those striving for justice and dignity.

To the Good People of Gaza is a necessary book for theatre makers who work with youth, advocates for the Palestinian cause, educators, Palestinians in the diaspora, and anyone who seeks to understand more about the people of Gaza. Engaging with this book is an act of bearing witness to Gaza as it was before, and taking in the stories that Lubeck and the performers felt were crucial to audiences in Gaza. Now, as we are confronted with a Gaza that has faced unspeakable horror through genocide, those of us outside of Gaza have this book to reflect on and use in our education, solidarity work, and continued advocacy for Palestine and the Palestinian people.

Marina Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in TAPS at Stanford University (M.F.A in Directing, University of Iowa). Her dissertation research focuses on Palestinian performance from 2015 to the present. Johnson is the co-host of Kunafa and Shay, a MENA theatre podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons, and they are also a member of Silk Road Rising’s Polycultural Institute. Johnson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Theatre/Practice, Arab Stages,  Decolonizing Dramaturgy in a Global Context (Bloomsbury), Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders and Sexualities (Routledge), Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance, Volume I: Performers (Bloomsbury). Prior to her Ph.D., she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Beloit College for three years. Select recent directing credits include: The Wolves (Stanford) The Shroud Maker (International Voices Project), Shakespeare’s Sisters (Stanford), The Palestinian Youth Monologues (Stanford), Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche (Beloit College), and In the Next Room (Beloit College).  www.marina-johnson.com

[1] Al Jazeera. “Timeline: Israel’s Attacks on Gaza since 2005.” Al Jazeera, August 7, 2022. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/7/timeline-israels-attacks-on-gaza-since-2005.