The Strangest: Blog

I worked as Assistant Director and Dramaturg on Betty Shamieh's The Strangest for HERE Art Center's Culturemart. Researching the world of French-colonized Algeria has been an eye-opening venture. May and I discussed what topics were most important to research during the pre-production process. Before rehearsals started we had already gathered information on the women's movement in Algeria, the political history between France and Algeria, and crimes against women in the country. Once the process started and we began digging deeper into our scene work new questions arose such as customs when greeting each other, eating around the table, torturing of men by the French Police. I left rehearsals with a new list of topics to research and once I found the information I would post it on the website I created and let everyone know what updates had been made to our site. Disseminating the information to the cast and crew has been really fulfilling as we have seen them take the information and churn out some really specific and truthful work. We can't wait to share the play with you all this February 4th and 5th. Below is a selection of information I curated from the website I created of some of my most interesting finds. Thanks for following!

French police officer holding up a metal detector to an Algerian woman - searching for bombs
1960 - These women did not wish to be photographed. They were forced to pose for ID cards which the French government set up for security purposes
Arabic and French quarter footage in 1930's
Algerian National Anthem
A Quiet Revolution in Algeria: Gains by Women in NYT
Family Law at the Crux of Algerian Women's Futures on NPR
History of Algeria
The Cure's Killing an Arab
French postcard of Algeria, early 1900's
Photo from the film, Battle of Algiers

The experience of presenting two public presentations of a new draft of The Strangest in the Culturemart Festival in January ‘11 was incredibly fruitful for our team artistically. We talked a lot about the legacy of colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa during our rehearsal process. None of us could have predicted that, within weeks of our closing, pro-democracy revolutions across the Arab world would begin to spring up at a dizzying pace. I had planned to visit Syria in mid-March primarily in order to do research on the storytelling tradition that features prominently in The Strangest (the text experiments with combining the element of solo narration from the Middle Eastern oral tradition with the Western theatrical practice of presenting multi-character scenes). One idea we talked about exploring in our next Culturemart presentation is the possibility of creating the experience of entering an Arab coffeehouse, where storytellers traditionally told their tales, for our audience.

I went ahead with the trip, thinking there was little chance of unrest spreading to Syria. Luckily, I was able to get a significant amount of research done before massive demonstrations began to erupt during the last days of my stay. Flipping between the channels while in my hotel in Damascus felt like a surreal experience, because they were presenting such a different picture from what I seeing and hearing. I was being kept up all night by the chanting of pro-regime demonstrations, surprisingly few of which were even mentioned on mainstream Western media outlets. I heard about anti-regime demonstrations and brutal crackdowns in Aleppo and Hama, obviously none of which were alluded to on the Syrian governmental channel. While I went to Damascus to learn about storytelling, I was reminded how much of a tale is shaped by who gets to do the telling.

The Strangest is largely set in French Algiers on the brink of revolution. It will be interesting to explore the same themes of colonialism, civil unrest, and revolution after we and our audiences have spent the last year watching the events of Arab Spring and calls for democracy across the Middle East unfold.

The Strangest is one of my first projects in New York since The Black Eyed was produced at New York Theatre Workshop in 2007. I was a playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in 2008. Since that time, I have been working almost exclusively in Europe (Again and Against in Sweden, Free Radicals in Holland, Territories at the EU Capital of Culture Festival in Austria). I’m off soon to Russia to work on a translation of Again and Against, which was made possible by the Lark Play Development Center and the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission. It has been such a blessing to have productions of my plays in translation abroad, but it’s very good to be back home. Our team was cheered by the enthusiasm for The Strangest in the press we got earlier this year, in The L Magazine (link), City's Best (link), NY Press (link).

Much thanks to those of you who helped spread the word and who braved the stormy winter nights to see the first incarnation of our project. I hope you’ll join us for the next showing in the upcoming Culturemart festival in 2012. It’s been fascinating to watch the development processes of my fellow HARP artists, and I urge you to catch some of their shows at HERE this season. We’ll be updating this blog more regularly, so be sure to check back soon. 

The World Theatre Day blog is designed to connect international theatre artists and will be posting essays of various artists throughout March 2011. My recent contribution can be read here.

I have been invited to give a manifesto on "Race and Gender" at the upcoming TCG conference in Chicago.  For details, http://www.tcg.org