Join us for an evening of staged readings and a talkback with the NO PLACE / LA MAKAN playwrights!
CPS developed the NO PLACE / LA MAKAN theatre initiative to provide the opportunity for playwrights to develop a new work within a community of actors, directors, dramaturgs, scholars, and the other writers. The commissioned playwrights are: Khawla Ibraheem (London-Jenin), Ismail Khalidi (Tennis at Nablus, Returning to Haifa), and Bashar Murkus (The Museum, Hash). Collectively, these writers have had works produced on some of the world’s leading stages, including the Public Theatre (New York), the Young Vic (London), and the Tokyo International Festival, as well as residencies with the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab and the MacDowell Colony. The NO PLACE / LA MAKAN initiative will culminate in two fully-realized radio productions of each play (one in Arabic and one in English), translated, directed, performed, and recorded by professional theatre artists and radio producers.
The staged readings, copresented by Columbia’s School of the Arts and the Middle East Institute, will preview the English language versions of each play.
PLAYWRIGHTS
KHAWLA IBRAHEEM is a Syrian/ Palestinian theatre artist born and raised in Majdal Shams – the occupied Golan Heights. She is an actress, playwright, and director. In 2004, a group for youngsters, Khawla among them, led by the Syrian writer Mutaz Abu Saleh, started a small theatre in the village: “O’eon” (eyes). She later graduated from Haifa University with honors in Theatre Studies. Khawla started her career as an actress with theatres in Palestine. She has starred in plays such as, A Parallel Timeline by Bashar Murkus, Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni, The Whole Story and Summer Time by Ameer Hlehel, The Bride and the Butterfly Hunter by Nisim Aloni, Winter Funeral by Hanoch Levin, Sarita by Maria Irene Frone, and The Publisher by Ameer Hlehel. She wrote and directed two shows for the National Palestinian Theatre: a musical for all ages called The Story Keeper and Soon to be Gone, a show that tells the story of the Druze Syrian community in the occupied Golan Heights. Khawla also wrote and directed several plays as a member of the Family of the Freedom Theatre, including London-Jenin. Khawla was in residence with the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab (2019) and the MacDowell Colony (2020).
BASHAR MURKUS is a theatre creator from Palestine - he lives and creates in Haifa, and is the artistic director of Khashabi Theatre which he, together with a group of Palestinian Artists, founded in 2011. Khashabi is a completely independent Palestinain theatre in the city of Haifa founded as the artists’ collective Khashabi Ensemble. In 2015 it achieved a physical space in the Wadi Salib neighborhood that was emptied from the majority of its original inhabitants 1948. Khashabi is working towards a Palestinian society that freely practices art and creativity as a natural right, and strives to renew its cultural identity by placing independent culture front and centre. Over the years, Bashar Murkus and Khashabi Theatre gained popularity in Europe and have performed in major festivals and venues such as Festival d'Avignon, Romaeuropa Festival, Theatre de la Ville Paris etc.
ISMAIL KHALIDI is a playwright, screenwriter and theater director. His plays include Truth Serum Blues (Pangea World Theater ‘05), Tennis in Nablus (Alliance Theatre ‘10), Foot (Teatro Amal ‘16), Sabra Falling (Pangea ‘17) and Dead Are My People (Noor Theatre ’18). He has co-adapted two novels for the stage with Naomi Wallace; Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa (Finborough Theatre ‘18) and Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer (Actors Theatre of Louisville ‘19). Khalidi’s work has been included in numerous anthologies and he co-edited, also with Ms. Wallace, Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora (TCG ‘15). His writing has been featured in American Theatre Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Mizna, Guernica, Al Jazeera and The Dramatist. Khalidi holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is currently a Directing Fellow at Pangea World Theater.
TALKBACK CHAIR
JEAN HOWARD is the George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. At Columbia she has received the Faculty Mentoring Award in 2006 and the Presidential Teaching Award in 2020; she has also received Guggenheim, NEH, Mellon, Folger, Huntington, and Newberry Library Fellowships. In 2010 she gave the Columbia University Schoff Memorial Lectures on 'Staging History: Imagining the Nation' on playwrights William Shakespeare, Tony Kushner, and Caryl Churchill. Her teaching interests include Shakespeare, Tudor and Stuart drama, Early Modern poetry, modern drama, feminist and Marxist theory, and the history of feminism. She is on the editorial board of Shakespeare Studies and Renaissance Drama. She has published essays on Shakespeare, Pope, Ford, Heywood, Dekker, Marston, and Jonson, as well as on aspects of contemporary critical theory including new historicism, Marxism, and issues in feminism.
NO PLACE | LA MAKAN is a project of the Center for Palestine Studies. The radio plays were produced in partnership with the A. M. Qattan Foundation, with support from Taawon, The Tides Foundation, and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. For more info about the NO PLACE | LA MAKAN initiative click here.