Search Results

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. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 19 Visit Journal Homepage Download Issue Table of Contents Amir al-Azraki Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Deniz Başar Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Marina Johnson Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Jovita Jacob Selwyn Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Marina Johnson Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Hadia Mousa Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. Arab Stages 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. Visit Journal Homepage

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Robert Wilson Yearbook Volume 1 Visit Journal Homepage Robert Wilson and Norway Steve Earnest By Published on May 1, 2026 Download Article as PDF Robert Wilson and Norway Steve Earnest Figure 1 Robert Wilson’s Edda , featuring images of Texas Robert Wilson emerged as an important figure in European theatre in the 1970s, following his production of Deafman Glance in Paris that prompted Louis Aragon’s famous “Open Letter to André Breton” regarding Wilson’s realization of the style of Surrealism. As additional works with German playwright Heiner Müller also followed, theatre companies from Northern Europe and Scandinavia immediately showed interest, and commissions from major state theatre companies began to appear. The 1998 production of Strindberg’s Ett Drömspiel ( A Dream Play ) in Stockholm’s Stadsteatern, Sweden, was Wilson’s first work in Scandinavia. It also marked his first music/sound collaboration with Michael Gottlieb. As the Wilsonian aesthetic was already in a highly developed phase, the Swedish audiences and press were particularly enthralled by Wilson’s combination of the visual picture with a well-developed soundscape. Wilson’s realization of Strindberg’s visual work was lauded in Sweden as a groundbreaking effort—described as “Weirdly hypnotic; a series of painterly tableau evoking artists as different as Magritte and Andrew Wyeth.” [1] Several productions were commissioned in Denmark during the early 2000s, including Woyzeck and The Black Rider (originally commissioned by Thalia Theater Hamburg in 1990) both of which played at the Betty Nansen Teatret in Copenhagen in 2000. In 2002 a special production entitled White Town was commissioned by the Bellevue Teatret for the recognition of the life and career of Danish theatre artist Arne Jacobsen. The first production of a Wilson work to appear in Norway was the 2005 production of Peer Gynt , commissioned by Det Norske Teatret in Oslo. Originally planned for a world tour, the production transferred to co-producer Det Neue Scene in Bergen before touring to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Three other productions by Robert Wilson have played in Norway: Edda Edda , produced by Det Norske Teatret in March 2017; Shakespeare’s Sonnets , produced by the Berliner Ensemble, later in May of that same year at the Bergen Theater Festival; and The Sandman , produced by Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus in 2019 at the Bergen Theater Festival. Since 2020 Wilson’s productions have been featured on occasion in major Scandinavian theatre companies. This essay will focus on productions in Norway and will explore Wilson’s aesthetic and its relationship to Norwegian society as well as to certain aspects of Norway’s social and cultural nature. The legacy of Ibsen and the tradition of both realistic and nonrealistic versions of his plays in Norway are well documented. Peer Gynt is the most often produced work by Ibsen, or anyone else, in Norway. The long history of production of the work includes ballets, operas, plays, children’s productions, films, and undoubtedly other types of performances not mentioned. As is noted in the extensive paper “Robert Wilson’s Staging of Peer Gynt and the Norwegian Tradition,” by Keld Hyldig, the work has maintained three basic characteristics throughout its long production history: 1) “an extensive use of spectacular Norwegian sceneries,” 2) lyrical, mood-creating music, and 3) recognizable and thus “natural” representations of Norwegian characters. [2] Throughout its lengthy history Peer Gynt gained the reputation as being representative of the Norwegian way of life and grew to represent “all things Norwegian” as it explores, in epic fashion, over fifty years of action that the epic work chronicles. As it predated strictly realistic staging, Peer Gynt was never bound to a particular approach nor was it relegated to a lower status as one of Ibsen’s “early plays.” The play’s exploration of Norwegian culture and society as well certain elements from the working class naturally led it to numerous Brecht-inspired productions in the 1970s, but most experts point to Ingmar Bergman’s staging in 1957 at Malmö City Theatre as being the via negativa of a new psycho-surreal approach whereby much of the play’s action occurred in Peer’s subconscious. Bergman’s approach realized the play as “an internal struggle where Peer seeks to find his own humanity” [3] and paved the way for numerous highly visual yet uniquely Norwegian productions that emphasized the music and folklore of Norway in the nineteenth century in addition to exploring various theatrical means as storytelling devices. Wilson’s later visionary staging certainly landed as a necessary sector in the trajectory of the work’s evolution. Wilson’s Peer Gynt began rehearsals in March 2003 at the Watermill Center on Long Island, New York. The Watermill workshop yielded an extensive set of drawings or a “Project Book” for Peer Gynt as well as a staged collection of physical images developed by participants in the Watermill Summer Program and set to music by composer Michael Galasso. Practical work began later that same year at Det Norske Teatret in Olso. Apparently, Wilson had conceived the work in typically massive scale and the initial drawings and other speculations had yielded a potential running time of eight hours or more. [4] As is the norm with commissioned productions of this nature, the extended rehearsal period was one year. Stage A, or table work, consisted of a few weeks and finished with a bauprobe (rough staging rehearsal) of several days. During the rehearsal time of Stages A and B, Von Arx developed scenography and discussed with Wilson and the other members of the production team numerous individuals like actors, dramaturgs and those involved in the process. From that table work a skeleton structure known as the “silent play” emerged and elements such as architecture, light, and other visual elements were contemplated and considered. Actors from both Det Norske Teatret in Oslo as well as Det Nationale Scene in Bergen were selected to supplement the skeleton cast, and the full cast was finalized some six months prior to the opening. The final stage, which lasted only around one month, consisted of the addition of the text to the work. For Peer Gynt , Det Norske Teatret had contracted Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse to create a new text for the work that was a greater reflection of Norway’s “new language” that emerged following Norway’s independence and breakaway from bokmål or the previous everyday Norwegian language that was highly influenced by the Danish language. [5] In its original form, Peer Gynt includes some forty scenes and locations all over the globe and includes both the conscious and subconscious worlds. Typical of most of Ibsen’s works Peer Gynt was written in old Norwegian, and Fosse’s goal was to write the text in a “new Norwegian,” a language that included dialects from four prominent regions of Norway. [6] Fosse noted “the original was written in an old-fashioned Norwegian, that in reality was Danish. It was quite a job to adapt the work, but it made the play fresher, and in my opinion made Ibsen’s greatness as a writer more visible” [7] The playwright also noted “Bob Wilson has a great ear for the music of language, so the actors delivered their lines in an almost perfect way. It was impressive.” [8] Critics, even those known for more traditional tastes noted that both Wilson and Fosse had preserved the text and the play’s overall meaning and impact with a strong measure of success. In discussing his collaboration with Wilson, Fosse noted that they never really did actually “collaborate.” Fosse noted “I delivered a text, and he [Wilson] cut it.” But Fosse stated that he deeply admired Wilson’s talent for understanding a language that he didn’t understand in “a normal way.” Most of the textual adaptation was done by dramaturg Monica Ohlsson, who had worked with Wilson previously in Sweden and Denmark. Fosse was impressed with Wilson’s ability to successfully substitute a deeply meaningful theatrical language for the written text. Additionally, it was noted that Wilson had emphasized the spoken elongation of vowels throughout the work, which added to both the musicality as well as the “strange beauty” of his staging. [9] Figure 2 Gertrude Jynge and Robert Wilson during Peer Gynt rehearsals After the success of Peer Gynt , Det Norske Teatret had the desire to present another work directed by Wilson with text by Fosse. For this work, Fosse was tasked with providing a version of the Eddic Poems, Icelandic manuscripts from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Wide ranging in their subject matter, the Eddic poems are essentially pre-Christian literary works that deal with Norse gods and medieval legends from the Nordic countries, handling many crucial events such as the beginning of time and the naming of the gods. Fosse noted that he wrote the work, trying at the same to be “loyal to the originals but also making into a coherent play” [10] Edda had its world premiere in Oslo at Det Norske Teatret in March 2017. Music was provided by Arvo Pärt along with the duo Coco Rosie, costumes were designed by Jacques Reynaurd, and scenic and painterly elements designed by Swiss designer Serge von Arx. As is the case with all things Robert Wilson, all roads typically lead to Ann-Christin Rommen. Having worked as Wilson’s co-director for over three decades, Ms. Rommen has been a key figure in all performance and conceptual elements of Wilson’s performances since their initial collaboration in 1983 with The CIVIL warS . She noted that Wilson likes to consider works that are very close and important to particular societies and cultures. He then likes to examine them in different ways, to find humor in the works, to “unseat the works from their high place” and look at them in a more playful, yet introspective way. In considering Wilson’s work on Edda , Rommen noted: Bob has always been drawn to universal myths. For example, I La Galigo the creation myth of the people of Sulawesi, Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the story of Die Nibelungen, Homer’s The Odyssey , Goethe’s Faust , and, of course, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. These works all include the themes of good versus evil, incest, weird creatures like trolls and the cyclops, and they all tell stories that are relevant for all mankind. [11] Figure 3 Henrik Rafaelsen as Odin and Gjertrud Jynge as Volva in Edda Certain elements of the Nordic myths were appealing to Wilson. A study of the scene breakdown with Rommen and Carl Morten Amundsen, dramaturg of Det Norske Teatret and a member of the Edda dramaturgical team, revealed several scenes when many of the Norse gods would come together for meetings and would need to remind Ovid, the “All Father and God of war and death” about some occurrence or event that he had forgotten. Wilson viewed Odin’s age-related conditions as being like those of humans who become more childlike and sillier as they grow older. A number of comic nonsense dances were given to Odin, and there was also a scene in which Odin tested death by hanging upside down and playing electric guitar. In early table work, Wilson had planned to realize the original Norse legend of Odin “hanging upside down” but added the action of his singing a rock song while playing an electric guitar. As the legend goes, Odin remained in that hanging position for nine days in order to do some inner soul searching. [12] Another important scene involved Odin’s son Tor and his meeting with Volva and the accidental severing of the Midgaardsorm, Volva’s companion and the snake who holds the world together. To connect these major events, Wilson created a number of “knee plays” as was the case with the CIVIL warS . These short works linked together the various stories and allowed for important scenic transitions to happen during the scenes. For Wilson, it was very important that they happened “in the clouds,” behind a transparent cyclorama that was backed by an aluminum metal wall—defining the place as the infinite clouds of time. This allowed the work to transcend the ordinary world and present the story of the world’s creation. Pioneered by von Arx and Wilson, the combination of the semi-transparent cyclorama backed by the steel wall had become a unique facet of Wilson’s stage aesthetic since his early work in Norway and remains as one of the unique elements developed during his work there. Figure 4 Ann-Christin Rommen with Robert Wilson Two additional works have appeared in Norway as of August 2024— Shakespeare’s Sonnets in May 2017 and The Sandman in 2019. Both works appeared as part of the Bergen Theatre Festival at the performance space Grieghallen, Norway’s largest combined cultural and congress venue. Shakespeare’s Sonnets toured to Bergen from Berliner Ensemble while The Sandman toured from Dusseldorf Schauspielhaus in what was billed as one of the festival’s most adventurous works and played for only two performances on June 1 and 2, 2019. The Sandman was Wilson’s first collaboration with British pop star and rock composer Anna Calvi, notorious for the often sinister, undergirding soundtracks of shows like Peaky Blinders and other dark film projects. The work was received as a “grusical,” a ghastly expressionist cabaret driven by the haunting dreamlike presence of the title character who steals the children’s eyeballs and feeds them to the monsters upstairs.The Norwegian theatre public and critics have apparently even fashioned the term uhygge , or uhyggelia (uncanny or weird) for this type of work. Considering the recent productions of theatre practitioners such as Vegard Vinge in Bergen, The Sandman was likely only darkly grim or weird to a relatively small portion of those who attended. Figure 5 Cast of EDDA, scenography by Robert Wilson and Serge von Arx Another aspect of Robert Wilson’s work in Norway is his association with the Norwegian Theatre Academy in Fredrikstad, about one hour from Oslo. Wilson has had a long-time association with Serge von Arx, a professor of scenography and practicing architect. Von Arx and Wilson began collaborating as early as 1989 on various stage, exhibition, and design projects all over the world, including the Berliner Ensemble, Teatro Alla Scala, Teatro Real, and many others as noted on von Arx’s website. Wilson and von Arx have long experimented with “performing architecture,” in which the elements of performance and architecture become permanently intertwined in performance. The idea is reminiscent of Russian artist and theorist Vslevold Meyerhold and several others who utilized constructivism and similar performance practices that involved the melding of humans and scenic elements in performance. In Wilson and von Arx’s work together, they have found it important to utilize specific materials unique to each work that are intrinsic to the world(s) of the play. For example, in Edda , von Arx notes that “The set is a partner in dialogue with everything else happening on stage.” [13] Wilson’s work has a long tradition of including visual quotes and references to pre-existing images and structures. In Edda one image was that of the Brion Tomb by Italian architect Carlo Scarpa. Von Arx noted that recognizable visual structures assist in communicating ideas; “if you have something that people know or they can recognize, it’s much easier to pull them into the performance” [14] (Picchi). Another Scandinavian or Norwegian element noted by von Arx was the use of “traditional building methods and materials such as native woods, paint textures and the superior craftsmanship that Norway is known for.” Scenic elements were developed in the same manner as all other elements of performance and were discussed on a daily basis. This would allow for changes in accordance with the evolution of the staging process and/or any additions to or subtractions from the text. Many world theatre companies are not able to manage the many changes that are inherent in a work by Wilson. The finished product would only be achieved after the work was fully rehearsed and all desired changes and stage artifacts were implemented to one hundred percent satisfaction. Figure 6 Cast of Edda , scenography by Robert Wilson and Serge von Arx Wilson’s works are well known for having many anachronistic and very personal references both within the spoken text as well as notable visual references. In Edda , there was a scene during which the character Tor had to make a quick getaway after making advances on Freya, who refuses to marry him because he is a troll. Tor makes his exit as a cowboy hat and a single cowboy boot appear in the sky—one of Wilson’s playful references to his home state of Texas,. It was noted by Rommen that “Bob’s life and work have always referenced Texas. For many of the first years that I knew him, he would only wear his signature cowboy boots.” [15] Rommen also noted that in many cases she could sense the majesty of the Texas sky in his landscape and lighting designs. In particular, the hues and textures of the Texas sunset had been etched in Wilson’s memory and thus became prevalent in his designs. This element was prevalent in Edda as the tints and hues of the landscapes were much more reminiscent of Texas than Norway or anywhere in Scandinavia. Edda also toured to Reykjavik City Theatre in Iceland and to the Aarhus Theater in Denmark. Edda was awarded the Norwegian Hedda Prize as the theatrical event of 2017, just as Peer Gynt had done in 2005. Figure 7 Wilson’s Moby Dick at Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Fall 2024 Unfortunately, a potential collaboration on Moby Dick with Det Norske Teatret did not materialize. The long-planned staging of Melville’s masterpiece, however, moved forward with a fall 2024 production at Dusseldorf Schauspielhaus. At the time of Wilson’s passing in July 2025, there were no known planned collaborations for Wilson in Norway or any other Scandinavian and Nordic countries. Endnotes [1] Michael Billington, “Review: A Dream Play ,” The Guardian , May 30, 2001. [2] Keld Hyldig, "Robert Wilson's Staging of PEER GYNT and the Norwegian Tradition." Nordic Theatre Studies 18 (2006): 46–57. [3] Ibid. [4] Maria Shevtsova, “Experiencing the Movement: Working with Robert Wilson,” New Theatre Quarterly 23, no. 1 (February 2007): 58‑66. [5] Serge von Arx, interview by author, July 29, 2024. [6] Jon Fosse, interview by author, June 10, 2024 [7] Ibid. [8] Ibid. [9] Marilyn Stasio, “ Peer Gynt ,” Variety , April 12, 2006. [10] Fosse interview. [11] Ann-Christin Rommen, interview by author, August 1, 2024. [12] Ibid. [13] Von Arx interview. [14] Picchi Giuliano, “Serge von Arx and Robert Wilson’s EDDA ,” Scenography Today , UNITA Online Platform, 2024. https://www.scenographytoday.com/robert-wilson-edda/ . [15] Rommen interview. About The Author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina. Robert Wilson Yearbook The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published annually by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, offers a dedicated platform for scholarly and creative engagement with the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Robert Wilson (1941–2025), one of the most original visionaries in contemporary theatre and performance. The Yearbook seeks to explore and expand upon Wilson’s groundbreaking approaches to staging, lighting, movement, and visual composition. Each issue will feature a diverse range of content—including original essays, critical commentary, archival materials, artist reflections, and photography—examining facets of Wilson’s multifaceted practice across genres, eras, and geographies. The Robert Wilson Yearbook is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - This Issue “Going on a Journey”: Space, Time, and Experience in Robert Wilson’s Installations and Museum Interventions Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht’s The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics The Theatre of Autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović Time’s Shadows: Crisis of Subjectivity and Reconciled Concord in Robert Wilson’s Performative Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets They Asked Me to Draw a City: Postdramatic Imaginings in Robert Wilson’s Direction of Strindberg’s A Dream Play Robert Wilson's Oedipus: The Postdramatic Journey of the Oedipus Story from Sophocles through Freud Robert Wilson and Norway Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Listening to Deafman Glance Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson Bertolt Brecht and Robert Wilson: The Dialectical Triad of Playwright, Director and Berliner Ensemble Actors in Wilson’s The Threepenny Opera Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 18 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine Marina Johnson Resisting the Unleashed Evils of the US- Invasion of Iraq in Amir Al-Azraki’s The Widow (2017) Thamir Az-Zubaidy Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation Hind Sabah Bilal Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage Raeda Ghazaleh Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba Hala Khamis Nassar Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. Dia Barghouti Performance Review: DUMMY IN DIASPORA. By Esho Rasho. Suzi Elnaggar Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi Peyman Shams Performance Review: THE CAVE. By Sadieh Rifai Sami Ismat Performance Review: IRAQ, BUT FUNNY by Atra Asdou Suzi Elnaggar Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. Malek Najjar Arab Stages 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. Visit Journal Homepage

European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back European Stages Volume 18, Fall, 2024 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Dan Venning Report from London (December 2022) Philippa Wehle Confessions, storytelling and worlds in which the impossible becomes possible. The 77th Avignon Festival, July 5-25, 2023 Ivan Medenica “Regietheater:” two cases Anton Pujol The Grec Festival 2023 Kalina Stefanova The Festival of the Youth Theatre of Piatra Neamt, Romania: A Festival for “Youth without Age” (notes on the occasion of the 34th edition) Marvin Carlson Report from Germany Ion M. Tomuș Poetry on Stage: Games, Words, Crickets..., Directed by Silviu Purcărete European Stages European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. ISSN Number: 1050-199 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Visit Journal Homepage

European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back European Stages Volume 19, Fall, 2024 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Duncan Wheeler A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Tamás Jászay (W)here comes the sun? Philippa Wehle Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Kalina Stefanova SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Klára Madunická International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society Gergana Traikova Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Marvin Carlson Report from Basel Steve Earnest Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. Aljoscha Begrich and Christian Tschirner Fine art in confined spaces Dan Poston 2024 Report from London and Berlin Cindy Sibilsky Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus European Stages European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. ISSN Number: 1050-199 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Visit Journal Homepage

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. By Hadia Mousa Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF Arab Stages ISSN: 2376-1148 Vol. 19 (Spring 2026), pp. 66-68 To preserve a certain memory and keep it alive, it's important to tell its story. This is what Samer Al-Saber accomplishes in his significant book, A Movement's Promise . He begins in a humorous tone to define the word "movement," aiming to avoid misunderstandings associated with its usual violent political connotations. After establishing this concept, Al-Saber provides justification for his selection of theatrical groups by detailing their histories. Focusing his research on Jerusalem and Ramallah, Al-Saber encountered difficulties in finding sufficient information about older groups. The challenges stem from the Nakba (the disaster) of Israel’s occupation and its consequences from 1948 to 1967. As a result, the author chooses to start his meticulous archival and ethnographic research from the year 1967, since the Palestinian theatrical movement was largely absent before this time. In the first two chapters, Al-Saber uses anecdotes and stories from artists to historicize the cultural Palestinian landscape and the political context from which the theatrical movement emerged after 1948. The early groups, which were short-lived, primarily targeted a Christian audience. One example is the Jerusalem Players Group, established by Haidar Al-Husseini, whose productions were mainly in English, although there was one performance of Eugene O'Neill in Arabic. George Ibrahim, who later founded Al-Kasaba Theatre—considered the largest group in Ramallah—was initially an actor and trainee in the Jerusalem Players Group. In chapter 3, covering the years from 1970 to 1973, Al-Saber highlights Ibrahim’s background as an actor in Israeli radio and television. Ibrahim eventually started his own group, The Theatrical Artistic Group, in the early 1970s, later renaming it Balalin (The Balloons) in 1972. This group became one of the longest-lived and most popular, primarily targeting children and young audiences. Due to the occupation, artists faced significant challenges in securing venues for theatrical and cultural events. As a Christian working for Israeli Radio and Television, Ibrahim was able to obtain the necessary permissions to perform in specific locations, such as Al-Omariyyeh School. Unfortunately, this new group eventually disbanded because they could not establish a stable financial position from which to produce plays. Additionally, the expanding control of Israeli military forces led to the dissolution of many Palestinian groups that had emerged during the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter 4 treats the following five years, 1973 to 1977, when several new theatre ensembles were formed, including Dababis, known for its theatre of resistance; the Palestinian Theatre Troupe (1973–1996); The Palestinian People’s Theatre (1979–1983); and Sanabel People’s Theatre (1983 to present). Each of these groups had its own unique style and attributes, but most presented realistic plays, whether comedic or tragic. They also incorporated al-dabkah, an indigenous Palestinian folkloric dance, into their productions. In 1973, several of these groups collaborated to organize the first theatrical festival in Ramallah. In addition, they established an artists' equity organization, the Association for Work and Development for the Arts, which served as an alternative to the absent Palestinian Ministry of Culture. They also published a theatrical magazine called Al-Masrah (The theatre), which helped document their movement and fostered a critical discourse in the 1970s. However, the situation for these groups worsened, as noted by Al-Saber, who documents artists getting arrested and expelled from Palestine. One such artist, Al-Kurd, was arrested twice before being forced into exile. Reaching a pivotal moment in this tragic narrative, chapter 5 focuses on El-Hakawati ensemble, one of the most renowned groups in the history of contemporary Palestinian theatre. Al-Saber details El-Hakawati’s prolific history from 1977 to 1987 under the leadership of François Abu Salem, discussing the historical context, the restrictions and obstacles they faced, as well as examples of their productions and themes based on interviews with the group's artists, including their critiques of the ensemble. This methodology is applied to many other groups as well. A crucial issue that arose alongside the external challenges faced by Palestinian artists was the deep divisions among them, which led to the disappearance of most ensembles formed in the 1970s, compounded by a lack of permanent theatrical spaces. Al-Saber addresses this issue in chapter 6, covering the years from 1981 to 1984. During this period, El-Hakawati experienced its golden era, successfully transforming a burnt cinema into a stable theatre space. With financial support from Europe and the United States, this building became a national cultural center, allowing Palestinian artists to take leadership of the venue and rename it the Palestinian National Theatre. One of El-Hakawati’s most significant achievements during this time was touring their productions in European countries and the United States. However, they faced new challenges, including biased reviews of their productions through an orientalist lens and the difficulties of performing in front of diverse audiences from various nationalities and backgrounds. Al-Saber returns to George Ibrahim in chapter 7, which focus on the years from 1984 to 1986, and documents the various groups Ibrahim collaborated with, including Masrah Al-Shoke, Firqat Al-Funoun El-Masrahiyyah, and, finally, Al-Kasaba Troupe. Unfortunately, during the Intifada from 1987 to 1990, the events unfolding in the streets had a profound impact on all theatrical groups. El-Hakawati, in particular, experienced significant internal conflict. As chronicled in chapter 8, it's noteworthy that two new groups emerged: Sanabel and El-Warsheh El-Fanniyeh. Besides the well-known companies, there were also smaller groups that struggled consistently to achieve financial stability and secure rehearsal and performance space. Finally, in chapter 9, Al-Saber compares the declining prominence of El-Hakawati Theatre with the rising success of Al-Kasaba Theatre, which Ibrahim was preparing to make his final destination in Jerusalem during the Intifada period. This new venue featured a co-production between Palestinian and Israeli artists of Romeo and Juliet , presented as a reflection of the Oslo Peace Accords. The challenges faced by the production led Ibrahim to remark, "Peace was just on paper and doesn’t exist in our reality," a sentiment supported by the events that followed in the years after the early 1990s up to the present day. In its conclusion, this book briefly mentions the emergent groups and theatre directors of the last twenty-five years. A comprehensive discussion about them would require another book. Al-Saber’s primary objective is to present information about the founding generations of Palestinian theatre, which is particularly significant given the limited number of publications on Palestinian theatre, in English or Arabic. He has succeeded in documenting and analyzing the productions of this earlier movement within its economic and political context, which is an ambitious goal given the considerable task of translating excerpts from journal reviews and conducting ethnographic research. Indeed, Al-Saber situates the Palestinian theatrical movement as authentic and impactful in this important work. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Hadia Mousa is an Egyptian Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Faculty of Arts, Theatre Department, Acting and Directing Branch, at Capital University, Cairo, Egypt. She was a visiting scholar at NYU and CUNY from 2012 to 2013. In 2019, Mousa published her first book, Egyptian Women Directors from 1990 to 2010 (The Arab Theatre Institute). She has contributed to numerous publications including the Arab Stages online journal (United States); International Centre for Performance Studies Publications (Morocco); Sharjah, Arabic and Egyptian theatre magazines; and with the publisher Routledge. Arab Stages 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. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back European Stages Volume 20, Spring 2025 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Steve Earnest Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Adam Pelty Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Steve Earnest Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Steve Earnest The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Marvin Carlson Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Marvin Carlson Mary Said What She Said Alex Lefevre The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Thomas Irmer Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit Dan Poston The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne European Stages European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. ISSN Number: 1050-199 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Visit Journal Homepage

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. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 15 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Five Arab American Plays Everyone Should Read Roaa Ali Interview with Nasser Rahmaninejad by Babak Rahimi Babak Rahimi MIDNIGHT IN CAIRO: THE DIVAS OF EGYPT'S ROARING '20S. By Raphael Cormack (REVIEW) Suzi Elnaggar Arab American Drama: Five Books that Inspired My Journey Malek Najjar Carving a Path: Desiring-Production in Displaced Syrian Theatre Bart Pitchford Arab Stages 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. Visit Journal Homepage

European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back European Stages Volume 21, Winter 2025 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Steve Earnest Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Marvin Carlson Report from Berlin Călin Ciobotari Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Timothy Koch Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Kalina Stefanova International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Ion Tomus The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage Amy Hamel Summer 2025 in London, England Savas Patsalidis Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Philippa Wehle Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Steve Earnest Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Steve Earnest Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 European Stages European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. ISSN Number: 1050-199 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Visit Journal Homepage

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. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 17 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents O Lord! By Ali Abdel-Nabi Al-Zaidi Ali Abdel-Nabi Al-Zaidi, Amir Al-Azraki, Jeff Casey Mothers Challenging the Divine: Ali Al-Zaidi’s Ya Rab! Amir Al-Azraki The 31st Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. September 1-11, 2024. Najwa Kondakji ARTIFICIAL HEART. By Mohammad Basha and Firas Farrah. Marina Johnson LEILI & MAJNUN. Written and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian Namrata Verghese SHAHADAT (THE TESTIMONIES) Adapted by Fouad Teymour Suzi Elnaggar Review: TO THE GOOD PEOPLE OF GAZA: THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE Marina Johnson Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre Tiran Manucharya Arab Stages 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. Visit Journal Homepage

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. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 16 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents An Interview with the Iraqi-born British playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak by Hadeel Abelhameed Hadeel Abelhameed Review: GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi Marina Johnson Performance Review: The Tutor Hala Baki, California Polytechnic State University Review: OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967 By Tiran Manucharyan. Areeg Ibrahim Review: PLAYS OF ARABIC HERITAGE. By Hannah Khalil Kari Barclay Arab Stages 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. Visit Journal Homepage

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. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 14 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Sonali Pahwa Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Zeina Salame Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Marjan Moosavi Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Sami Ismat Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Samer Al-Saber Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Areeg Ibrahim Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Marina Johnson Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Tiran Manucharyan Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly Iman Ezzeldin Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Katherine Hennessey Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Edward Ziter Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Sami Ismat Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Sonja Arsham Kuftinec Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Areeg Ibrahim Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Suzi Elnaggar “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Matthew Randle-Bent Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber George Potter Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Suzi Elnaggar Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Hassan Hajiyah Arab Stages 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. Visit Journal Homepage

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. By Marina Johnson Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF 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. Article 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. References 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 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. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. By Marina Johnson Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF The clown paints his face to become someone else — to live in another reality. With white paint, a few colors, and a red nose, he can turn tragedy into comedy. He can walk into a hospital room, where someone lies dying, and turn him into a laughing child. He can enter a refugee camp and make it a festival .… He paints his face, puts on the nose — and for a moment, he’s allowed to dream again. [1] The Clown is a gripping one-man play that delivers far more than its simple title might suggest. At its center is Sobhi (Ezzat Al-Natsheh), a Palestinian clown performer whose painted smile conceals a churning inner world of joy, humiliation, pain, hope, and unrelenting self-doubt. The play follows Sobhi, who is haunted by the traumatic car crash that happened to him and his friend while they were driving to a birthday performance in the rain. Throughout the monologue, Sobhi argues with a second voice, “the Clown,” a manifestation of his inner critic, that alternately mocks, seduces, and confronts him about his lifelong need to please others, his humiliation and bullying, and his guilt over surviving when others did not. As Sobhi recounts memories of family violence, political repression, and the daily humiliations of life under occupation, the clown persona becomes both a survival strategy and a trap that feeds on others’ laughter while concealing his despair. By the end, Sobhi briefly removes the red nose in an attempt to reclaim himself, but ultimately puts it back on, acknowledging that the cycle of performance, masking pain with laughter, will continue. I first encountered this work in rehearsal on August 28, 2025, at El Hakawati Palestinian National Theatre while I was in Palestine. Two weeks later, on opening night, I was already back in the United States, so my friends helped me watch the performance via a WhatsApp video call, a surprisingly intimate way to witness the performance from afar. I could hear my friends laugh and cry throughout the performance as they sat in the red velvet seats of one of my favorite theatres, while I laughed and cried from my couch in the US. I was grateful for the solution that allowed me to witness a play I had been anxiously anticipating by a team I hold in high esteem. The play’s concept originates with Al-Natsheh himself and draws directly from his life story. He shared the material with Mariam Basha, who crafted the script and served as assistant director and choreographer alongside Kamel El Basha, who directed the production. I had previously collaborated with Al-Natsheh on El Manshiyyeh , which I co-directed with Samer Al-Saber, but I’ve also known him for years through his work with the famed Jerusalem clown duo Zaatar and Sim Sim (he is, of course, Sim Sim), as well as his collaborations with Red Noses Palestine. [2] A little-known fact about Al-Natsheh–he keeps a nose on him at all times because sometimes someone around him needs joy, and he is just the one to deliver it. Also, he is often recognized in public as Sim Sim, so the nose allows him to get in and stay in character with/for the kids who recognize him. Al-Natsheh is quick-witted, intellectually agile, and an extraordinarily funny performer. This piece, however, revealed a different register of his artistry. In the opening moments, he applies his makeup onstage, transforming himself into the clown before the audience’s eyes and setting the tone for the performance to come. The text of the play begins with Sobhi describing a fragmented memory of being in a car accident and the feeling of being trapped and unable to scream as the other person in the car dies. He asks: “Why was it me who stayed alive? … I’ll never know what he wanted to tell me.” [3] This tragic car accident serves as one of the play’s anchoring images, its rain-soaked violence symbolizing both literal and psychic rupture. Rain becomes a recurring motif that is at once cleansing and wounding, a metaphor for memory, endurance, and the cyclical nature of grief. Water washes over the narrative as Sobhi attempts to peel back the layers of performance that shield him from his own vulnerability. Interruptions are key to the play. Phone calls frequently interrupt the scenes with people calling Sobhi to offer clown jobs, and we see that he is constantly negotiating work under stressful conditions. In the series of phone conversations, the difficult circumstances of work as a clown are revealed: short notice, low pay, unsafe environments, and often unrealistically high expectations. Other memories also intrude, contributing to the play's fragmented nature. For instance, Sobhi recalls being eleven years old and living with his grandfather, who burned his belongings and constantly insulted him. This bullying carried over to other facets of his life, as he remembers being bullied by his peers for his height and appearance. Image 1: Ezzat Al-Natsheh on stage at El Hakawati Theatre in Jerusalem. Photo credit: Mohammad Basha. The crux of the play lies in the interruptions where Sobhi speaks with “the Clown,” a figure who interjects, comments, argues, and mocks him. They volley between dark humor, confession, and near-prayer, their exchanges revealing a fractured sense of self shaped by personal trauma and the suffocating pressures of social and political life. The Clown criticizes Sobhi for being too kind, for letting people walk over him, and for depending on others’ approval. Sobhi tries to defend himself, but the dialogue shows how entangled they are. At times, the Clown sounds like a bully; at other times, he praises Sobhi and even becomes affectionate. Their battlesome relationship is at the center of the play, and it was what I, as an audience member, wanted to know more about. In a quieter scene that reveals his inner turmoil, Sobhi prays aloud, asking God for relief and strength (Image 1). As he speaks, he reflects on what a clown can do, such as bringing laughter to hospitals and refugee camps, offering brief moments of joy amid hardship. These reflections frame the emotional spine of the play: memories of childhood humiliation, emotional neglect, and constant belittlement for failing to embody the expectations of masculinity. Those wounds follow him into the present, where he struggles as a clown who barely makes ends meet, trapped in a society that relies on him for laughter yet mocks the very profession that sustains him. The Clown, both tormentor and truth-teller, relentlessly probes Sobhi’s insecurities, accusing him of cowardice, failure, and complicity in his own suffering. Their confrontation builds toward the play’s central question: whether Sobhi’s clowning is an act of degradation or a source of purpose. Near the end, the Clown urges Sobhi to “take off the nose.” Sobhi removes it, and the Clown insists that without it, he cannot exist. Sobhi resists, declaring that he is “done performing,” and attempts to walk away. Yet in the moment of refusal, Sobhi recognizes what gives his life meaning. He chooses to put the red nose back on—not as submission, but as an affirmation of the role he has claimed for himself. Without this… who am I? Without the laughter… who remembers me? Maybe the clown is the only part of me that’s still alive. The stage’s visual composition echoes the play's themes. The scenography was deceptively minimal. At the center of the stage lay a patterned carpet that served as a grounding place for the story. Upstage right sat a mound of pastel balloons, eight or more in various soft colors, an oddly cheerful counterpoint to the psychological terrain of the piece. On the opposite side rested a wooden chair draped with a ukulele, topped with a rubber chicken, and accompanied by a red-and-blue striped stand for a computer. The center was left open, allowing the dueling figures, Sobhi and the Clown, ample room to spar, circle one another, and, in Sobhi’s case, to dance. Al-Natsheh transitioned between the two characters simply by sharply turning; when he faced stage right, we knew the Clown was talking in his aggressive and often belittling voice. When he faced stage left, Al-Natsheh was the one in the lead, responding and reasoning with the Clown. The production extended this sense of divided identity into the costume itself. The costume design sharpened the performance’s tonal dissonance: a one-piece clown suit with light blue sleeves and hip pockets, bisected into pink on one side and yellow on the other, its bowtie reversing the colors so that pink and yellow contrasted each other. The result was both whimsical and faintly disquieting, perfectly attuned to the play’s oscillation between humor and unease. Kamel El Basha’s direction provides a steady hand throughout the production, while Mariam Basha’s choreography introduces dances that offer moments of levity and deepen the play’s emotional texture. Al-Natsheh’s acting is remarkably agile, shifting seamlessly between characters—signaled subtly by whether his hair is tied back in a ponytail or left down. What makes The Clown so resonant as a production is the intimate character study at its core. Laughter emerges as both lifeline and trap: an act of resistance against despair, yet also a performance demanded by others that gradually erodes the self. Through the protagonist’s exchanges, the play exposes the gendered and political dimensions of his pain, revealing how patriarchal expectations of strength, the violence of occupation, and the indignities of precarity conspire to “castrate” him emotionally and spiritually. Ultimately, The Clown becomes a haunting meditation on what it means to continue performing joy in a world that constantly humiliates and silences. Blending absurdist comedy with piercing confession and poetic repetition, the play offers a powerful and unsettling portrait of identity under pressure—an unforgettable image of a man struggling to endure, create, and hope while caught between the demands of the world and the echoing chambers of his own mind. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes [1] My translation, from Mariam Basha’s script. [2] Red Noses Palestine is a branch of Red Noses International, which employs local clown-doctors to perform in hospitals for sick patients. [3] My translation, from Mariam Basha’s script References 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 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. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' By Deniz Başar Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF Arab Stages ISSN: 2376-1148 Vol. 19 (Spring 2026), pp. 27-51 Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays Helezoni and Orange Deniz Başar Abstract : This article traces the changes to the alternative theatre field in Turkey since the 2013 Gezi Park Resistance until today, documenting the reasons for and outcomes of the erosion of that field due to growing authoritarian neoliberalism. Through auto-ethnography, among other methods, the writer tries to meditate rhizomatically on the relationship between alternative theatre in Turkey and repertoires of resistance embodied in 2013, and re-embodied in protests triggered by the illegal imprisonment of elected İstanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on 19th of March 2025. Tracing the lineage of the 19th of March protests, a Gen Z-led movement, back to the millennial-led movement of Gezi, the article investigates the living heritages of the alternative theatre field in Gen Z theatre, which persist despite the strategic damage to the field which took place through the past decade. Arguing that these re-embodied, ever-growing repertoires of resistance are best archived in their sensibility by young people’s theatre works, the writer shares her insights into two short plays from 2025: Helezoni and Orange . Both plays were made by ensembles of emerging theatre practitioners, who were pushed into working in 2020s neoliberal spaces, due to the strategic and authoritarian erosion of the 2010s’ alternative theatre field, and both plays challenge the neoliberal authoritarianism policing their lives and censoring their work, in ways legible to people who have embodied knowledge of the local repertoires of resistance . Keywords : repertoires of resistance, Gezi Park Resistance, 19th of March 2025 protests in Turkey, alternative theatre, Gen Z theatre, queer theatre A Personal Introspection, in the Form of a Literature Review I have been teaching in various theatre conservatories in İstanbul, such as Bahçeşehir University and Maltepe University, as contract faculty, and as part of independent theatre workshops, such as Performance Ecologies , since 2022. Since 19 March 2025, I have encountered most of my students, and some of my own university professors from my BA degree in Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University’s (MSFAU) Urban and Regional Planning Department, through the on-going protests. I feel unnamable things in my chest when I think about the fact that I was my students’ age when the Gezi Park Protests [1] happened in 2013, as I was writing my MA thesis on the alternative theatre field of İstanbul (Başar, 2014), and how that whole experience changed who I am today. A fellow theatre scholar working on the performance field of contemporary Turkey, Zeynep Uğur, notes the ways in which the alternative theatre field that emerged in the late 2000s and early 2010s provided sociological foreshadowings of the Gezi Park Protests. Uğur then traces the aftereffects of Gezi on the alternative theatre field: [T]he Gezi movement can be traced back to the alternative theatre practice in Istanbul which was already in existence prior to the protests claiming autonomous spaces in the city for artistic creation and sociability. In other words, it provides an alternative history to analyse the sociopolitical transformation of citizens claiming their ownership in the city. Furthermore, alternative theatres become spaces of political resistance in the aftermath of Gezi (Uğur, 2022, 122). The logic of cause and effect is unapologetically ouroboros in contemporary Turkey. Gezi transformed my personal relationship to the city and independent theatres too, as a sense of urgency sneaked into all of my daily practices. The “here and now” of a revolutionary moment redefined the “here and now” of performance for me within my body as a “performing remains” (Schneider, 2011). It was the end of my first year in my master’s degree when Gezi happened, and I remember many things about June 2013 along with how I—miraculously—managed to write my graduate papers in between regularly being tear gassed in Taksim. Starting from late 2011 I was captivated by the alternative theatre scene which was introduced to me by a crush who was working as a volunteer dramaturg in this habitat. As life goes, this crush led to the other—the much, much bigger one—which redefined my life. I took it onto myself to make sure the world knew about it. I agree with Uğur’s reading above: alternative theatre—as a field—was a foreshadowing of Gezi (it was indeed one of the many [2] ). I underestimated the impacts of taking part in this kind of resistance, as many young people in their 20s do, but it caught up to me gradually: with immense waves of migraine and body pain (see Başar, 2022 for an academic reflection; [3] see Başar, 2025 for an artistic reflection), and in forms of chronic workaholism as I attempted to document, academically and artistically, what was happening (see Meerzon, 2024; and Ülgen, 2024 for semi-academic meditations on my artistic outputs). I wrote my MA thesis in Boğaziçi University (BU) between 2012 and 2014, a personal turning point in my career that made me the social scientist that I am today, if not the artist (for that, the real nod goes to MSFAU). BU, a historical, prestigious, landmark university, has been under heavy attack by the AKP government since 2021 (see Tekay, 2022; and, Altuğ et al., 2025), the year that I returned to Turkey to do my postdoc in BU through an FRQSC scholarship. My postdoctoral supervisor Emine Fişek was forced into quitting her tenure job after a long fight with AKP-enforced rectorate around the time my funding ended in 2023.[4] I produce most of my academic work in English, about the political performances and performativities of Turkey in the AKP era. I give into the colonial hegemony of Anglophone academia as strategic choice: I need other ESL scholars like me to learn about what has been happening here. [5] Yet I struggle about where to begin. How can I make the connections that are obvious for us—insiders—visible to outsiders? Here is my attempt. What Came Before and After 19 March 2025 On 19 March 2025, the elected mayor of İstanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was taken from his home for multiple alleged crimes, including “threatening and targeting persons involved in anti-terrorism activities” (Tecimer, 2025). A wave of nationwide protests started in the subsequent months, as more and more elected mayors were taken from their homes across Turkey for belonging to opposition parties against the 23-year rule of the AKP and Prime-Minister-turned-into-President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The preview of this authoritarianism was particularly tested in the 2019 elections, when İmamoğlu became mayor for the first time (see Felix, 2019; and Demiralp & Balta, 2021). Surely this episode of the history of Turkey will be written in detail in the near future, and after less than a year, the first academic articles are already circulating. Here is a quote from one: When he was detained on March 19 (he would be formally arrested a few days later), İmamoğlu was the presidential frontrunner of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which leads the political opposition to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. While the next presidential election is not for another three years, İmamoğlu had been leading Erdoğan in opinion surveys. Now the 55-year-old mayor sits behind bars, facing the possibility of a long prison term (Esen and Gümüşçü, 2025, 106). As I revised this article at the end of 2025, citizens of Turkey were updated on this infamous case by learning through various media outlets that the “prosecutor seeks 2,352-year jail term for Istanbul's mayor” (Tuncer and Blackburn, 11 November 2025). Just as the timing gap between journalism and academic response has rapidly decreased in contemporary Turkey, the timing between journalism and artistic response has shortened too. Perhaps this is because many intellectuals of the country, artists, journalists, and academics, collectively feel the responsibility (and burden) of documenting what has happened, increasingly and overwhelmingly, over the past two decades. We don’t have the time to digest, and we almost always have to respond urgently. Perhaps this should be kept in mind as one reads this piece too, that Zeitgeist in contemporary Turkey is of urgency and urgency only. Then how does this Zeitgeist inform our lives? It means that hundreds of thousands of people live in a constant state of being ready for mobilization. As generative modes of activism have been directly attacked by the government since the early 2010s, and as they have been eroded through the daily reality of social and economic crisis of the early 2020s, our mode of action today is becoming more reactive. Like a fraudulent chess game, when the government makes a move, the people counter-move, en masse in at least the hundreds of thousands, and face the consequences. As Amnesty International reported on the 19 March protests: Following the CHP rallies, law enforcement officials used unnecessary and excessive force to disperse the crowds and according to the authorities, detained 1879 people, either at the location of the protests or from their homes, between 19-26 March across the country. By the end of March, over 300 people—mainly university students from different provinces including Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir—were remanded in pre-trial detention while hundreds of others were subjected to judicial control measures, including house arrest, foreign travel bans and reporting requirements. In Istanbul, seven journalists covering the protests in Saraçhane Square were detained in raids of their homes on 24 March (Amnesty International, 2025, 1). In the days that followed 19 March, many lecturers and professors in the university where I now work were left helpless as their students were detained without any legal procedure. We reorganized, pushed the authorities to start the legal process, tried to stay in solidarity, of course. Yet the burnout remained. Amnesty International documented several instances of unlawful use of force by law enforcement officials against peaceful demonstrators between 19 and 26 March, including beating, kicking and dragging protesters on the ground and the unlawful use of water cannon, pepper spray, tear gas, kinetic impact projectiles, often at close range directly targeting individuals at the head and upper body that led to numerous injuries and hospitalizations. All the information collected was assessed in accordance with international standards and the pertinent legal obligations the Turkish state has under the treaties it is a party to (Amnesty International, 2025, 2). Perhaps it was the morning of 21 March when a friend, who is an expert Ottoman historian, came to our shared office and cried her heart out as some of her students were detained and the legal support hadn’t caught up yet. What does this do to you, really? To people who are dissidents but also mothers, fathers, friends, teachers, Ottoman historians, and theatre artists. What does it actually do to your nervous system, to your dreams, to your understanding of what it means to be alive? My focus is very rhizomatic these days, and it is not out of choice. I regularly google how long Salazar ruled Portugal (36 years), Franco ruled Spain (36 years), Mussolini ruled Italy (22 years), Pinochet ruled Chile (17 years). I google how many years have passed since the so-called Islamic Revolution in Iran (47 years). I do statistics. I want to find a logical future projection as an academic. We call fortune telling “statistics” in academia. Fast Forward to June 2025 I get two invitations from my former students, current colleagues, to attend two different short play festivals. One is DasDas Theatre’s, which took place between 12-15 June (Image 1); and the other is Zorlu PSM Studio Shorts Festival, 14-15 June (Image 2), which is the final result of a seven-month long residency for young playwrights and directors. DasDas is a multi-functional venue with multiple black box performance spaces created by a group of well-established stage artists (actors and musicians), running since 2017 in the Metropol İstanbul shopping mall, aiming to cultivate new audiences within a particular upper-middle class. Zorlu PSM, designed as the first “performance center” of Turkey, is located in a luxury shopping mall, Zorlu Center, which was designed by starchitect Emre Arolat and opened in 2013. It was built through well-documented labor abuse [6] and the direct support of the government, which allowed the illegal building of the colossal shopping mall in the center of one of the busiest districts of İstanbul. Image 1: Memory ticket, DasDas Shorts Festival. 12-15 June 2025. Image 2: Instagram post , PSM Studio Shorts End-of-Year Performances. 14-15 June 2025. The structures of the two festivals are quite different: DasDas invites theatre students and new graduates living in İstanbul to showcase their new experimental and devised works, whereas Zorlu PSM Studio selects artistic interns in the beginning of an academic year and works separately with directors and writers to make meaningful artistic pairs who create a series of short plays at the end of the year. On 14 June 2025, at 9:15pm, I am at DasDas to watch Helezoni (Image 3) , a short play by new graduates and current students of Bahçeşehir Conservatory, having been invited by my former student Seray Üstündağ; and on 15 June 2025, at 8:30 pm, I am at Zorlu PSM to watch Orange (Image 4) , invited by the playwright, Baroj Nejdet Babat, whom I met through the Performance Ecologies project. I want to talk about these two pieces together because they are both created by theatre artists in their early 20s living and working in Turkey, and struggling to form their artistic voice in an atmosphere that is becoming more and more dreadfully oppressive and monopolized with each passing day. Image 3: Helezoni (poster) Project Design and Performance: Buse İlker, Seray Üstündağ, Yağmur Başak Text: Collective Text Supervision: Doruk Öztürk, Diyar Çiler Assistant Director: Diyar Çiler Sound Design: Buğra Nayir Lights: Alp Özer Video Design: Eray Devrenk Poster Design: Doğa Erdağ Date & Time: 14 June 2025, 9:15 pm Place: DasDas Stage Image 4: Orange (poster) Playwright: Baroj Nejdet Babat Director: Yasemin Kır Producer: Riyana Tufanova & Ekinsu Köse Assistant Director: Teo Chapdelaine Assistant Producer: Orçun Ertaman Performers: İpek Sobutay, Mizgîn Özel, Tuğba Sorgun, Aylin Çelikçi, Begüm Önerler, Merve Bayus, Nezahat Arkun Stage Design (SD): Cem Yılmazer, Yasemin Kır SD Realization: Zekeriya Ece, Riyana Tufanova Costume Supervisor: Hilal Polat Costume Design & Realization: Riyana Tufanova Light Design & Application: Güray Doğru Sound Design: Aylin Çelikçi, Begüm Önerler, Merve Bayus, Nezahat Arkun Poster Design: Can Akşit Date & Time: 15 June, 2025, 8:30 pm Place: Zorlu PSM These shows took place almost back to back, in two completely different parts of İstanbul, yet both inside luxurious shopping malls. I remember how in early 2010s my generation was proud of the bohemian nature of found spaces being turned into little black box stages in Beyoğlu [7] . In a palimpsest, I quote my (earlier) self: A significant episode in the contemporary theatre scene of Turkey began around 2008 (Başar 2014), when a generation of emerging young artists started renting small flats around the Beyoğlu district of İstanbul, which is known to be one of the most cosmopolitan, historical, and, possibly, the liveliest part of the city. These artists were locked out of institutional theatre settings because of the lack of formal theatre education (most of them were trained in universities’ theatre clubs while studying other things) or because of their ideological differences with the theatre institutions (Başar 2014, 152). In Beyoğlu, they began to create ensembles and write in the small black-box stages that they collectively made together. Only on these alternative stages and through their new plays, a variety of characters from contemporary Turkey (such as Kurds, LGBTI characters, and urban women wearing headcloths) started to appear on stage. This was a breath of fresh air in the theatre field of Turkey, circumventing the Leviathan-like bureaucracy of state theatres and municipality theatres, and the cheap populism of commercial comedy theatres and other private establishment theatres (Başar, 2021, 196). I remember both the vibe and the hype: Many of us were in our 20s or early 30s, some of us were emerging theatre professionals, some were either bachelors or graduate students in the diverse academic ecosystem of İstanbul (before the brutal attacks on academia after 2016, which aimed and partially succeeded in creating a monoculture [8] ), and there was a smell in the air that blended theatre and activism, and in return redefined both of these categories as immediate life itself. Yet I don’t mean to romanticize this era; it was a precarious heterotopia, just as Gezi was. But heterotopias, “[a]s a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation[s] of the space[s] in which we live” (Foucault, 1986, 24), die hard. In parallel to my above reading of the era, Zeynep Uğur comments on the same phenomenon as follows: In the early 2000s, the alternative theatre scene gained a new momentum with the increasing number of theatres spreading around Taksim. The founders of these theatres are commonly inspired by the avant-garde of the 1990s; however, their own personal trajectories are different. Almost all of them take their roots from university theatre clubs instead of conservatoires or theatre departments. Thus, socialisation emerges as a mobilising motor. To ‘create their own space to be able to make theatre as they want’ is an often-repeated phrase in the interviews that I conducted in Istanbul. A young audience profile, mostly college students, adhered to this emerging theatre (Uğur, 2022, 137). We used to look down upon the idea of moving into shopping malls (also see Aydoğan and Ayhan, 2026, to trace the sentiment). In a little more than ten years so much has changed, with so much trauma. [9] The bohemian and underground theatre infrastructure—built outside of state-governed institutional theatres and profit-oriented commercial theatres [10] —to which many people contributed with sweat, blood and tears has (mostly) collapsed under a regime that has become increasingly authoritarian. This regime has been very strategically targeting Beyoğlu, particularly since 2011, but the scale and insidiousness of the attacks has multiplied exponentially every year, as Asu Aksoy and Kevin Robbins, among others, point out: At first glance, the Beyoğlu Cultural Route (Beyoğlu Kültür Yolu Projesi) [a large-scale re-development project launched in 2020 by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism] may appear to be a good investment of resources, with the potential to enhance the cultural life of the city. […] What it represents is, in fact, an intervention on the part of the central state, intended to impose its own ideological priorities, both economic and political, on the cultural life of the city (Aksoy and Robbins 2023, 40). Meanwhile, hand-in-hand with the current regime, large corporations such as Zorlu Holding have started to invest in the performing arts in İstanbul, and as a miniscule compensation for this exploitative capitalist shift, these new organizations started creating spaces (extremely limited ones) for up-and-coming theatre artists. Yet, quite obviously, these spaces fail to make up for loss of the grassroots independent theatre scene of 2010s. That’s why I am burdened by history at age 36, when I come to see the shows of my former students in their early 20s; yet I also feel a complicated brew of emotions, knowing what they might be feeling since 19 March 2025. My internal compass oscillates between the joy of solidarity and mourning of the loss of innocence. But being in one’s early 20s means having hope, because that age group does not yet have the luxury of the 30s and 40s for being comfortably hopeless. A Brief Cross-Tracing of Repertoires of Dissident Performance and Protest Culture The two works that I watched back-to-back are stylistically and dramaturgically very different from each other. Helezoni , which is a made-up word based on the Turkish appropriation (‘helezon’) of the Latin word helix , is a devised work, fragmented in a 1990s-postmodern fashion, comfortable with being misunderstood. Orange , on the other hand, is much more structured: there is a text, there is a story, and there is even an invented folk tradition and ritual embedded into the performance. I go through my private mind-library of rhizomatic references, to see where I attach these performances in the global network of everything I know about theatre. Helezoni —interestingly, despite having an American gloss to it (à la Wooster Group and Tim Burton)—strictly lands in the German, especially Berlin-based, realm of theatre making: I reach and grab Robert Wilson’s Berliner Ensemble productions, Rimini Protokoll’s fragmented dramaturgies, and of course Bertolt Brecht’s pre-Second World War take on cabaret. In the realm of Turkish theatre, the only distant relative I can think of for Helezoni is Şahika Tekand’s body of works, which are also rooted in 1990s İstanbul (see Dinçel, 2023). A day later, Orange takes me to references from across Europe, and strictly avoids any feel of Americanness. I grab Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2009 movie Dogtooth , the 2023 book She That Lay Silent-Like Upon Our Shore by Brendan Casey, and–of course–García Lorca's last play before his assassination in 1936 during Spanish Civil War, The House of Bernarda Alba . The world that playwright Baroj Nejdet Babat and director Yasemin Kır created also reminds me of the aura of early 2010s in İstanbul; I am reminded of Şamil Yılmaz and Pelin Temur’s plays from Mek’an Sahne (see Onat, 2025) and M î rza Met î n and Berfin Zenderlioğlu’s works, performed in Kurdish with Turkish surtitles, from Şermola Performans. [11] Both pieces want to speak to the world they live in, and to the state of contemporary Turkey, but where Helezoni uses metatheatricality through 1990s-postmodern fragmentation to do that, Orange goes back to ritual to seek metatheatricality as a form of the sublime. These are both strategic dramaturgical choices to tap into the repertoires of resistance of Gezi, which was actually both a palimpsest and a transcendence of all previous left-wing resistance movements in Turkey (see Verstraete, 2019 & Başar, 2022); which is why the main title of this piece is “Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance.” Helezoni Helezoni has four parts to it, strictly separated by a male voiceover that introduces the numbered sections, which are loosely connected. All sections are devised by the woman-majority team, which includes many queer collaborators, and the only prior information the audiences have about the show is that it is devised from the premise “fascism everywhere”. The first section is a Grimm-style tale, written mostly by Diyar Çiler, within the parameters the group decided on, a tale about a group of animals living happily in a forest, accompanied by AI-generated images which straightforwardly aim to tickle the cognitive response of the uncanny valley (reminding me of Rimini Protocol). The wording of the tale is tethered to the taboo themes of the repertoires of resistance of Gezi, which was partially reenacted in the 19 March protests. [12] For instance, the tale uses ‘pepper’ to stand in for ‘tear gas’, and the phrase ‘factory of emotions that produce hope,’ which can mean both ‘state propaganda’ or ‘revolution’, almost-alluding to many things, almost gesturing towards a creeping danger, but all in a purposefully ambiguous manner. As the tale goes on, stage creatures in the form of acting bodies start to occupy the stage, filling it with mundane acts of prepping for the performance, such as putting tape down to mark the exact boundaries of where the performance will take place. Their physicalities range from fairies to witches. Defining the boundaries is important, to be able to cross over them later. The second section starts with three Tim Burton-esque (or Robert Wilson’s take on the Faustian theme) stage creatures taking over the stage fully (Image 5), after listening to the same tale with us, while working and commenting on the tale, their sudden and explosive laughter echoing around us. These stage creatures move in a stylized manner and have choreographed movements and fragments of speech that they throw at us. In the darkness we hear a witchy voice yelling “catastrophe! nein!” which marks the beginning of this second part while introducing the linguistic heteroglossia of the piece. Adding German into the mix perhaps alludes to both the Brechtian aesthetic and the horrors of fascist propaganda’s aesthetic (such as Triumph des Willens [1935]). The vocabulary they break apart is embedded in our own political moment, and their gestures showcase a repertoire of the streets, of the military training that we all received as part of our compulsory physical education classes in Turkey, and of the acting education they all received, creating counterpoints. Then they locate us in an urban square through their scattered descriptions. Is it Taksim Square where the 2013 protests happened, located next to Gezi Park? Or is it Saraçhane Square where 29 March 2025 protests took place [13] ? Is it Tiananmen Square in 1989? Is it Tahrir Square in 2011? Is it Vali Asr Square in 2022? Where is this square? Why are they there? And more importantly, why are we here, with them? But we don’t stay in the square: a video is projected alluding to the now aged practice of zapping amongst TV channels, which always censor what happens in squares.[14] The TV glitches, and a quote from early 2010s leftist band Bandista intervenes with the commercials. After this oscillation between the lived reality of urban squares and censored TV, the third section reaches towards the internet as a public sphere, immediately interconnected to urban squares, which speak a different tune than the commercials on TV (because “the revolution will not be televised,” as Gil Scott-Heron once said). Image 5: Helezoni. Photo credit: Volkan Aykaç. The third section opens with video which showcases this realm of the internet, which is completely different from the AI-generated video in the first section. This video was made by Film and TV undergraduate student Eray Devrenk, with clear care and passion. It was interesting for me because this video, less than four minutes long, pulled out so much of my personal history—the burden of history I tried to unpack in the beginning of this article—along with other things that I didn’t know yet, but immediately recognized their meaning through the overlap of images. Banned LGBTQ pride walks in İstanbul, highlighted with police clashes; conservative Islamic ‘family’ protests, backed by the government, against LGBTQ pride walks; the suicide videos from 2014 and 2015 of kind individuals (like Mehmet Pişkin—see Başar, 2022, 181, n.10) and trans activists like Mehtap Zengin, who just said that they could not take it any longer; the 2016 military coup attempt which paved the way for the three-year-long state of emergency and legitimi-zation of human rights abuses; wild-fires; wars; more wars; the 6 February 2023 earthquake that turned into a massacre, due to corrupt planning decisions; world leaders lecturing cameras on their borders, their wars, their hierarchy of people, and all the things that I can’t, and perhaps don’t want to, remember, to be able to stay functional. The video ends with a pop culture twist, a short scene from The Hunger Games , where Jennifer Lawrence yells at us “if we burn, you burn with us.” The actors don and doff a variety of accessories—ropes, hair pins, etc.—at the front of the stage as this video rolls behind them (Image 6). We don’t hear most of the sounds of these videos, à la Thomas Ostermeier; a solo drummer playing from a recording keeps the beat of the performance going. The final section makes yet another metatheatrical move. The actors change their acting style completely: they are actors now in a rehearsal room, they play, and then they wash their makeup in front of the audience (Image 7), and conclude with movement choreography. Image 6: Helezoni. Photo credit: Volkan Aykaç. The stylistic break comes when Seray Üstündağ comments on the fact that her taping work in section 1 of the performance was indeed not a good job, as the tape is laid in a wavey nature. People laugh here; the gesture of this stylistic shift is a powerful one. Seray Üstündağ untapes the stage. Now the entire stage, even perhaps the back stage, even perhaps the foyer, and beyond the shopping mall, the streets and the squares, belongs to the actors. They perform a series of trust falls, an act of catching each other at the exact moment of falling, which is an acting practice, and a very necessary skill in a revolutionary moment. (We have learned very well in Turkey exactly what happens when no one catches you in a trust fall.) When they wash their makeup together, almost in a ritualistic manner, it is a moment of catharsis. Yet it is also an uncanny catharsis in this postmodern show with no conclusion, no predefined faith hovering over the characters, and/or the actors. The final choreography is of exhausted bodies, going through choreographed stage actions as they fall apart, and fall down in a lump on the ground, to—maybe—rest a little. In the talkback session after the performance of Helezoni , the group talks about what made them devise this play. I am humbled by the experiences they have survived in their young age, and especially shaken by learning that assistant director Diyar Çiler is a survivor of the 6 February 2023 earthquake. What they choose to tell, I am here to listen. I also think about how the name of the play gestures towards the psychedelic nature of living in this global Zeitgeist, how violence is so close, but how much we are alienated from the impact of it unless it hits us directly and immediately. Orange The day after Helezoni , Orange tells another story of our times. Playwright Baroj Nejdet Babat is a very young queer and Kurdish artist from Şırnak [15] , who received their BA in Munzur University, and was introduced to the Performance Ecologies team by our colleague Asst. Prof. Duygu Çelik. [16] They have a soft voice and gentle manner always accompanied with a kind smile, which might at first sight hide their deep theoretical knowledge on gender and queer studies, exceeding many of the theatre scholars I encounter regularly. Director Yasemin Kır does justice to this nuanced gem of a text, with all the performative areas she explores with the design team and performers. Image 7: Orange. Photo credit: Cem Gültepe. Orange takes place in an imaginary village that only grows oranges and nothing else (Image 8). No other fruits are allowed to grow in the village, and villagers (especially women and children, who are not allowed to leave) can only eat oranges. Only adult men are allowed to leave the village, and when they are gone, the village is ruled by a deep-cutting matriarchy that leans on a much deeper-cutting patriarchy. Mothers are the gatekeepers of the community; they indoctrinate their children about the importance and singularity of oranges, and tell fearful stories of wild boars that roam around the village [17] to make sure the children won’t go out, seeking a different fruit—or a different life (Image 9). The ecologically problematic idea of monocultures—i.e. growing a single crop in a large piece of land—as represented through the intense singularity of oranges in the play, also serves as a metaphor for fascism. Image 8: Orange . Photo credit: Cem Gültepe. Babat’s text is unapologetic when it comes to using ancient tools of theatre, such as the chorus. In Orange , the chorus is composed of the village women, who give life to land, who protect, who harvest oranges, but who also oppress through their gazes and exert intense control through shaming, gossip, and their collective power to break the will of young people. In this village of oranges lives a young girl whose name is Cennet (a real name in Turkish which means both Paradise and Heaven ). Cennet wants to break free from both the monoculture of oranges and from her oppressive mother, who forbids her from ever being curious about the outside world. This mother figure seems to have walked in from the world of Gabriel Garcia Lorca. She casts heavy curses upon women who dare to disobey the monoculture, and tells gruesome stories about what has happened to them outside the village. Supposedly, the wild boars that roam right outside the limits of the village do not necessarily kill young women; rather, the violence described by the mother sounds much more like kidnapping, rape, and forced marriage. The choice of animal is loaded too: pigs are haram /sinful in Islam. The mother acts like the head of the chorus in Greek tragedies, and the chorus sings with her, collectively cursing the unnamed and mythologized women who disobeyed once upon a time, and were doomed to unspeakable fates. All the while, their songs cherish the monoculture of oranges. Image 9: Merve offers Cennet an apple. Orange . Photo credit: Cem Gültepe. Just when Cennet is toying in her loneliness with the idea of escaping, an outsider comes, another young girl, from a neighboring village which only grows apples. This new friend, Merve, secretly sneaked out to take a long walk in the forest and discovered Cennet’s village of oranges, and she is curious to taste this new fruit. Merve starts visiting Cennet secretly and regularly after that first contact, and their friendship knowingly hints to the audience that a homoerotic romance develops between them. (I wonder how much more openly queer this performance could have been if we had been in an independent space, outside of this shopping mall, deep into Beyoğlu, surrounded by the dirty walls of found spaces turned into black box theatres, surrounded with will power and solidarity, maybe a decade earlier. Sure, the performance might have been less clean, less polished, but it would have not pulled back from naming things, as they should be named in honesty.) Merve also tells Cennet that the boars in the forest are not dangerous—it is the humans that are dangerous, and that she is particularly scared of orange-trading men. (Isn’t it always one of the most difficult confrontations to realize your community can be the big bad wolf in someone else’s story, and that they might be right to see you that way?) When Merve offers Cennet an apple (Image 10), she finally eats it—which is a direct allusion to the apple of Adam and Eve, which according to the three major monotheistic religions leads to the famous couple’s exile from heaven. Image 10: Orange . Photo credit: Cem Gültepe. From here on, there is a dramatic twist, one that is welcomed by the foreshadowing of the allusion of Adam and Eve’s apple—a twist that only early twentysomething artists can do, who are not beaten down by the dramatic structure, the dramatic canon and the conventional beauties of tragedy. After eating the apple Cennet goes back to her mother and village women and confronts them about their oppression, about their chosen and insistent ignorance, about their own evil (Image 11). She sings the prayer of the apple that she learned from Merve as she does this, and the chorus along with the mother try to silence her with the prayer of the orange village. Cennet sings longer and louder than them, and eventually leaves the monoculture of oranges with Merve, hand in hand, to find other fruits, together. Conclusion: An Interdisciplinary Introspection What does it mean to be in your early twenties in Turkey today? How does it differ from my early twenties? What is lost, what is gained in time? Below I quote my younger self, from a point in time when I was doing a first round of calculations for answering this question. I agree with Uruguayan political scientist Paulo Ravecca who claims that ‘situating disciplinary introspection through personal introspection may open fruitful paths to interrogate and unravel knots of experience made of knowledge, power, and politics’ (2019: 166). My own history is entangled in the history of contemporary Turkey: I was one of the protestors in the Gezi Park during June 2013 like many people I know, and the experience influenced—and perhaps shaped—me in multiple ways (Başar, 2022, 192). 19 March 2025 and its aftermath has shaped this generation of theatre makers. Many gestures of dissidence remained little-changed, yet meanings of these gestures shifted considerably over a dozen years: while we covered our faces in Gezi primarily to protect ourselves from the tear gas, this generation went to Saraçhane covering their faces primarily to protect themselves from government profiling. GenZ’s experience is different from ours as they try to fit their artistic and political perspective into a corporate institutional system that we managed to escape to some extent fifteen years ago, but that ecosystem is gone (for now). Today, answers escape me. Yet I stay with the questions as they grow and multiply like rhizomes, and wait for the right time, alongside my young colleagues. Because who knows? Formulating the right question could be the right answer to our times, by triggering the tsunami wave of a paradigm shift. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes Endnotes [1] For an overview of and commentary on the 2013 Gezi Park protests, see Özkırımlı, 2014; David & Toktamış, 2015; Gürcan & Peker, 2015; Koç & Aksu, 2015; Yücesan-Özdemir, 2016; Hemer & Persson, 2017; Tüfekçi, 2017; Ağartan, 2024 . [2] See Yücesan-Özdemir, 2016, for a survey of other events that foreshadowed the Gezi Park protests. [3] Also see Christina Banalopoulou's discussion of the government's "suffocation policies" and "politics of asphyxiation" (2024). [4] Emine Fişek has been the Research Associate and Project Leader of ERC Project: THEAGENT - Theatre and Gentrification in the European City in Austria since 2023. See Fişek, 2026. [5] The limitedness of translations of Turkish plays into English makes it a challenge to start a larger scale discussion in Anglophone academia about the theatre field in Turkey; this has directly impacted my career trajectory, developing me as a translator and a translation editor. For a survey of Turkish play anthologies available in English, see Ergil and Yanıkkaya, 2026. [6] Curiously, these Zorlu Center cases, well known to the Turkish-speaking public, are not translated into English. Let me offer a translation of a short news clipping from 2012: “At the Zorlu Center construction site, which has turned the Beşiktaş district into a massive construction zone, a tragic worker death occurred. According to eyewitness accounts, the worker fell from the 22nd floor of the building and was killed. The Zorlu Center, which was sealed off when the construction reached the 4th floor, and then obtained a permit in one day without the approval of the Beşiktaş Municipal Council and the Chamber of Architects, continues to be the scene of tragic events. […] It is unknown whether Zorlu Center officials obtained a work permit for working on Sunday [the day that worker’s death happened]. The Beşiktaş Municipality is also maintaining silence on the matter. According to claims by local shopkeepers and eyewitnesses, this tragic death is not the first at Zorlu Center. Local residents claim that there have been fatal work accidents at Zorlu Center before, but all of them were kept from the press.” Translated from the source: "Zorlu Center'da işçi ölümü!" [Worker death in Zorlu Center], Beşiktaş Postası, last modified May 14, 2012. For readers who know Turkish, see İş Cinayetleri Almanağı 2012 [Almanac of Worker Murders], BirUmut Yayıncılık, 2013. This book and its serials from the same activist publication house will allow readers to see what a large-scale issue this is in the construction-dependent economic development model of the AKP, where workers are seen as disposable, work safety measurements are consistently lacking, and the construction companies where work accidents repeatedly happen face no disincentivizing punishments. [7] See Şeyben, 2021 (especially “ Section III: Decentralized Theatres”) for a good discussion of the relationship between authoritarian urban transformation and alternative theatres. Also see Fişek 2018 on the representation of gentrification and capitalist investment on the stages of alternative theatres during the 2010s. Ironically, the venue discussed in this 2018 article, GalataPerform, was closed during the pandemic, though the ensemble continues to work. Additionally, see Fişek et al., 2026. [8] See Akıncı, 2018 to follow the reasoning of this claim. [9] For more on this claim, see Ejder, 2019. [10] See Şeyben, 2021 (especially “ Section II: Subsidized Theatres” ) to understand the impact of AKP on institutional theatres of Turkey. Also see Adak and Altınay, 2018, to have a sense of the historical cultivation of the current day theatre ecosystem of Turkey. [11] See Baş, 2015; Akar, 2018; Metîn, 2019; and Şeyben, 2021 (especially “ Chapter 6: Battle on Many Fronts: The Case of Şermola Performans ”) for an analysis of the Kurdish theatre scene in İstanbul during the 2010s. Beyond these works, to understand the general state of Kurdish theatre in Turkey, see the body of publications of Duygu Çelik, which are listed below. [12] It is telling that many of the banners in 19 March protests referred to Gezi. Here are some examples: “Biz Çapulcular Yeni Gelmedik Geri Geldik” [“Us Chapullers Didn’t Arrive Just Now, We Only Came Back”], “Gezi_2.0”, “Çapulcuların Çocukları Büyüdü” [“The Children of Chapullers Grew Up”] (Peker, 2025). “Chapullers” ( Çapulcular ) means “looters” in Turkish. Initially a pejorative that the government applied to the Gezi protesters, it was later adopted by protesters as a badge of honor. [13] See Akgöz, 2026 for a history of protests at Saraçhane Square. [14] Such as the infamous penguin documentary, broadcast on CNN Turk during the first days of the Gezi Protests, while people were being brutalized by the police almost immediately outside CNN Turk’s own corporate building (David & Toktamış, 2015, 19). [15] Another point of introspection: The main character (Toprak) of my first award winning play in Turkey, The Itch , was also from Şırnak. See Başar, 2024 for more on this play; and see Onat and Başar, 2025 for more insight on the nature the contest. [16] See works cited for a list of Duygu Çelik’s works on Kurdish theatre in English and Turkish. [17] The imagery here is reminiscent of the 2019 Turkish movie, Sibel, and its use of the wolf mythologies of the Black Sea region. ___________________ Works Cited Adak, Hülya, and Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay. "Introduction: Theatre and Politics in Turkey and Its Diasporas." In "Performing Turkishness," special issue, Comparative Drama 52, no. 3/4 (2018): 185-214. Ağartan, Kaan. Gezi: The Making of a New Political Community in Turkey . Edinburgh University Press, 2024. Akar, Bilal. "Transformation of the Kurdish Theater Field in Turkey between 1991 and 2017." Master's thesis, Koç University, 2018. Akgöz, Görkem. "LMT #142 : Saraçhane Square, Istanbul, Turkey." Laboratório de Estudos de História dos Mundos do Trabalho. Last modified March 5, 2026. Accessed March 7, 2026. https://lehmt.org/lmt-142-praca-sarachane-istambul-turquia-gorkem-akgoz/ . For the English version of the article: https://www.academia.edu/164967991/Saraçhane_Square_Istanbul_Turkey Akıncı, Özgül. "Performing Academia in Public Space in Turkey." Performance Research 23, no. 2 (2018): 44-48. Accessed 13 November, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1464753 . Aksoy, Asu, and Kevin Robbins. "Beyoğlu in Istanbul: Whose Story is It?" In Culture in the Cities - Present and Future , edited by Franco Bianchini and Guy Saez, 40-53. İletişim Yayınları, 2023. Altuğ, Seda, Mert Arslanalp, Volkan Çidam, and Saygun Gökarıksel. "Repression and Resistance at Boğaziçi University: The Making of Counterpublic under Authoritarian Offensive." In Fragments of Repression and Resistance: A.K.P. Rule in Turkey , edited by Kumru F. Toktamış and Isabel David, 119-42. Peter Lang, 2025. Aydoğan, Kemal, and Emine Ayhan. "'Büyük PSM'lerin Önünde Garipsiyorduk'" ["We were finding ourselves weird in front of big PACs (Performance Arts Centers)"]. In "Bugün, Sahne Nedir? [What is the stage today?]," special issue, Cogito , no. 119 (2026): 139-57. Banalopoulou, Christina. "'Doesn't Every Dying Person's Last Breath Touch the Living?'" Performance Research 29, nos. 4-5 (2024): 49-55. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2024.2510855 . Baş, Elif. "The Rise of Kurdish Theatre in Istanbul." Theatre Survey 56, no. 3 (2015): 314-35. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0040557415000289 . Başar, Deniz. "Constructing A Fictional Skin Disease Pandemic as Political Allegory Based on First-Hand Experience: An Auto-Ethnography Trial on How I Wrote The Itch ." In The Routledge Companion to Performance and Medicine , edited by Gianna Bouchard and Alex Mermikides. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2024. Başar, Deniz. "Faces of a Long Unspoken Collective Trauma: Theatrical Representations of Friendship, Love, Betrayal, and Pain in the Landscape of War in Contemporary Turkey." In The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race , edited by Osita Okagbue and Tiziana Morosetti, 195-217. Palgrave, 2021. Başar, Deniz. "From Repertoires of Resistance to Monuments of Absence." European Journal of Theatre and Performance 4 (June 2022): 160-97. https://doi.org/10.21827/ejtp.4.41720 . Başar, Deniz. "Kaşıntı [The Itch]." In Mitos-Boyut 6. Oyun Yazma Yarışması, 2014 . Mitos Boyut, 2015. Başar, Deniz. "Performative Publicness: Alternative Theater in Turkey After 2000s." Master's thesis, Boğaziçi University, 2014. Başar, Deniz. Tsunami . Edited by Mina Çakmak. Istanbul: Onagöre, 2025. Poetry. Çelik, Duygu. "Dengbejlik geleneği ve Türkiye'deki Kürt tiyatrosuna etkileri [Dengbêjî tradition and its effects on Kurdish theatre in Turkey]." PhD diss., İstanbul University, 2017. Çelik, Duygu. "The Impact of the Dengbêjî Tradition on Kurdish Theater in Turkey." In Kurdish Art and Identity: Verbal Art, Self-definition and Recent History , edited by Alireza Korangy and Philip G. Kreyenbroek. Walter De Gruyter, 2020. Çelik, Duygu. "Kilam as Theatre Music in Kurdish Theatre in Turkey." In Music and Sound in European Theatre: Practices, Performances, Perspectives , edited by David Roesner and Tamara Yasmin Quick. Routledge, 2025. Çelik, Duygu. "The 'Other' Karagöz: The Kurdish Qeregoz." In Race, Gender and Disability in Puppetry and Material Performance , by Laura Purcell-Gates, edited by Paulette Richards, Hazel Briar, and Alissa Mello. Routledge, 2026. Çelik, Duygu. "Otherness and Censorship in the Theatre of Turkey (1960s–70s)." In The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship , edited by Anne Etienne and Graham Saunders. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. David, Isabel, and Kumru F. Toktamış, eds. 'Everywhere Taksim' : Sowing the Seeds for a New Turkey at Gezi . Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Demiralp, Seda, and Evren Balta. "Defeating Populists: The Case of 2019 Istanbul Elections." South European Society and Politics 26, no. 1 (2021): 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2021.1923639 . Dinçel, Burç İdem. "Biomechanical Resonances in Turkey: The Working Method of Studio Oyuncuları." In The Routledge Companion to Vsevolod Meyerhold , edited by Jonathan Pitches and Stefan Aquilina. Routledge, 2023. Ejder, Eylem. "Reports from the Field: Contemporary Performance Criticism in Turkey— Critical Endeavours: Experimental Searches in Contemporary Performance Criticism in Turkey." Platform 13, no. 1 (2019): 103-15. Accessed 13 November 2025. https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/media/11708/09_eylemejder.pdf.pdf . Ergil, Başak, and Zerrin Yanıkkaya. "Towards New Perspectives on Anthologizing and Representing Turkish Theater in the Anglosphere." Middle Eastern Literatures , March 13, 2026, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262x.2026.2629937 . Esen, Berk, and Şebnem Gümüşçü. "How to Fight Turkey's Authoritarian Turn." Journal of Democracy 36, no. 3 (2025): 106-20. Fişek, Emine, Aurélien Bellucci, Regina Lissowska-Postaremczak, Joseph Prestwich, and Clio Unger. "Stages of Gentrification: An International Roundtable." Theatre Research International, March 4, 2026, 1-13. Accessed March 7, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1080/03078833.2026.2634146 . Fişek, Emine. "Palimpsests of Violence: Urban Dispossession and Political Theatre in Istanbul." In "Performing Turkishness," special issue, Comparative Drama 52, nos. 3-4 (2018): 349-71. https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2018.0015 . Fişek, Emine. "THEAGENT ÖAW." Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften [Austrian Academy of Sciences]. Accessed April 14, 2026. https://www.oeaw.ac.at/projects/theagent . Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22-27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648 . Gürcan, Efe Can, and Efe Peker. Challenging Neoliberalism at Turkey's Gezi Park: from Private Discontent to Collective Class Action . Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Hemer, Oscar, and Hans-Åke Persson, eds. In the Aftermath of Gezi: From Social Movement to Social Change? Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. İş Cinayetleri Almanağı. 2012 [Almanac of Worker Murders] . 2013 ed. BirUmut Yayıncılık, 2013. Koç, Güneş, and Harun Aksu, eds. Another Brick in the Barricade: the Gezi Resistance and Its Aftermath . Wiener Verlag für Sozialforschung, 2015. Meerzon, Yana, Art Babayants, and Deniz Başar. "Ethos of New Stockholm: A City Invented to be Staged." Critical Stages . Last modified December 2024. Accessed February 4, 2026. https://www.critical-stages.org/30/ethos-of-new-stockholm-a-city-invented-to-be-staged/ . Metîn, Mîrza. "Kurdish Resistance and the Dramaturgy of Fire." Theatre Research International 44, no. 3 (2019): 314-17. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0307883319000397 . Onat, Fatma. "Traces of a Lost Archive: Four Selected Theatre Criticisms by Fatma Onat from 2010s' İstanbul." Edited by Deniz Başar. Critical Stages . Last modified December 2025. Accessed February 4, 2026. https://www.critical-stages.org/32/traces-of-a-lost-archive-four-selected-theatre-criticisms-by-fatma-onat-from-2010s-istanbul/ . Onat, Fatma, and Deniz Başar. "In A State of Constant Migration: Conversation with Fatma Onat." Critical Stages . Last modified December 2025. Accessed 4 February 2026. https://www.critical-stages.org/32/in-a-state-of-constant-migration-conversation-with-fatma-onat/ . Onat, Fatma, Deniz Başar, and Ayşe Bayramoğlu. New Stockholm'de Sonbahar = Payîza New Stockholmê = Autumn in New Stockholm . Mitos-Boyut, 2023. Özkırımlı, Umut, ed. The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey: #occupygezi . Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Peker, Dilara Bağcı. "Gözaltına Alınan Ekrem İmamoğlu'na Destek İçin Saraçhane'ye Akın Eden Halkın Açtığı Pankartlar" [Banners Unfurled by People Flocking to Saraçhane in Support of Ekrem İmamoğlu, Who Was Taken into Custody]. Onedio. Last modified March 19, 2025. Accessed 29 January 2026. https://onedio.com/haber/gozaltina-alinan-ekrem-imamoglu-na-destek-icin-sarachane-ye-akin-eden-halkin-actigi-pankartlar-1280979 . Ravecca, Paulo. The Politics of Political Science: Re-writing Latin American Experiences . Routledge, 2019. Schmidt, Felix. "'The aura of invincibility is gone.'" IPS. Last modified 25 June 2019. Accessed 29 January 2026. https://www.ips-journal.eu/interviews/the-aura-of-invincibility-is-gone-3562/ . Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment . Routledge, 2011. Şeyben, Burcu Yasemin. Struggle and Survival under Authoritarianism in Turkey: Theatre under Threat . Lexington Books, 2021. Tecimer, Cem. "The Arrest of Istanbul's Mayor is Textbook Lawfare." Verfassungsblog - On Matters Constitutional. Last modified March 28, 2025. Accessed 29 January 2026. https://verfassungsblog.de/the-arrest-of-istanbuls-mayor-is-textbook-lawfare/ . Tekay, Cihan. "#AşağıBakmayacağız ('We Will Not Look Down')." South Atlantic Quarterly 121, no. 1 (2022): 210-19. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-9561671 . Tuncer, Anıl Can, and Gavin Blackburn. "Prosecutor seeks 2,352-year jail term for Istanbul's mayor over alleged corruption." Euronews. Last modified 11 November 2025. Accessed 12 November 2025. https://www.euronews.com/2025/11/11/prosecutor-seeks-2352-year-jail-term-for-istanbuls-mayor-over-alleged-corruption . "Turkey: 'I Cannot Breathe' Allegations of torture and other ill-treatment in the context of mass protests between 19—26 March must be investigated" [Index Number: EUR 44/9471/2025]. Amnesty International. Last modified 19 June 2025. Accessed 12 November 2025. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur44/9471/2025/en/ . Tüfekçi, Zeynep. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest . Yale University Press, 2017. Uğur, Zeynep. "Reappropriation of Public Space Autonomous Space Making from Istanbul's Alternative Theatre Scene to the Gezi Movement." In "Activism and Spectatorship," ed. Pieter Verstraete and Agata Łuksza, special issue, European Journal of Theatre and Performance , no. 4 (May 2022): 114-59. Ülgen, Övgü. "'Wine & Halva:' Post-Migration and The Limits of Western Liberalism." The Theatre Times. Last modified July 26, 2024. Accessed 4 February 2026. https://thetheatretimes.com/wine-halva-post-migration-and-the-limits-of-western-liberalism/ . Verstraete, Pieter. "In Search of a New Performativity after Gezi: On Symbolic Politics and New Dramaturgies in Turkey." Theatre Research International 44, no. 3 (2019): 273-90. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0307883319000312 . Yücesan-Özdemir, Gamze, ed. The Road to Gezi: Resistance and Counter-publics in 21st Century Turkey . Red Quill Books, 2016. "Zorlu Center'da işçi ölümü!" [Worker death in Zorlu Center]. Beşiktaş Postası. Last modified 14 May 2012. Accessed 29 January 2026. https://www.besiktaspostasi.com/zorlu-centerda-isci-olumu-29556/ . References About The Author(s) Deniz Başar (PhD Concordia University ‘21) is a theatre researcher and playwright from Turkey, and a 2021-2023 FRQSC post-doctoral fellow in Boğaziçi University. She has published multiple articles on puppetry and political performativity. Her play Wine and Halva was staged in Montreal (2024) and remounted by Teesri Duniya Theatre (2026-27). Autumn in New Stockholm (2023), a play she co-wrote with Fatma Onat and Ayşe Bayramoğlu, was published in a trilingual edition (Turkish, Kurdish, and English), and a French translation was staged in Montreal in 2026. She currently works at the Foundations Development Directorate of Sabancı University. Arab Stages 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. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 18 Winter 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. By Malek Najjar Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Ashtar Muallem’s Awalem/Cosmos is a one-woman performance infused with text, music, and aerial arts performance, co-written by Ashtar Muallem, and co-written and directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba. Muallem, who has toured the production around the world, performs the work in Arabic, English, and French. I attended this production in Portland, Oregon, at the AWOL Dance Collective, produced by BOOM Arts on Saturday, March 1 st , 2025, after attending a movement workshop with Muallem earlier that day. A self-described Jerusalemite artist who navigates life between Palestine and France, Muallem bills Awalem/Cosmos as “a one-woman theatrical performance” ( Cosmos English). In the press materials, she describes the show thus, Ashtar practices yoga, and meditation, and explores tarot reading and hypnosis on the internet. Her elastic body mirrors her dual life, between two countries, cultures, and languages, between solitude and togetherness. In a satirical manner, she presents her beliefs, inviting us to participate in a ceremony where poetry blends with humour and subjectivity merges with the universal. Through Ashtar’s art, we embark on a journey of balance, contradictions, and the beauty of interconnectedness. ( Cosmos English) The audience enters to Muallem sitting in the lotus position wearing a white blouse tied at the waist and black yoga pants on a large white cloth pooled on the stage, which also ascends high above her to the rafters. She performs several actor vocal exercises and speaks casually to the audience as they take their seats, asking if they are comfortable and whether anyone has practiced yoga or meditation. She then asks everyone to inhale and exhale together, “to get into the group’s atmosphere” (YouTube). This metaphor of “inhale, exhale” becomes central to the piece as it progresses. Muallem begins the actual performance with a Tibetan singing bowl, which she rings and circles with a mallet while laying on her side. Ashtar Muallem performs in Cosmos/Awalem by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba, . Directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba. Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage. She tells the audience she is neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim, nor from the East or West. “I abdicated duality and saw that the two worlds aren’t but one. Everything is one,” she states. She then begins a series of exercises with a yoga stretching strap while she speaks about the primacy of the body and the need for harmony between the body, soul, and spirit. She tells the audience of her grandmother, a religious woman who wanted Muallem to be like her, a “prayer addict” living in Jerusalem, a city of peace with a market filled with the smells of za’atar, sumac, sesame, and curry. However, despite the beauty of the city, there was a tension that convinced her at the age of eighteen to leave her country to study circus in France. She spends months in the new country, unable to speak the language until she attends a pro-Palestine rally where she hears the shouts “Free Palestine! Victory to Palestine!” There, she is asked about the history of her country and explains the 1948 War, the 1967 War, the division of Jerusalem into quarters, and the occupation zones that dictate where Palestinians are allowed to live or travel under occupation. When asked by foreigners what the solution is to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she says: “The solution is simple. It is within us.” (YouTube) Although never mentioned, her tenure in France seemed to coincide with the COVID-19 lockdown, leaving her with a hopeless feeling that she would never be allowed to perform theatre again. She flirted with the idea of becoming a YouTube influencer but found little success. With her vanishing hope, she came to study Zen and its koan “You cannot control external circumstances. Pain is a part of life” (YouTube). She learns that everything happens for a reason and that there is a predestiny at work. Music begins, and she performs a beautifully choreographed aerial sequence as she ascends the silk and performs gravity-defying maneuvers. Suddenly, she stops, pulls out a cigarette, lights it, and smokes high above the stage floor. “Are you surprised that I’m smoking?” she asks. “I have plenty of time to burn” (YouTube). She says that her true lover, solitude, complements her as she cooks, reads, dances, and repeats affirmations in her lockdown. She realizes she is a vortex of creativity and creates rituals where she hugs and kisses herself, sometimes cradling and speaking baby talk to her own leg as she would an actual baby. She watches a tarot reader named Estelle online who always predicts correctly. She also learns to read the aura surrounding people by crossing her eyes and looking directly at them; a technique she employs on the actual audience watching the production. Ashtar Muallem performs in Cosmos/Awalem by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba, . Directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba. Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage. She then tells us that she finds that some people have blockages, and that men are told not to cry and they, in turn, tell their children not to cry either. To remedy this, she pulls a male audience member from the audience and leads them upstage right to a table with a chopping block and a chef knife, where they sit on a chair facing the audience. She produces a basket of onions and tells the participant to cut them until they are done. “You will cry freely and I will move freely” she says. As a mournful Arabic song plays, she dances, returns to the aerial silk, ascends, and performs a balletic dance high above the stage with unbelievable accuracy and speed. When she descends and escorts the man from the stage, she tells us how we, like the onion, are constituted of many layers, with each layer representing an identity we have assigned ourselves. “For us to access our truths,” she states, “we need to peel off these layers.” (YouTube) [1] She repeats a mantra, “Those who never cry are full of tears” (YouTube). She says she has seen too many men carrying weapons, but too few who cry. “I wonder if men let their tears fall then perhaps our world would be washed from all the wars?” she asks. She then breaks into a humorous infomercial voice as “Ashtar the Influencer,” urging audiences to purchase onions in the lobby. Her last words are “May peace be upon you. Namaste.” Muallem’s embodied performance of physical and vocal mastery, her congenial tone, her direct address, and her spiritual quandaries combine to make Cosmos/Awalem an enjoyable and thoughtful evening of performance. It is clear that she is exploring her role as an artist in the world and her life as a woman, as a Palestinian, and as a spiritual seeker in the hopes of unravelling her complicated emotions regarding the patriarchy, toxic masculinity, war, and occupation. Perhaps, instead of an onion, a more apt metaphor might be the artichoke. One may not cry while peeling an artichoke, but each layer peeled leads not to tears, but to the heart. After all is said and done, isn’t that the journey Muallem has asked us to take during this poignant evening of performance? Ashtar Muallem performs in Cosmos/Awalem by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba, . Directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba. Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes SOURCES: Cosmos: A One-Woman Theatrical Performance, Co-written and Performed by Ashtar Muallem. Co-written and directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba.” ASHTAR Theatre, 11 September, 2003. Media kit. Muallem, Ashtar. “AWALEM with English sub.” YouTube, uploaded by ASHTAR Theatre 7 January, 2024. https://youtu.be/HUhNyBJnASU?si=sHnGUAGOPOKxj0Vx . [1] On this particular evening of performance, I was unexpectedly the one asked onstage to chop the onions. As I sat there cutting the onions I found myself much less interested in the task as I was in the mesmerizing aerial performance unfolding before me. References About The Author(s) Malek Najjar is a Full Professor of Theatre Arts with the University of Oregon. He holds a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies (UCLA) and his Master of Fine Arts in Directing (York University). He is the author of Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures and Creators and Arab American Drama, Film and Performance: A Critical Study, 1908 to the Present. He edited Heather Raffo’s Iraq Plays: The Things That Can’t Be Said and The Selected Works of Yussef El Guindi ; Four Arab American Plays: Works by Leila Buck, Jamil Khoury, Yussef El Guindi, and Lameece Issaq & Jacob Kader . He is co-editor of Until I Return: The Selected Plays of Ismail Khalidi and Mona Mansour: The Vagrant Trilogy (with Hala Baki) and Six Plays of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (with Jamil Khoury and Corey Pond). Malek has directed with Silk Road Rising, Golden Thread Productions, New Arab American Theatre Works. Malek is a performance editor for Arab Stages and a board member of the Middle East North African Theater Makers Alliance. Arab Stages 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. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine Resisting the Unleashed Evils of the US- Invasion of Iraq in Amir Al-Azraki’s The Widow (2017) Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. Performance Review: DUMMY IN DIASPORA. By Esho Rasho. Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi Performance Review: THE CAVE. By Sadieh Rifai Performance Review: IRAQ, BUT FUNNY by Atra Asdou Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 15 Spring 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage MIDNIGHT IN CAIRO: THE DIVAS OF EGYPT'S ROARING '20S. By Raphael Cormack (REVIEW) By Suzi Elnaggar Published: June 15, 2024 Download Article as PDF Raphael Cormack’s Midnight in Cairo offers a glimmering portrait of the female stars of Egypt’s Roaring ‘20s. The book combines meticulous research and a narrative style that appeals to a broad audience, which bring to life the 'divas' of the era through detailed biographical vignettes. These stories capture the jubilant glamor of the period, showcasing the lives of these fascinating performers both on and off the stage. Midnight in Cairo has resonated with readers beyond academia, as it offers an entertaining and insightful foray into a pivotal moment in Egypt’s performance history. Cormack organizes the narrative into “a theatrical story in three acts”: Act I: Setting the Scene , which focuses on the historical performance context pre-1920s; Act II: The Leading Ladies , which provides the biographies of the key female performers; and Act III: Curtain Call , which tracks the political and social developments in Egypt from the 1950s forward, providing a brief retrospective in contrast to the earlier era (10). In the first act, Setting the Scene , which encompasses chapters one through four, Cormack provides a brief overview of Egyptian theatre and performance history up to the 1920s. By beginning with Ibn Daniel’s thirteenth-century shadow plays, Cormack pushes against the narrative that Egyptian drama began with the intrusion of European colonialism. This approach not only counters pervasive historiographic narratives but also positions Cairo of the 1920s within a broader regional performance history. Cormack vividly paints Cairo of the 1920s as a sort of cosmopolitan fever dream, suggesting, “Egypt was all over the front pages, and Cairo’s residents must have felt they were living at the centre of the world” (100). He focuses, in particular, on the vibrant nightlife and cultural scene in Ezbekiyya, a Cairene district known at that time for an abundance of dance halls, theatres, and other performance venues. Written in an engaging narrative style, this first ‘act’ of Midnight in Cairo serves as an excellent primer on performance history in Egypt; the focus on a diverse array of notable figures, writers, producers, and actors, as the narrative throughlines makes for a delightful read. In the second act of Midnight in Cairo , The Leading Ladies , which spans chapters five through eleven, Cormack explores the lives of significant female film, stage, and musical stars of 1920s Egypt through chapter-long vignettes. The biographies intersect and build on each other, with some women becoming recurring figures, background players in the others’ narratives. The chapters focus respectively on stage-actress turned journalist Rose al-Youssef, theatre troupe leader Fatima Rushdi, singer and actor Fatima Sirri, widely known songstress Oum Kalthoum, musical theatre star Mounira al-Mahdiyya, film actor Aziza Amir, and comic actor and dancer Badia Masabni. While a few men, such as Aziz Eid, feature prominently throughout, the chapters focus on the women’s groundbreaking careers and complex lives. Notably, Cormack addresses both their triumphs and challenges, a choice that is exemplified by the highlighting of Rose al-Youssef’s controversial editorial choices, use of misogynistic cartoons, and an all-male staff for her eponymous still-running magazine. Yet, her story is ultimately portrayed as a tale of triumph, as Cormack emphasizes her unlikely rise in Egyptian society, stating, “it is hard to imagine that a young girl who had turned up alone in Alexandria at the beginning of the twentieth century could possibly have started her own literary journal in Egypt if she had not found her way into the world of arts and become one of Egypt’s biggest stars” (148). Cormack extends the stories of these women into the twilight of their careers and lives in the 1950s, fulfilling the book’s core mission to “tell the history of Cairo’s nightlife through the eyes of the women who made it what it was” (321). Curtain Call , the final act, which covers chapter twelve and the conclusion, serves as a fitting denouement, opening with an anecdote of a young Edward Said visiting Badia Masabni’s establishment in 1950 to watch the famous dancer Tahiyya Carioca. Cormack leverages this happenchance encounter between Said and Carioca to chronicle Egypt’s journey from the precipice of the 1952 Revolution to the present day. In the concluding chapter, Cormack adopts a more personal tone, reflecting on feminism, contemporary Egypt, and regional cultural transformations. While providing a modern perspective, this subjective shift sometimes contrasts sharply with the detailed historical narrative he established earlier, which casts a somewhat somber tone on the ending. This discordance may feel jarring, yet it also effectively draws the reader into the ongoing dialogue about Egypt’s past and its present. In crafting nuanced portraits of the iconic ‘divas’ of the era, Cormack extends beyond drama and theatre to include music, dance, and film. He situates these arts within the broader historical, political, and cultural contexts that shaped the performers’ lives, their artistic expressions, and their legacies. Cormack enriches the narrative by interweaving tales of lesser-known figures and personal dramas, creating a rich tapestry that captures the vibrancy of the 1920s Cairo stage scene. The book touches upon fraught subjects, if too briefly, such as intercultural tensions, misogyny, blackface, and colonialism. While Cormack does not approach these critically or in-depth (as that is neither the style nor objective of the text), their inclusion serves to make Midnight in Cairo a well-rounded entry into the performance history of the region. This approach makes the book accessible and informative, appealing to a general audience as well as theatre students and scholars from other disciplines, such as historians and literary scholars who focus on Egypt or the Middle East. However, performance and theatre scholars will also find much of interest within the text as Cormack gives a glimpse into oft-overlooked pre-1950s Egyptian drama, music, and dance. Cormack’s use of archival photographs and excerpts from interviews and the writings of the stars themselves adds authenticity and depth, showcasing the era’s glamour and the significant, yet often overlooked, contributions of these women. Cormack’s Midnight in Cairo is a love letter to a bygone era of Egyptian glitz and glamour. Bringing to light some of Egypt’s most fascinating female figures, often marginalized in narratives that typically focus on Western perspectives, the text makes these women both legible and truly dazzling. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Suzi Elnaggar is an Egyptian-American performance scholar, freelance dramaturg, and theatre-maker. She was a 2021 Kennedy Center Dramaturgy Intensive Fellow and works as both a developmental and production dramaturg. She is pursuing an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama and MENA Studies at Northwestern University. She holds an M.A. in Theatre Studies from Baylor University, where she researched the work of Heather Raffo through the lens of trauma studies. She has been published in Asian Theatre Journal , Arab Stages , and Theatre Times . Her research interests include recontextualizing Greek tragedy, post-colonial theatre contexts, decoloniality in performance, theatre of social change, the intersection of trauma and performance, and work that centers around SWA/MENA (Southwest Asian/Middle Eastern and North African) experiences. Her scholarship and practice center community, collaboration, and context. Arab Stages 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. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Carving a Path: Desiring-Production in Displaced Syrian Theatre Interview with Nasser Rahmaninejad by Babak Rahimi Arab American Drama: Five Books that Inspired My Journey Five Arab American Plays Everyone Should Read MIDNIGHT IN CAIRO: THE DIVAS OF EGYPT'S ROARING '20S. By Raphael Cormack (REVIEW) Previous Next Attribution:

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 15 Spring 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Arab American Drama: Five Books that Inspired My Journey By Malek Najjar Published: June 15, 2024 Download Article as PDF Photo courtesy of Malek Najjar When asked by Arab Stages Book Review Editor George Potter about five books that shaped my thinking about Arab American drama, I immediately thought about the fact that there were no full-length books available about the genre when I began my doctoral dissertation on the topic. As a matter of fact, the very reason I focused my attention upon this bourgeoning theatre form was because of the paucity of information available up to that time. We must remember that, although the first Arab American play, Ameen F. Rihani’s Wajdah , was written in 1909, prior to that point, the entire history of Arab American drama consisted of one-off productions and publications. Like other immigrant communities, our theatre was not considered legitimate because it had no major playwrights with large bodies of work, it had no Broadway productions, it had no anthologies of plays, and it had no major prizes associated with it. Instead, Arab Americans have been creating theatre independently, and with little or no means of production, since the first recorded Arab American theatrical group, the Syrian Youth Society, staged the play Andromak in 1896.(1) The early plays by Kahlil Gibran, Mikhail Naimy, and Ameen F. Rihani were published in Arab American newspapers, but were never staged in their lifetimes. This might have prompted Edward W. Said to lament to Gregory Orfalea that, in terms of Arab Americans having any influence on the dominant culture, “the Arab American simply plays a very tiny, marginal, unimportant role.”(2) Said’s words rang true in his lifetime, but the burgeoning of this artform over the past decades has proven that this situation has changed over time. No serious discussion of Arab American history, arts, or letters can begin without mentioning Edward W. Said’s seminal work. Even though his book Orientalism is, of course, a masterwork, his essays “The Arab Portrayed,” which appeared in the 1970 book The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective , edited by the late Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, and his “Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Volume” of Orientalism were the foundation for my study of Arab American drama. In “The Arab Portrayed,” Said crystalized the very notions I had been wrestling with my entire life as an Arab American as I watched Arabs being perniciously misrepresented in films by filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis, and John Frankenheimer (to name only a few). In the films I watched by these directors, Arabs were always portrayed as evil, violent, terroristic, stupid, sex-crazed, and sadistic. This contrasted greatly from the films I grew up watching at home starring Omar Sharif, Fairuz, Farid Al Atrash, Faten Hamamah, and others. The Arabs I knew watching my parents’ VHS tapes sang, danced, played musical instruments, loved, laughed, cried, and mourned. By contrast, the Arabs in the movie theatres were Nazi collaborators, ruthless terrorists, vile letches, and scimitar-wielding villains worthy only of a brutal death. Said’s essay begins with the two offensive caricatures of Arabs he encountered: the stupid and offensive Arab with their hands above their heads in a gesture of surrender, or the treacherous, sex-mad Arab intent on violating Western women and killing Western men. Said attributes these to British and French colonialist writings and the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War coverage, which pitted white Europeans facing off against a horde of native savages. He wrote, “As an intelligible unit in the mind, the Arab has been reduced to pure antagonism to Israel. The sheer mass of his numbers—against which, it seems, any injustice counts for very little—has been abstracted into unitary order, the better to deal with the uncomfortable moral demands his history and actuality might make.”(3) He continues by stating that the sympathy one might feel for Africans or Vietnamese, Balkan nationals or Irish nationalists, simply cannot be extended to the Palestinian Arabs. “In the mind’s syntax, then, the Arab, if thought of singly, is a creature without dimension. His history is obscure, for it is written neither in terms of institutions the Americans can recognize nor in a language he can read… What is most telling about Western consciousness of the Arab is how few ordinary categories of human existence seem applicable to him. Suffering and injustice, it seems, can never be his lot.”(4) Said critiques scholars such as I.F. Stone, Theodore Draper, Joel Carmichael, Michael Walzer and Martin Peretz. In works like these, Said, states, “It is no accident, I think, that in America the representation of the Arab in accounts of the modern Near East relies so heavily on a simple, though to my mind seriously defective and malicious, conception of fact.”(5) Said also blames “regional studies” programs that also diminish Arabs into factual statistics, rigid categories, and psychological conditions. Said ends his essay with the following notice: “There are signs, however, that with much of the Third World, the Arab has now fully recognized this as his predicament: he is demanding of the West, and of Israel, the right to reoccupy his place in history and actuality.”(6) In his “Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition” of Orientalism , Said, speaks both of his advancing age and “diminutions in expectations,” and his faith in emancipation and enlightenment. He wrote, “My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated, so that ‘our’ East, ‘our’ Orient becomes ‘ours’ to possess and direct.”(7) This radical notion of unmaking history and rewriting it melded perfectly with what I observed in Arab American dramas that recast and restaged the Middle East from our Arab American point of view, not the point of view of those outside of our community who wished to distort and misrepresent us. Given the horrors of the American invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan at the time, Said’s essay was a reminder that, for as much progress as we have made in this country, we were still basically viewed the same by the hegemonic powers that governed our nation. Said also wrote, “Therefore, it would seem to be a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the reductively simplifying and confining ones, based on mutual hostility, that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long.”(8) The plays and playwrights I read, studied, and witnessed, were the ones subverting stereotypes by providing the American theatre with fully dimensional Arab and Arab American characters who were not, by any means, perfect, but were just as fallible and wonderful as any humans might be. That humanism is what Said valued most in his essay when he wrote, “humanism is the only, and I would go so far as to say, the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”(9) That was what I saw in these plays—resistance against the inhumane films major filmmakers created that disfigured our Arab and Arab American histories. In my desire to piece together this lost history, I turned not to books but to essays. The first important essay I found was by Ala Fa’ik, titled “Issues of Identity: In Theater of Immigrant Community” found in Ernest N. McCarus’s book The Development of Arab American Identity (1994). Here, Fa’ik explores how Arab American theatre has shaped the identity of Arab Americans. He examines “theater of different types: plays in Arabic by and for Arab-Americans, bilingual productions for wider audiences of both Arab-Americans and non-Arab-Americans, and professional productions in English for the general U.S. public.” (10) For Fa’ik, the roots of Arab American theatre grew from Arab communities grappling with how to preserve their cultural heritage, such as the plays that were staged by the early Arab American immigrants. Although he cites the fact that there were some Arab American theatre troupes that preceded the 1970s, in this essay Fa’ik focuses upon the plays produced in the 1970s and the 1980s. He cites that Arab Americans came to the United States for many reasons: the pursuit of a better life and the flight from political persecution and war. Arab immigrants who settled in larger U.S. cities, therefore, also fulfilled the cultural needs of these communities by creating cultural and entertainment events. The amateur groups, mainly concentrated in urban centers like Detroit, Chicago, San Diego, and Los Angeles, presented plays in Arabic with various Arabic dialects, but in Fa’ik’s opinion, despite the commercial success these productions achieved, they were artistically lacking. Some of the plays which dramatized life in the United States were based on assumptions and misunderstandings which, in Fa’ik’s opinion, “perpetuates ignorance and misinformation.” (11) Fa’ik’s article introduced me to the various amateur theatre groups that had been creating theatre of all sorts: political plays, social commentary plays, social justice plays, children’s theatre, and his own playwriting. In his summary he wrote, A study of the Arab-American theatrical movement does not reveal a high literary and artistically enduring quality right now, but it mostly does reveal attitudes, values, ideals, and aspirations of immigrants developing a community. It brings to light a new dimension to understanding the growth and development of the self-identity of an immigrant community in the United States. As a theater practitioner and scholar, I find the movement of evolving cultural character material of great value to be recorded and studied further… Arab-Americans in their developing theater are bringing their past and their values to the U.S. culture of which they are now a part while at the same time they struggle to maintain their own identity and to define for themselves what that identity is. To be an Arab-American, say these plays, is to be both Arab and American and, for the time being at least, to be neither. (12) Fa’ik’s essay provided a template for me, as an Arab American scholar and practitioner myself, for how to move forward in the discussion of these disparate works of art created by this vibrant artistic community. Unlike Fa’ik, I was writing in a time when there was a larger body of works by extremely accomplished playwrights like Betty Shamieh, Yussef El Guindi, Leila Buck, and Jamil Khoury. What was most exciting for me was recording the progression of Arab American theatre from the chamber plays of Gibran, Naimy, and Rihani, to the semi-professional work of S.K. Hershewe, to the amateur productions of the playwrights Husam Zoro, Hammam Shafie, and Fareed Al-Oboudi. What was also evident was the reflection of these works on the various “waves” of Arab American immigration from the early first-generation Syrian-Lebanese playwrights, to the plays of the first-generation playwrights in the 1970s and 1980s, to the second-generation Arab American plays of the 1990s and 2000s. I saw a longer trajectory of Arab American plays that was overlooked by Fa’ik, and one I wanted to explore in greater depth with my book-length project. Another important essay that was published by Dalia Basiouny and Marvin Carlson titled “Current Trends in Arab-American Performance,” was published in the 2009 edited volume Performance, Exile and ‘America’ , edited by Silvija Jestrovic and Yana Meerzon. The essay begins with the history of Arab migration to the United States, the development of distinct immigrant communities, and the early theatre offerings they presented. The essay then turns to the post-9/11 situation and Arab American artists’ response to negative media portrayals, the wars in Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan, and the need to express hybrid identities. They note that the majority of the artists creating work during this time were women, saying: “Thus, even on this most basic level, current Arab-American theatre and performance is working to present a more accurate picture of Arab-American culture by contradicting the standard Western stereotype, according to which Arab women are widely if not universally oppressed and not allowed any voice or outlet for expression within Arabic culture.” (13) The article discusses several Arab American artists and groups including Yussef El Guindi, NIBRAS, and the Arab-American Comedy Festival, but the focus is primarily on women artists including Faiza Shereen, Etel Adnan, Heather Raffo, Betty Shamieh, Leila Buck, Elmaz Abi Nader, Soha Al Jurf, Rania Khalil, Kathryn Haddad, Lena Rizkallah, and Maysoon Zayid. “The majority of the plays and performances of these artists deal in one way or another with the negotiations of being Arab in America today,” they write. (14) The authors examine plays like Shamieh’s Roar, Khalil’s Flag Piece , Rizkallah’s Layla’s Sahra , and Haddad’s With Love from Ramallah . They also focus attention on female solo performances such as Al Jurf’s Pressing Beyond In Between , Buck’s ISite , Abi Nader’s Country of My Origin , and Raffo’s Nine Parts of Desire as works of “autobiographical solo performances.” They define this genre as, “a particularly popular medium for women theatre and performance artists, particularly for the exploration of the forces that encourage or discourage the formation of identity.” (15) They conclude the article by stating that these varied performances are making a significant contribution to American theatre, utilizing theatre to explore the tensions and identity formations of the Arab American community in the United States. “Their work has a therapeutic and educative dimension for themselves and their community,” they write, “but it has even more widespread therapeutic and educative work to do in the American culture within which it is created.” (16) This final statement is one that landed most with me as I immersed myself in Arab American theatre and performance. While first-generation Arab audiences are drawn predominantly to plays and performances in Arabic that primarily feature humor and music, such as the works of Dearborn theatre makers Najee Mondalek’s AJYAL Theatrical Group , second-generation Arab Americans gravitate more toward the English-language productions of these second-and-third generation playwrights and performers of Arab descent. However, the largest audiences for Arab American plays and performers are actually non-Arabs. For them the plays are translations of the Arab experiences through the lens of Americans of Arab descent. That speaks directly to what Basiouny and Carlson refer to as the “therapeutic and educative work” in the American culture. Another important scholar, Jack G. Shaheen, provided two major resources for my understanding about Arab and Arab American representation in his books Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People and Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11. Shaheen was a vociferous advocate for Arab and Arab American representation, especially when it came to Hollywood filmmaking. In his seminal book Reel Bad Arabs , he critiques nine-hundred films by major Hollywood directors, screenwriters, and producers that malign and misrepresent Arabs and Arab Americans. The introduction to this incredible study focuses on what Shaheen called “The New Anti-Semitism.” He explains, “I call it ‘new’ not because stereotypical screen Arabs are new (they aren’t) or because anti-Semitism against Jews is dead (it isn’t). I use the word ‘new’ because many of the anti-Semitic films directed against Arabs were released in the last third of the twentieth century, at a time when Hollywood was steadily and increasingly eliminating stereotypical portraits of other groups.” (17) For Shaheen, malicious stereotypical portrayal of Arabs on screen was not just an aesthetic matter—it had real-world implications in the way Arabs were treated in society and in world affairs. What I appreciated most was that Shaheen was not calling for a blanket approach that would only praise Arabs onscreen. To the contrary. He wrote, “I am not saying an Arab should never be portrayed as the villain. What I am saying is that almost all Hollywood depictions of Arabs are bad ones. This is a grave injustice. Repetitious and negative images of the reel Arab literally sustain adverse portraits across generations. The fact is that for more than a century, producers have tarred an entire group of people with the same sinister brush.” (18) He breaks down the categories of the “reel” Hollywood Arabs into villains, sheiks, maidens, Egyptians, Palestinians, and gratuitous scenes and slurs. Like Said before him, Shaheen traces the beginnings of the pernicious stereotypes of Arabs in the media to the conflict between Israel and the Arab countries dating back to the late 1940s. The anti-Arab sentiment only grew over the successive decades and, by the time he wrote the book Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11 , Shaheen writes, “Today, the stereotype’s power to inflict damage on innocent people is much greater than before 9/11. During times of armed conflict, stereotyping meets the least resistance; its mendacity most convincingly masquerades as truth, and it is most vigorously defended and justified as truth. Arabs have been so demonized that it has become impossible for some world citizens to believe they are real people; they are perceived only as the enemy, as terrorists, as the ‘other.’” (19) In that book, he also challenges other stereotypes such as “Arab=Muslim”, Post-9/11 images, “Reel Bad Omnipresent Arabs”, and “Reel Political Implications.” He likens these films to the German propaganda of the 1930s, furthering governmental strategies to enforce stereotypes in an attempt to influence foreign policies. One of the most impactful chapters in this book is one titled “Real Solutions” whereby Shaheen calls upon us in the Arab American community to eradicate these stereotypes by breaking into the industry and becoming a key part of the production of these films, to major and excel in media studies, and to learn more about Arab American plays, to create documentaries that focus on Arab lives, and to hold an “Arab American Entertainment Summit” where creatives can gather to “recognize, contest, and correct images of the reel evil ‘others’” of Hollywood films. (20) Shaheen ends this book on a hopeful note, stating: “Change will come—one summit, one college film course, one character, one movie, one TV show, and one courageous imagemaker at a time… Keep the faith: New films will lead the way, illustrating that regardless of color, creed, or culture, we are bound together.”(21) Shaheen’s optimism inspired me, yet, after struggling as an out-of-work director in Los Angeles for years, I must say that my own experience proved otherwise. I hope this brief essay about the scholars and essays that shaped my understanding about Arab American theatre, film, and performances has been helpful. All our scholarship lies on the shoulders of those Arab Americans before us who took the time and effort to document the important and creative work artists in our community have been creating for over a century. Scholars like Edward. W. Said, Ala Fa’ik, Marvin Carlson, Dalia Basiouny, and Jack G. Shaheen are but a few of those who have guided my path as I’ve attempted to analyze, understand, and disseminate the works of these extraordinary individuals. Over time, I’ve had the opportunity to publish manuscripts, anthologies, journal articles, and play reviews as well as teach classes and direct plays to educate and enlighten others to the powerful and impactful work that is consistently produced in this country. Other incredible scholars are now adding to the understanding of Arab American theatre including Roaa Ali, Evelyn Alsultany, Dina Amin, Hala Baki, Waleed F. Mahdi, Somaya Sami Sabry, and others. Before I wrote my book, someone asked me “is there such a thing as Arab American drama?” My hope is that our collective works can prove once and for all that this question is ridiculous. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes 1. Michael W. Suleiman, The Arab-American Experience in the United States and Canada: a Classified, Annotated Bibliography (Ann Arbor, MI: Pierian Press), 488. 2. Quoted in Gregory Orfalea, The Arab Americans: A History (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press), 175. 3.Edward W. Said, “The Arab Portrayed,” in The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of 1967: An Arab Perspective . ed. 1970. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), 3. 4. Said, “The Arab Portrayed,” 4. 5. Said, “The Arab Portrayed,”, 8. 6. Said, “The Arab Portrayed,”9. 7. Edward W. Said, “Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition,” in Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), xviii. 8. Said, “Preface,” xxiv. 9. Said, “Preface,” xxix. 10. Ala Fa’ik, “Issues of Identity: In Theater of Immigrant Community” in The Development of Arab-American Identity, ed. Ernest McCarus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 107. 11. Fa’ik, “Issues of Identity,” 111. 12. Fa’ik, “Issues of Identity,” 117-118. 13. Dalia Basiouny and Marvin Carlson, “Current Trends in Arab-American Performance,” in Performance, Exile and ‘America’, ed. Silvija Jestrovic and Yana Meerzon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 209-210. 14. Basiouny and Carlson, “Current Trends,” 211. 15. Basiouny and Carlson, “Current Trends,”213. 16. Basiouny and Carlson, “Current Trends,” “Current Trends,”219. 17. Jack G. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (New York: Olive Branch Press), 6. 18. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs , 11. 19. Jack G. Shaheen, Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11 (Northampton: Olive Branch Press), XII. 20. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs , 77. 21. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs , 89 References About The Author(s) Malek Najjar is a Professor of Theatre Arts with the University of Oregon. He is the author of Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures and Creators and Arab American Drama, Film and Performance: A Critical Study, 1908 to the Present. He edited Heather Raffo’s Iraq Plays: The Things That Can’t Be Said, The Selected Works of Yussef El Guindi , and Four Arab American Plays: Works by Leila Buck, Jamil Khoury, Yussef El Guindi, and Lameece Issaq & Jacob Kader . He is co-editor of Mona Mansour: The Vagrant Trilogy (with Hala Baki) and Six Plays of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (with Jamil Khoury and Corey Pond). He has directed mainstage productions with Silk Road Rising, Golden Thread Productions, and New Arab American Theatre Works. Malek is currently working with Hala Baki on the edited volume The Selected Plays of Ismail Khalidi . Arab Stages 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. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Carving a Path: Desiring-Production in Displaced Syrian Theatre Interview with Nasser Rahmaninejad by Babak Rahimi Arab American Drama: Five Books that Inspired My Journey Five Arab American Plays Everyone Should Read MIDNIGHT IN CAIRO: THE DIVAS OF EGYPT'S ROARING '20S. By Raphael Cormack (REVIEW) Previous Next Attribution:

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 17 Spring 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre By Tiran Manucharya Published: May 12, 2025 Download Article as PDF Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre . By Amina ElHalawani. London and New York: Routledge, 2024; pp. 170 + x. Reviewed by Tiran Manucharyan Amina ElHalawani’s monograph Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre is a detailed study of the transformative potential of theatre in the political development of a country through the examples of intersections between theatre and politics in Egyptian and Irish contexts. Clearly, an essential inspiration for the author is the unique place of the play Waiting for Godot (1952) by the Irish-born playwright Samuel Beckett (1906-1959) in Egyptian theatre tradition. A notable example of Beckett’s influence in Egypt is the frequent comparison, including by ElHalawani, of one of the country’s most influential plays, The Farfurs (1964, Al-Farafir ) by Yusuf Idris (1927-1991), with Beckett’s masterpiece. References to Beckettian characters and scenes are abundant in the work of many of Idris’s compatriots of his time, some of whose work is incorporated into ElHalawani’s study. Today, too, Beckett’s work continues to speak to issues within Egyptian society, evidenced by the periodic revisits to his plays on Egyptian stages. The 2015 production of Waiting for Godot , directed by Ahmed Sobhi, or the 2024 production of Endgame (1957), directed by El-Saeed Qabil, both on the stage of Cairo’s E-Taliaa Theatre, are only a couple of such examples. This significant and ongoing influence of Beckett on Egyptian theatre indicates that the topic of ElHalawani’s monograph has the potential to make a timely and pertinent contribution to the study of Egyptian theatre. ElHalawani’s take on Beckett’s work is in line with the almost canonized perception of it among Egyptian playwrights and directors, interpreting Waiting for Godot as a play that turns theatre into “the arena in which rebellion is not only suggested but performed” (90). In this stance, the author is inspired by the highly prominent Egyptian playwright Tawfiq al-Hakim’s (1898-1987) experiments with the Theatre of the Absurd, in which life is depicted “as constant struggle” (75), and Michael Y. Bennett’s reading of Waiting for Godot as “a recast myth of Sisyphus” (76). Building on this standpoint, ElHalawani’s book narrates a convincing history of direct and indirect dialogue between the Irish and Egyptian theatres of rebellion. The monograph incorporates comparative analyses of the work of a handful of Egyptian and Irish playwrights. Egyptian theatre is represented with plays by Tawfiq al-Hakim, Mikhail Roman (1924-1973), Yusuf Idris, and Salah Abdul-Saboor (1931-1981), and Irish theatre with those by Brian Friel (1929-2015), Frank McGuinness (b. 1953), Christina Reid (1942-2015), and Samuel Beckett. Given the significant development and influence of Beckett’s work beyond Irish shores, the inclusion of his work in the scope of a book, which discusses specific national theatres, with a stress on the word ‘national’, is a bold decision by ElHalawani. Yet this is well argued: it is an attempt “to complicate the relation between the centre and periphery exactly through such ambiguous figures [i.e. Beckett and William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)]” (11). The study strongly emphasises the belief in theatre’s potential to “effect change” (5). As ElHalawani clarifies, her book “presents a gesture of reading global modernist texts in local contexts, which gives way to new approaches of understanding complex moments of social change entangled within global histories of colonialism and decolonization” (12). The book opens with the story of the Irish playwright and theatre manager Lady Augusta Gregory’s (1852-1932) visit to Cairo, and her acquaintance with and admiration for the Egyptian nationalist Ahmed ʿUrabi, the leader of the 1879-1882 revolt in Egypt against the political leadership of Egypt and British and French control of the country. As the author states, Lady Gregory and Yeats’ project of national theatre has been inspirational for similar endeavors among Egyptian cultural practitioners. In her introduction, the author specifically mentions the most prominent examples of such attempts in Egyptian theatre, undertaken by al-Hakim and Idris. She highlights al-Hakim’s emphasis on how indigenous Egyptian cultural forms were redefined by modernist cultural movements of the time. At almost fifty pages, Chapter One is the longest chapter of the book and makes up one third of it. Such length is necessary to provide the reader with the socio-political context to justify the comparative discussion of Irish and Egyptian theatres. Here, ElHalawani elaborates further on the development of cultural nationalism in Irish cultural production and Yeats’ involvement in it. The author stresses the difference between colonialist nationalism, which looks at “local cultures [of those colonized] as unworthy, primitive and backward”, and the nationalism of liberation movements, which attempt “to reassert themselves and the right of their nations to self-government” (23). In her analyses, ElHalawani incorporates references to and discussions of a wide range of examples from Egyptian and Irish literature, music, and theatre, placing the developments in theatre within the framework of the wider socio-political context and trends in the cultural production of the two nations. Among others, one of the most interesting sections in this chapter is that concerned with the involvement of women practitioners in the theatre scenes in Egypt and Ireland. The section starts by reflecting on the Egyptian playwright and director Laila Soliman’s (b. 1981) 2016 play Zig Zag , which returns to the attack carried out by the British army on an Egyptian village called Nazlit al-Shubak in 1919 and to the stories of the women raped by British soldiers during this attack. ElHalawani interrogates the absence of these women’s stories from Egyptian nationalist discourse—and their availability only in the archives of the British Foreign Office—as underscoring “issues of women’s rights and citizenship” (39). The author draws a parallel with the Irish director and playwright Louise Lowe’s 2011 play Laundry which revisits the infamous Magdalene Laundries, focusing on “the violence and oppression the women and children [in them] went through not only at the hands of the British Empire but even more painfully under the rule of the Irish Free State” (39). As she suggests, the disappearance of women’s narratives and names from the canonical narratives in history “brings to the forefront the question of the missing female names from the theatre canon itself” (41). The next three chapters analyze the key texts chosen by the author for her study. Chapter Three focuses on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , al-Hakim’s Fate of a Cockroach (1965, Masir Sursar ) and Roman’s The New Arrival (1965, Al-Wafid ). Through this selection of plays, the author aims to investigate the Egyptian playwrights’ interpretation of Beckettian absurdist tradition. According to ElHalawani, the Egyptian writers approached the Theatre of the Absurd as a mode that allowed them to perform rebellion in an era of gradually growing disillusionment during the 1960s, which contrasted to the atmosphere of euphoria and hope that the 1952 revolution brought to Egypt in the previous decade. The overarching argument that ElHalawani develops is that the shared “sense of despair in an existing world order” in these plays does not equate to “a despair in life itself” and does not deny “the possibility for man to give it new form.” Moreover, according to ElHalawani, interpreting them as performances of rebellion inside the theatre suggests that “a sense of contagious collectivity pushes for a new world order to be negotiated” (90). In Chapter Three, the discussion is driven by ElHalawani’s attention to the self-reflexive quality of Idris’s The Farfurs , Friel’s Faith Healer (1980), and McGuinness’ Carthaginians (1988). The self-referential quality of these plays, as ElHalawani explains, allows her “to examine the vision of three overtly committed writers concerning [the] transformative nature of the performative act and the different ways in which it can be achieved” (92). Engaging with Idris’s masterpiece, ElHalawani revisits one of the central, almost eternal, questions in Egyptian theatre, which concerns its form and content: what makes theatre Egyptian? This question has long perturbed Egyptian theatre circles, most prominently since the 1960s thanks to al-Hakim’s and Idris’s preoccupations, but arguably since its beginnings in the second half of the nineteenth century. As ElHalawani concludes, Idris’s play is in fact “a complex hybridity” that is “inspired by Western theories of theatre without denying its own authenticity as an Egyptian play” (94). ElHalawani’s conclusion regarding its content follows the same logic, suggesting that in it “the local is made global and then is reduced back to its specificity” (100). What unites these plays, according to the author, is that, through their self-reflexive essence, they enabled the playwrights to reflect on how they saw the role and the responsibility of theatre “to react to the past and present” and to “shape the future” (116). In Chapter Four, engaging with Reid’s Did You Hear the One About the Irishman…? (1985), Abdul-Saboor’s Musafir Layl (1969, Night Traveller ), and Beckett’s Catastrophe (1982), ElHalawani investigates “the correlational dynamics involved in performing oppression and revolt”, considering theatre’s power to turn its audiences into “a communal force” (119). The author argues that in these plays the playwrights are united in prioritizing “a more politically active audience” (121). As she explains, through their liminal quality and by breaking boundaries these plays bring reality and imagination together, turning theatre into “a space in which transformations are possible and where people can redeem their agency”. She goes on to conclude that the outcome is the transformation of theatre into “an interactive endeavour,” which empowers “the audience’s agency both in the theatre and in the public sphere” (137). As well as being a thorough study of the key texts from Irish and Egyptian theatre traditions, ElHalawani’s monograph is a rare example of scholarly writing with an engaging narration. This is enriched by the author’s inclusion of various theatre-related anecdotes, such as Lady Gregory’s above-mentioned encounter with ʿUrabi or Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s (in power 1954-1970) involvement in a school production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar . Thus, a valuable addition to the scholarship for researchers and students engaged with theatre, comparative literature, and the intersections between arts and politics, ElHalawani’s book can also attract readers curious about Irish and Egyptian theatres and the role of theatre in the resistance movements of the two nations. Lastly, the appendix of the book provides those who teach or study Egyptian theatre in English with much anticipated first translations of Idris’s opening remarks to The Farfurs and al-Hakim’s introduction to his Qalibu-na al-masrahi (1967, Our Form of Theatre ), a book in which the playwright manifested his vision of how a truly Egyptian theatre could develop. As a final note, I would like to highlight the recently rekindled encouraging interest of English language publishers in Egyptian and Arab theatre in general. One hopes this will result in additional publications on the subject, since—despite its not very long documented history—theatre in the Arabic language has produced a huge number of brilliant texts, many of which may help us to make sense of some of the crises we witness today, not only in the region but also beyond it. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Tiran Manucharyan is a Lecturer in Arabic at the School of Modern Languages, University of St Andrews. Tiran holds a PhD in Arabic from the same university. His thesis looked at politically and socially engaged Egyptian theatre in the second half of the 20th and in the early 21st century. Published in 2024, his first monograph, titled Of Kings and Clowns: Leadership in Contemporary Egyptian Theatre since 1967 , builds on his PhD thesis, focusing on the work of the Egyptian playwrights Yusuf Idris, Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny, Lenin El-Ramly, and Fathia El-ʿAssal. Tiran is currently working on a British Academy-funded project devoted to the work of late-twentieth-century Egyptian women playwrights. Arab Stages 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. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents O Lord! By Ali Abdel-Nabi Al-Zaidi Mothers Challenging the Divine: Ali Al-Zaidi’s Ya Rab! The 31st Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. September 1-11, 2024. ARTIFICIAL HEART. By Mohammad Basha and Firas Farrah. LEILI & MAJNUN. Written and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian SHAHADAT (THE TESTIMONIES) Adapted by Fouad Teymour Review: TO THE GOOD PEOPLE OF GAZA: THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 16 Fall 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review: OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967 By Tiran Manucharyan. By Areeg Ibrahim Published: November 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967. By Tiran Manucharyan. Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2024; pp. 270. Tiran Manucharyan’s Of Kings and Clowns: Leadership in Contemporary Egyptian Theatre Since 1967 is an important addition to the literature on theatre and leadership. Manucharyan who is a Lecturer of Arabic as well as Comparative Literature at the University of St. Andrews, Scottland is a budding scholar of Egyptian theatre. Composed of 270 pages, this monograph is a rewriting of the author’s PhD dissertation and is comprised of a preface, an introduction, seven chapters and a conclusion. The book deals with the transformations of Egyptian theatre since 1967 until the 2011 revolution through theoretical discourses, essays and plays of Yusuf Idris, as well as the analysis of the plays of Abul-‘Ela El-Salamouny, Lenin El-Ramly, and Fathia El-‘Assal, along with some theatre makers of the younger generation such as Sondos Shabayek, Mahmoud Gamal Hedeny, and Magdy El-Hamzawy. In the preface, Manucharyan explains that the book explores the development of Egyptian theatre since the period following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, shedding light on political and cultural leadership. The author maintains, “The book observes the ways Egyptian theatre has negotiated its place within the socio-political environment in which it operates, not only transforming itself but also inciting transformation” (xi). The author also proposes that this book is innovative as a monograph in English that provides an examination of the progress of theatre as well as a detailed analysis of plays, focusing on leadership and taking gender into consideration, especially in the dramatic and theatrical works of women playwrights and theatre makers. In the introduction, the author begins by exploring the way in which events on stage can integrate with real-life events, and recalls the essays of iconic Egyptian playwright Yusuf Idris who proposed removing the boundaries between stage and audience, in order to emphasize theatre’s role in society. After going through the relationship between leadership and theatre, Manucharyan refers to the works of some of the major Egyptian playwrights of the period, referring to Idris, El-Salamouny, El-Ramly and El-‘Assal. In chapter one, “ Tamasruh : Between Theatricalisation and Carnivalesque,” the author link’s Yusuf Idris’ tamasruh , a coined term which refers to dissolving the boundary between audience and spectator, with Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. The chapter links these concepts to the overarching theme: the relation of clowns and jesters to the carnivalesque. By extension, intellectuals/playwrights represent such archetypes, especially when they assume their role as leaders in the society. Idris’ vision of theatre, which is informed by indigenous popular forms of Egyptian theatre, such as the shadow theatre ( khayal al-zill ) and open-air rural performances ( samir ), calls for the stage as a space for public and collective participation (21). The chapter explores such concepts in relation to the plays of El-Salamouny, El-Ramly, and El-‘Assal. Each of the next four chapters takes up individual playwrights. Chapter two continues to explore Yusuf Idris’ ideas about establishing a uniquely Egyptian theatre, and then brings the discussion back to the clown and the role of women, with some references to plays of the aforementioned playwrights. (Since both this chapter and the previous engage in Idris’ thought, one wonders why they were not integrated into one chapter.) Chapter three focuses on the role of theatre and explores representations of leadership in the plays of Abul-‘Ela El-Salamouny. Similar to Idris’ ideas, El-Salamouny integrates indigenous forms of performance and theatricalization in his plays in order to have an open dialogue with the audience (63). The plays are discussed in relation to what they present about leaders, kings, clowns and women. Chapter four explores Lenin El-Ramly’s use of comedy as “the art of cunning” to satirize the socio-political milieu. Despite El-Ramly’s slightly different stance on the use of indigenous popular forms in theatre, his use of meta-dramatic techniques also offers a space for theatricalization. As in many of his plays, El-Ramly makes use of foolishness and madness to explore authoritarianism and institutionalization versus leadership and social change. Chapter five links silence and carnivalization while discussing the plays of Fathia El-‘Assal, as representative of Egyptian women playwrights. Manucharyan opines, “She makes female characters central to the action, yet still silent and muted to start with, making them seen and heard within the silence” (158). El-‘Assal’s plays thus portray leadership, women rights and societal inequalities. The final two chapters take up the 2011 revolution and the theatre it inspired. In chapter six, “Of Times and Spaces,” the author begins by referring to the 2011 revolution and then sheds light on the realities of the revolutionary change. The chapter discusses the time and space of the discussed plays (a part that could have been integrated into the previous chapters) before moving to explore how public spaces played a role during revolutionary times. The chapter then relates the revolution to the carnivalesque and the emergence of verbatim theatre, or public spectacles that are based on lived testimonies of the revolution. Some women theatre makers also had a paramount role in producing such kind of theatre. Chapter seven, “Theatre and the Revolution,” focuses on the post-2011 plays. It explores the relationship between theatre and the 2011 revolution in relation to the plays of the younger generation of theatre makers as well as some post-revolution plays by the previously-discussed dramatists. The chapter suggests that the 2011 revolution had its impact on theatre in allowing for the emergence of new forms and new voices (213). For instance, Sondos Shabayek and team’s Tahrir Monologues presented verbatim documentary theatre that narrated testimonies of the revolution’s participants. Mahmoud Gamal Hedeny and Mohamed Gabr’s 1980 Onwards dramatized the uncertainty of Egyptian youth after the revolution. As for Magdy El-Hamzawy’s Report on Revolutionary Circumstances , it was a staged play about the role of an underprivileged Kid in supporting the revolution. To sum up, Tiran Manucharyan’s Of Kings and Clowns: Leadership in Contemporary Egyptian Theatre Since 1967 provided an encyclopedic study of Egyptian theatre from the last third of the twentieth century onto the 2011 revolution. The book is a good read both for an average reader as well as scholars and students of theatre and Arabic studies. The strength of the book lies in its survey and analysis of leadership, carnivalization, and the search for a theatrical national identity in the plays of three established playwrights, as well as three theatre makers of the younger generation. The book uses these phenomena as lenses to look at the plays El-Salamouny, El-Ramly, and El-‘Assal both individually and in relationship to one another. The book also clearly uses the ideas of Egyptian playwright Yusuf Idris as part of the theoretical literature about the discussion. It is unclear as to whether the analysis of Idris’ plays is central to the book’s arguments about these phenomena or simply helps clarify the playwright’s theoretical concepts. The book also could have benefited from using some of the topical literature in leadership studies. Overall, t he book engages both the specialized and average reader in a journey with bits and pieces of enjoyable information and analyses about Egyptian theatre and representative plays. The book closes with a profound analysis of the 2011 revolution and highlights the role Egyptian theatre performances narrated, documented, and came to terms with that event. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Areeg Ibrahim is Professor and Chair of the Department of English Language and Literature at the Faculty of Arts in Helwan University, Cairo and was the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at Effat University, KSA. She has published widely in both Arabic and English on Arabic and international Drama. She is the co-editor of a Routledge volume, Rewriting Narratives in Egyptian Theatre . She has also translated a number of Theatre books for the National Center for Translation. Arab Stages 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. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents An Interview with the Iraqi-born British playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak by Hadeel Abelhameed Review: GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi Performance Review: The Tutor Review: OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967 By Tiran Manucharyan. Review: PLAYS OF ARABIC HERITAGE. By Hannah Khalil Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 15 Spring 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Five Arab American Plays Everyone Should Read By Roaa Ali Published: June 15, 2024 Download Article as PDF Mosque Alert by Jamil Khoury.Valparaiso University 2015. Photo courtesy of Aran Kessler Arab American drama has been a growing movement, urgently demanding to center Arab American representation and carving a unique space of its own in the American theatre institution. As a genre, Arab American drama often deals with negotiations of identity, ethnic, racial and religious Othering, and explores the gender and sexual discourses of its community. It is also situated at the intersection of family and community codes, politics, cultures of resistance, and the American theatre establishment. Within that establishment, Arab American drama contests the demarcation of who traditionally occupies the cultural center and who is kept at the margin. Despite not receiving the attention it deserves, Arab American drama and theatre existed long before 9/11, but it was arguably only then that it was afforded any demand or visibility, while simultaneously being pigeonholed as an expression of a minority-in-crisis. Amidst heightened xenophobic rhetoric and the resurgence of anti-Arab and Muslim sentiments that colored the Trump years—and which is often reactivated during Israeli aggressions on Palestinian territories and people--Arab American drama continues to offer alternative narratives that are both invigorating and transformative. Growing out of an existing, albeit small, Arab-American theatrical repertoire, which dates back to 1909, the expanding post 9/11 Arab American theatre has continued to disrupt a state of political and cultural marginalization, occupying the unique space where the political is unequivocally personal and the personal is inevitably political. It is an impossible task to pinpoint or confine a number of plays as representative of the genre, but I want to introduce here five Arab American plays that made a transformative impact on my understanding of theatre in general, and Arab American theatre specially. Yussef El Guindi’s Back of the Throat Of the many eloquent and innovative playwrights that Arab American drama boasts of, Yussef El Guindi is perhaps the genre’s most critically acclaimed with his thrilling skill of organically evoking the political as he dramatizes the personal. El Guindi’s Back of the Throat (2005) offers a deep and uncomfortable confrontation with paranoia and anti-Arab sentiments, that ensued after 9/11 as a state of affairs particularly for male Arab Americans. The play provides a parallel narrative exploring themes of surveillance, racial profiling, and the erosion of civil liberties in post-9/11 America. Originally stage-read in Chicago’s Silk Road Rising, the play garnered multiple accolades, including winning the 2004 Northwest Playwrights’ Competition, L.A. Weekly’s Excellence in Playwriting Award for 2006, a nomination for the 2006 American Theater Critics Association’s Steinberg/New Play Award, and being voted Best New Play of 2005 by the Seattle Times . The play shows examples of the institutional bias practiced in the US following 9/11, as well as giving the space for the narrative of a suspicious America after a tragedy. The play portrays Khaled, the Arab American male who emerged after 9/11 as an immediate suspect of a crime he did not commit in a gripping Kafkaesque atmosphere of paranoia and intrigue. Betty Shamieh’s The Black Eyed Describing her plays, Shamieh asserts: “they’re not about politics, but they’re inherently political. Because if you’ve never heard a perspective, it makes it political” (cited in Schillinger, 2004). At the beginning of her career, Shamieh wanted to escape a categorization that would pronounce her an Other, thrust in a marginalized artistic space. She was conscious that: “white, male writers are known as writers, while women and minorities [can] become very quickly pigeonholed; and theatres often times will accept certain types of plays from people with a certain ethnic identity” (Shamieh quoted in Alexander, 2005). However, 9/11 forced a spotlight on the Arabness of the Arab American in Shamieh. In The Black Eyed (2009), four Palestinian women from different historical periods find themselves in a hazy afterlife, discussing their life’s trials, choices, and decisions and celebrating their life experiences. As characters, Delilah, Tamam, the Architect, and Aiesha, symbolize different facets of womanhood, collectively representing a shared consciousness of womanhood while occasionally expressing individual trials and experiences. The play does not provide definitive answers to their questions but offers them a space to voice their experiences, struggles, and unyielding strengths. The Black Eyed had its world premiere at the Magic Theatre in May 2005, its European premiere in Athens at Fournos Theatre in 2006, and its American premiere in the Off-Broadway New York Theatre Workshop in 2007. There exists a well-documented history of external editorial pressures or self-imposed censorship imposed on productions depicting the Palestinian experience. This was evident in the development of The Black Eyed where Betty Shamieh’s initial script faced various forms of censorship. Initially, Shamieh’s submission advocating for non-violence and depicting the suffering of a sister of a suicide bomber was rejected by organizers of the Brave New World Festival in November 2001. To ensure Arab American representation at the festival, Shamieh compromised and created a new monologue featuring an Arab American woman on a hijacked plane. This monologue later evolved into the character Architect in The Black Eyed , although the story and monologues underwent significant changes. Heather Raffo’s 9 Parts of Desire Heather Raffo’s 9 Parts of Desire (2006) is a play that unapologetically centers Iraqi women characters on the American stage. 9 Parts of Desire weaves a narrative tapestry of nine Iraqi women from diverse backgrounds, ages, and locations. Through individual monologues, these women share their stories, revealing a history marked by resilience amidst oppressive regimes and wars, including the Gulf Wars and the American occupation. Inspired by a visit to the Baghdad Museum in 1993, Raffo’s play underscores the emotional depth, complexity, and resilience of these Iraqi women, whose stories intertwine to create a mosaic of a fractured Iraqi psyche. The play’s solo performance format enhances the authenticity of these voices, embodying them as an amplified collective narrative. The play initially premiered at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 2003. Subsequently, it found success at the Bush Theatre in London, where it consistently ranked among the ‘Five Best Plays’ in London, as recognized by The Independent . The play continued to evolve and was featured in the ‘New Work Now’ festival of readings at the Public Theatre in New York in May 2004. It then premiered at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre in October 2004 where it ran for nine months and received five extensions. The play won numerous awards and was a critic’s pick of the New York Times , Time Out , and Village Voice . Lameece Issaq and Jacob Kader’s Food and Fadwa Written by Lamees Issaq and Jacob Kader, Food and Fadwa (2014) tells the story of Fadwa, a Palestinian woman who escapes her Palestinian trauma and domestic drama by starring in her own make-believe cooking show as she prepares the food for her sister’s wedding. The play’s dramatization of the internal and personal space of a Palestinian family shies away from the troubling politics of its outside reality and renders the play insistently a drama about family and not politics. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is certainly not absent but rather delicately sandwiched in between Fadwa’s culinary talents, ambitions, and family dynamics. The playwrights aimed to direct the spotlight in Food and Fadwa towards the intricate, intimate, and everyday experiences of a Palestinian family, hoping this approach would be palatable to a theatre institution that is fundamentally resistant to Palestinian stories and voices. Food and Fadwa was the inaugural production of Noor Theatre, a New-York collective of Arab Americans fostering, nurturing, and showcasing the creativity of Middle Eastern Americans artists. It became a Company-In-Residence at New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) and Food and Fadwa was the first play with a Palestinian setting to be staged in 2012 at NYTW after the much-criticised cancellation of My Name is Rachel Corrie . Food and Fadwa received positive reviews from theatre critics and enjoyed a very successful and extended run at NYTW. Jamil Khoury’s Precious Stones Precious Stones is the debut play for Chicago’s Silk Road Rising theatre company (SRR) in 2002 by playwright and SRR’s Artistic Director Jamil Khoury. The play queers the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and presents it through private negotiation of sexual and national identities mediated by dialogue and transgression of identity demarcation. The play presents the possibility of crossing over national and sexual borderlines to initiate a seemingly unimaginable dialogue between two women, whose national belonging is dividing, but whose sexual belonging is unifying. Set in Chicago in 1989, the play introduces two diasporic women; Andrea, a Jewish American woman, born and bought up in Chicago, and daughter of Holocaust survivors from Krakow, Poland; and Leila, a Palestinian American woman, born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon and daughter of refugees expelled from Jaffa, Palestine in 1948. The two women embark on an Arab-Jewish dialogue project for their communities, but they finally become its only participants with a lesbian love affair fostering their efforts. Precious Stones offers a glimpse of hope for a seemingly irreconcilable colonial conflict when Andrea and Leila invite the body and politics of gender and sexuality into their room of national conflict. By doing so, the play offers its hyphenated characters the chance to overstep the borders of their conflicting inherited national belongings and reach a compromise. Precious Stones moves in a quick tempo where Leila and Andrea are always dancing a dangerous tango, but one that might just lead to hope and resolution in an otherwise grim reality. Jamil Khoury’s Mosque Alert Jamil Khoury’s 2015 online play Mosque Alert is certainly worthy of an honourable mention. Mosque Alert addresses contemporary challenges confronting American Muslims, particularly the resistance to mosque construction. Inspired by real events like the Ground Zero mosque controversy and protests in Chicago, it portrays tensions among three families: the Muslim Khans and Qabbanis, and the Christian Bakers. Exploring themes of Islamophobia and identity, it aims to provoke dialogue on religious freedom and discrimination. The play employs a participatory model, utilizing digital spaces to engage with audiences and explore themes of civic engagement and access and representation for minority artists and audiences. These plays and Arab American drama in general offer fascinating narratives and employ intriguing dramatic devices while navigating their way into the American cultural mainstream, which often imposes restrictions on politically vocal or adjacent productions. In terms of content, Arab American drama has so much to offer. I argue that playwrights like Shamieh, Raffo, Issaq and others are part of a movement that I term ‘pragmatist feminism’ operating in a space where Arab American women find themselves both privileged and constrained by white liberal feminism while concurrently crafting their own form of feminism within the unique landscape of cultural production in the post-9/11. Furthermore, in Khoury’s work and glimpses in other Arab American plays, a new understanding of Arab American queerness is emerging. These two discourses of feminism and queerness are evolving as the playwrights problematize ethnic and religious Otherness, asserting their own representation against a problematic history of stereotypes and marginalization. Arab American drama is rich with negotiations of what it means to be in-between cultures constantly revisiting cultural heritage and redefining the self at a historical moment of crisis. The playwrights and theatre makers mentioned here have been instrumental in creating the Arab American theatre movement. This movement, though still young, is already proving to be dynamic, innovative and disruptive. Theatre stages and educational curriculum will undoubtedly be the richer for recognizing and celebrating the value of Arab American theatre and its artists – reading these plays becomes, certainly, a must. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes Alexander, V. (2005) ‘Betty Shamieh: First-Generation American’, Harvard’s Diversity & Distinction . Available at: https://www.bettyshamieh.com/copy-of-the-new-arab-playwrights-1 . El Guindi, Y.E. (2006) ‘Back of the Throat’, TheatreForum , (29), pp. 25–50. Issaq, L. and Kader, J. (2014) ‘Food and Fadwa’, in M.M. Najjar (ed.) Four Arab American Plays . North Carolina: McFarland & Company. Khoury, J. (2015) ‘Mosque Alert’, Silk Road Rising . Available at: https://silkroadculturalcenter.org/digital-media/mosque-alert-collection/ . Raffo, H. (2006) 9 Parts of Desire . Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Schillinger, L. (2004) ‘The New “Arab” Playwrights’, The New York Times , 4 April. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/theater/theater-the-new-arab-playwrights.html (Accessed: 10 August 2023). Shamieh, B. (2009) ‘The Black Eyed’, in H. Hill and D. Amin (eds) Salaam. Peace: An Anthology of Middle Eastern-American Drama . New York: Theatre Communications Group. References About The Author(s) Roaa Ali is a Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Manchester. She is an interdisciplinary researcher focusing on race and diversity in the cultural sector. Roaa has a PhD in Drama and Theatre Arts from the University of Birmingham and her thesis explored Arab American and ethnic minority art production within the American cultural and creative industries. She writes extensively on issues of inequality, anti-racism, and the politics of cultural production in the creative industries. Out in 2024, her forthcoming monograph titled The Cultural production of Otherness: Contemporary Arab American Drama focuses on Arab American drama and interrogates issues of cultural production in post 9/11 white neo-liberal neo-orientalist ‘benevolent’ America. Her recent publication includes a co-edited volume titled Arabs, Politics and Performance (co-edited with Samer Al Saber and George Potter). Arab Stages 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. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Carving a Path: Desiring-Production in Displaced Syrian Theatre Interview with Nasser Rahmaninejad by Babak Rahimi Arab American Drama: Five Books that Inspired My Journey Five Arab American Plays Everyone Should Read MIDNIGHT IN CAIRO: THE DIVAS OF EGYPT'S ROARING '20S. By Raphael Cormack (REVIEW) Previous Next Attribution: