Loading ...Out of Mideast, a Comic Recipe for the Stage
WHEN “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” was postponed and then pulled from the New York Theater Workshop in March 2006, the ensuing furor raged chiefly between critics of the play’s unequivocal sympathy for the Palestinian cause and those, like Tony Kushner and Harold Pinter, who worried that the workshop had bowed to political censorship.
But one kind of voice was conspicuously absent from the standoff over “Corrie,” a British play about an American activist killed in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli military bulldozer in 2003: that of Palestinians.
A new play, “Food and Fadwa,” which began showing at the workshop this week, represents much more than a sop to those who found fault with the company’s handling of “My Name Is Rachel Corrie.” A seriocomedy about life under occupation, “Food and Fadwa” is not only the professional playwriting debut of two Palestinian-American writers, Lameece Issaq and Jacob Kader, but also the inaugural production of Noor Theater, the Middle Eastern American company in residence at New York Theater Workshop.
Maha Chehlaoui, who appears in “Food and Fadwa” as a young Palestinian bride-to-be whose nuptials are thwarted by a West Bank curfew, was one of a number of Arab-American theater artists who approached the workshop in the months after the “Corrie” flap. “I wanted to understand what had happened rather than just take it at face value or circulate 100 petitions,” Ms. Chehlaoui said recently.
So she and a colleague from Nibras, an Arab-American theater collective, sat down with the workshop’s artistic director, James C. Nicola, and his associate artistic director, Linda S. Chapman.
“They didn’t know me and I didn’t know them,” she said. “It was an awkward conversation at first, but we acknowledged the awkwardness and decided to move forward. It’s so rare for an institution to do that — to take an opportunity when they hit a bump in the road not to pretend that it didn’t happen but to say, ‘Let’s talk about it; here’s a scab, let’s poke at it.’ ”
This uncomfortable probing led to a partnership. With Nibras, the workshop produced two evenings of Palestinian-American writing at the Public Theater’s Arab-Israeli Festival in fall 2006. In readings of works by Ms. Issaq, Najla Said and Leila Buck, Mr. Nicola saw the promise of a new initiative for the workshop.
“Seeing the emotional response the audience had to those voices, I realized, ‘This is good stuff — this is something that people are compelled by,’ ” Mr. Nicola said. He could also see that Arab-American artists were hungering for the platform. “I thought there was an opportunity to talk across the footlights,” he said.
Nibras served as the workshop’s resident Arab-American company for a time, producing a weekend of staged readings in 2007 called “Aswat: Voices of Palestine.” That partnership eventually foundered, but Mr. Nicola had spotted a potential successor at the readings. One play was an early version of “Food and Fadwa,” a bittersweet one-act about a multigenerational family crammed into the busy kitchen of a house in Bethlehem, in the West Bank. Ms. Chapman took an interest in the play, while Mr. Nicola saw the makings of a new resident company in Ms. Issaq and her colleagues, who by then included Ms. Chehlaoui.
This time, though, Mr. Nicola wanted to make sure the company, Noor (the word means “light” in Arabic and Farsi), would be built to last, so he asked that it bring money to the table for a coproduction of “Food and Fadwa”: the company eventually raised $80,000 of the production’s $410,000 budget. “We did it as a challenge for them to build their administrative muscles,” Mr. Nicola said, “because someday they won’t be a company in residence and won’t have the cushion we provide.”
For the moment, though, Noor, whose founders also include the producer Nancy Vitale, is focused on serving up “Food and Fadwa.” The play’s inspiration was a comedy sketch presented by Ms. Issaq in the annual New York Arab-American Comedy Festival. Though the full-length version would eventually take place in a Palestinian home under occupation, it started out in a less dramatic setting.
“I was a bit on the aimless side, crashing on my friend’s futon in Astoria and watching a lot of the Food Network,” recalled Ms. Issaq, a tall, emphatic performer who plays the lead character, a woman named Fadwa who vents her frustrations through her cooking. “I was thinking about changing course, and then there was this ad for, ‘Be the next Food Network star.’ I was like, ‘I’m perfect!’ ”
She asked Mr. Kader, an acquaintance from the comedy festival, to shoot a video of her proposed Palestinian cooking show (alas, never to get the green light). Eventually she and Mr. Kader began to flesh out the character, her family and her surrounding circumstances.
“Food and Fadwa” has the occupation as its backdrop, and the West Bank barrier wall figures in a bravura scene involving shredded napkins and heaps of hummus. But Ms. Issaq said: “We’ve been very cognizant of letting the politics be a sort of ancillary character. We really want to focus on the personal story; we don’t want to be standing on a soapbox.”
Mr. Kader agreed: “We didn’t set out to say, ‘How do we talk about being Palestinian?’ It’s just a natural outgrowth. There are so many stories we want to tell — not necessarily about the conflict, but about our cousins, our family, our constant connection to it.”
An exchange at a recent rehearsal illustrated the near-impossibility of separating the personal and the political in such a fraught setting. Heather Raffo, an Iraqi-American performer and writer (she did the acclaimed one-woman show “9 Parts of Desire”), plays a relatively spoiled Arab-American cousin, Hayat, and she was having trouble with a transition.
“I don’t know how to go from this intimate moment to this outburst,” she said, referring to a quick turn Hayat must make from womanly commiseration to a brief fulmination about the occupation.
Without skipping a beat, the director, Shana Gold, replied: “This woman is suffering. That can be your catalyst; your sympathy turns into outrage.”
Rob Weinert-Kendt
New York Times