Marina: Yes. Oh my goodness. And, just while we’re talking here, I mean, it’s definitely a sidebar, but one of the plays that I’ve seen recently that is a play I cannot stop thinking about is called Drowning in Cairo, which is written by Adam Ashraf Elsayigh and it was done at Golden Thread recently, had a great production there, directed by Sahar, who we had on the show. But it’s a play that I can’t stop thinking about because I saw it twice; I wept both times; I think that it is doing interesting things with structure and form. I love seeing plays that are, of course, set outside of the United States, specifically, in this case, in Egypt, dealing with the Queen Boat incident and then subsequent LGBTQ issues and the people that are directly impacted by them. I bring this all up to say, check out that play, I think, I love it. It was great.
Nabra: Well, speaking of Golden Thread, something I haven’t told you yet, but—
Marina: Wait, me or everyone?
Nabra: No, you. You, Marina and, I guess, everyone, too, depending on who I’ve talked to—
Marina: Breaking news.
Nabra: —by the time this comes out. Breaking news everyone, this is way too much tension. The problem is, listeners, you did not see Marina’s face, which was far too overly dramatic for the news I’m about to share right now.
Marina: I can’t handle this.
Nabra: But anyways, my play What to Expect When You’re Simulating Expecting, is going to be part of Golden Thread’s New Threads Reading Series in August!
Marina: Amazing, Nabra.
Nabra: So look out for that. I’m super excited.
Marina: Oh, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.
Nabra: I know. Listen, it just happened, so I’m really excited about that, because I love, love, love Golden Thread. It’s really my dream to work with them more.
Marina: Oh my gosh, and this play is so great, y’all.
Nabra: Thank you.
Marina: Nabra let me read a draft and it’s so cool. And I’m not going to be here; I’m going to be in Palestine. What? Is it streaming?
Nabra: I don’t know.
Marina: Everyone make sure you check it out. Okay.
Nabra: Thank you, Marina. Yeah, so this is a play that I wrote during the pandemic. and I actually just, this past weekend, finished a third draft on it. So it’s something that I wrote and then shared with a few close friends and got some feedback—
Marina: And apparently Golden Thread.
Nabra: And Golden Thread. I felt like they would like it. I don’t know. It feels up their alley and it’s around climate change and struggles with identity and the future generations and has a lot of mixed-race characters. Actually, all the characters are mixed race, which I’m excited about. I mean, I wrote it, but I’m also excited about my own plays, because I don’t see a lot of mixed-race characters specifically and, obviously, I’m mixed-race, so I want to see more of that representation. So I’m excited about that and I’m doing another private reading—
Marina: Yes.
Nabra: —of a play that I wrote called Confessions that I really wrote for myself. I didn’t have the intention to share it with people until I finished a full-
Marina: Clearly, I haven’t read it.
Nabra: I know. I’m very secretive about this play. It’s like my—
Marina: Wait, is this the Muslim woman play?
Nabra: Yes, it’s about Muslim women and I call it my play diary, it’s where I kind of just vented about the state of representation in the American theatre for like a year and a half or two years, and then it was suddenly finished and I kind of was like, “Okay, I don’t really know what to do with this, but I want to share it with my community.” What I learned is that I wrote this for other young Muslim women or Muslim women in generally, really. And so, I kind of tiptoed out of my comfort zone and held a private reading at a friend and colleague’s house a while ago. Goodness, I don’t remember when that happened, maybe less than a year ago, but more than six months ago? Question mark? And only invited MENA and Muslim women. And we had food and hung around and just sat around a couch and people just volunteered to read parts and it was amazing. We were there for so long.
I was like, “Oh, maybe it’ll be like two hours,” I think the play itself is an hour and a half. We were there for like four or five hours and we didn’t even notice. We were just having the best time hanging out together, talking about this play, chatting, playing these characters. It’s a comedy, so we had a lot of fun. And then, they were all like, “We need to do this again,” and I was like, “You know what? I’m going to write a second draft just so I can get this group together again.” And since then, I’ve met some more MENA and Muslim women in the community and invited them. And so, since then I’ve really been thinking about and debriefing with my other POC theatre colleagues around who is a play for and what is audience? Because there is a default of a play being written for a public audience. I think that’s what we, as playwrights, tend to do. That’s what everyone kind of expects of a play.
But I don’t think that’s necessary for either the life cycle or the success even of a play. And it makes me think about, especially, this question of solidarity within our movements. I think there’s an element of community building that we can do in more private settings or by writing plays really for our community specifically and not for a wider audience, that I believe is really powerful. I wrote this for MENA and Muslim women, and I don’t translate the Arabic in the play. I don’t explain things that Muslims would know to a non-Muslim audience. And I think that people can find their way in, but if you’re not of those identities you’re not going to get everything from that play, and I think that’s okay. And I don’t know when or if I want to share this with a public audience.
And so, I’ve been reflecting a lot on that, is what do I want to do with this, what do I want to see more of out of our community and how can we create safer spaces for our people to share really possibly intense, very personal stories without feeling responsible, I guess, for the opinions of others. And this relates, I think, to what you were saying, Marina, that I don’t need a critic to tell me about this play. I don’t think I’d read that. I wouldn’t care; that that’s not what it’s for. It’s for the reflection, internal, and interpersonal reflection, of my community and of myself, really. But then, I also see and reflect on a responsibility, having this play that represents and was written, largely, in response to a lack of really real representation of the young Muslim American identity right now. I feel this responsibility to share that, to have that representation out into the world.
And also, having this be a comedy, along with what Yussef and Leila talked about: a comedy brings people in, it warms people’s hearts, and it’s something that folks are looking for and hungry for right now, in a time of great crisis and strife and something that you don’t see produced from our communities. You see so many dramatic, traumatic stories coming out of the MENASA community. And so, I see a responsibility that’s kind of sitting in my computer and trying to balance my desire for community building and for personal comfort or safety with this need to contribute to the greater representation of our communities and to kind of use my privilege that I have in many different spheres, to push myself to share stories that maybe other folks, who have less privilege than me, wouldn’t be able to share.
It’s a lot of what I’ve been thinking about recently with this play, but I mean, if nothing else, I’m just super, super excited to have this private reading and, honestly, if it goes nowhere else, I feel like I’d be happy to just keep inviting women to a living room under the guise of, I’m going to keep working on this play and just keep having food and tea and be like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m still working on it. Let’s get together for another draft.” That might be my secret plan.
Marina: I love that. And, I mean, Nabra, yes, keep us posted on where this is going, even it’s going just where it is right now. I think that we need to have different standards for what success of this looks like, right? For everything. But also, just in defense of not writing for the most broad, general audience ever, oh my gosh, if people could make me go see Marvel movies and Star Wars and I’m supposed to believe that there are these tropes that have existed in these comics and cartoons that now exist in this thing; I don’t understand what the heck’s going on. But that’s a thing: there are these givens that people expect. Like, yeah, let the Muslim identity be the given and everyone else can figure it out. It really is great and wonderful, and I wish more plays would do that. I wish we would stop trying to appeal to the broad masses. Disney’s doing that, and they’re doing it quite successfully for themselves.
Nabra: And I think that’s also what I’m craving more and why I was fired up enough to write this. And I’m just going to connect it to everything.
Marina: Do it.
Nabra: Because it’s so much on the forefront of my mind. But Betty and Tracy were talking a lot about different nuances of representation, but one of the things that we talked about in that episode, which was our first episode of the season, is the face that it limits our artistic creativity to cater to a broad, white, older audience. Not having the default of working with and creating art for our community, causes us to use time and effort and money and our artistic capacity to explain. We spend so much time explaining, whether that be to the audience or, as they also brought up, to designers who don’t share those identities. I want less of that explaining, and this play basically leaves no room for explaining. Y’all, you would have to, if this was a non-MENA, non-women, non-Muslim group of people putting on this particular play, they’d spend the entire rehearsal period researching or getting a lecture from their cultural consultant.
Nabra: And so, creating these plays that are really driven by that understanding, I think it’s so important for our community as we move towards more robust representation, kind of get to the next level of representation. And also, I mean, groups that are doing it really well—I think about Parmida and Seda Theatre Company here in Seattle who are doing plays and doing classes specifically for the Iranian community in Farsi, primarily, same with Masrah Cleveland Al-Arabi doing plays in Arabic. It immediately kind of means that it’s for and by the community. That kind of gives it that, again, push. You can’t just hire a non-Iranian person to work with Seda, because you have to have that cultural context through the language context. And I think Shadi with her company, by virtue of the ensemble, investing in an ensemble structure where everyone’s Iranian. Again, there’s that shorthand and that artistic license to create work that is really speaking to their community and let that artistry shine without requiring explanation and fitting within existing structures.
Marina: Yes. Amazing. Wait, okay, Nabra. I know that we’ve talked about you losing your voice, but one more thing to add onto what you were just saying, please, if you don’t mind, I know that you gave a lecture on African theatre at UW, and I was hoping you could talk to us a little bit about what the contents of that lecture were.
Nabra: Oh my goodness. I am so thankful to have gotten the opportunity to do this. I did this for the class, a friend of mine who is a professor at UW named Dr. Jasmine Mahmoud. And it was a Theatre 101 lecture and I kept wondering, “Am I going too deep?” But I’ve wanted to basically write this lecture or write this paper for a long, long time. And really, I’ve been, obviously, studying and experiencing African theatre my whole life, but especially studying it since college and kind of focusing on African theatre both, obviously, in my own writing as an African writer, but also in consuming a lot of especially West African and South African media. And so, I’ve noticed a lot of trends in both African theatre of the continent, but also African diasporic theatre here in the United States. And so, it was really kind of illustrating putting into writing the trends that I’m seeing and what constitutes elements of a modern African theatre canon.
And that, especially, an African theatre canon that includes traditional and Indigenous theatre forums like oral tradition and ritual. So what does that look like in modern context, in a classical context, as well as in both Indigenous African context and a diasporic context? That’s my very academic overview, but I hope one day I’ll be able to share this more widely or write a paper on it.
