February, 2021 - DGTOME

The Final Month of the Fifth Year

February 23, 2021/0 Comments/in 2016, Drama, Syria /by Martin Zebari

The Final Month of the Fifth Year tells the story of Jaber, a Palestinian-Syrian playwright who escaped Syria and lives as a refugee in Gaziantep, Turkey. Jaber is a journalist, and works with a radio station that supports the Syrian revolution. Jaber meets Fadl, a 20-year-old young man who escaped from Aleppo, and begins writing a play based on Fadl’s life, following his difficult journey from Aleppo to Idlib and eventually Turkey. Two additional characters are introduced: Tuba, a half-Turkish, half-Syrian girl who was born and raised in Turkey and who works as translator in the same radio that Jaber works for; and Younes, a Kurdish-Turkish young man, who once had a short-lived relationship with Fadl. Jaber finds himself losing faith in himself and his ability to tell stories, as the complexities of Fadl’s history multiply and embroil everyone around him. Ultimately, Jaber’s attempts wear away at his relationship with Wash, his girlfriend, a character we only meet over video calls. Jaber begins, too, to question his sexuality, and most characters question their understanding of the concept of identity.

Before Dinner

February 23, 2021/0 Comments/in 2014, Drama, Syria /by Martin Zebari

Before Dinner follows a single brutal night of conversation between a mother and a son. The mother is a schoolteacher, and the wife of a martyred Palestinian fedayi. The son is a theater student. Before Dinner is a play about generational struggle, and about the inheritance of a generation of young people who came of age during the Arab Spring. It is about what can be said and what can’t, and about the silences and absences that become deafening when parents and children can no longer hear each other. It is about the way successive disasters have forced specific cultural climates on each generation, and the different ways in which each generation finds itself haunted by defeat.

Layalina

February 23, 2021/0 Comments/in 2020, Comedy, Drama, Iraq /by Martin Zebari

In 2003, newly wed Layal plans a future with her family as they make plans to immigrate to the U.S. from Baghdad. 18 years later, just outside of Chicago, Layal’s life and responsibilities look unimaginably different from what she had envisioned two decades before. Layalina examines how families maintain their love in the midst of turbulent global and social change.

Against

February 23, 2021/0 Comments/in 2011, Syria /by Martin Zebari

This text confront us with the simple questions about war, power and freedom- about our life under the daily violence, destroying the humanity and the future.

Hamlet Machine

February 23, 2021/0 Comments/in 2018, Diaspora, Drama /by Martin Zebari

Hamlet Machine, written by Heiner Müller in 1977, was adapted by Ayham Majid Agha in 2018. The Exile Ensemble, of which Ayham serves as Artistic Director, has been part of the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin since the 2016/17 season. The ensemble’s seven actors are investigating the original texts alongside Ayham’s adaptation, as well as researching their own positions in an open ended project. With Hamlet Machine, they’re pursuing the dramatist who radically questions the intellectual’s position in a world that is out of joint, dissecting Shakespeare, among others, and then putting the remaining fragments together again.

Snooze/Nostalgia

February 23, 2021/0 Comments/in 2004, Pantomime, Syria /by Martin Zebari

The text talks about a popular neighborhood in the old city of damascus, about a love story started from the balconies, about the fair of Time and it surprises, about the families rules and our wishes, about having a better future without loosing the love of your life. Eight characters telling a story of a city, while the young guy is mixing the past with the present and the future in his snooze.

Ishtar in Baghdad

February 23, 2021/0 Comments/in 2009, Drama, Iraq /by midetheatre@gmail.com

Ishtar in Baghdad focuses on female detainees. The play is based on a real incident in 2004 in which female Iraqi prisoners were insulted, beaten and raped. One of the prisoners managed to smuggle a letter to her tribe and urged them to bomb the jail. This coded letter meant that they had been raped and thereby dishonoured, and the only way to purify them was to kill them. The script is a dramatical fantasy, as the events are told by Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess of war, sex, beauty and fertility, and her lover Tammuz, the god of food and nature. The two deities descend to Baghdad in 2004 to share with Iraqis their descendants the calamities of war. Ishtar is caught by the US marines and imprisoned in Abu Ghraib prison where she meets Iraqi women detainees. As Ishtar gets into the cell, she witnesses women’s miseries. They are all naked, curled in one corner; they are arguing about the way to purify themselves from this disgrace.

Godless Women

February 23, 2021/0 Comments/in 2005, Drama, Iraq /by Martin Zebari

Godless Women is a personal prism of (three) Arab women who have escaped from political oppression, intellectual co-option, or religious custody in their homelands. The play depicts a significant phase in the life of the three women, Ameena, Mariam and Reyhana, when they hover between the past, the present and the future. The characters journey to reach Germany with ruthless smugglers, who seize each chance to exploit their powerless passengers. As they reach their destination, they realize that they are now under a wider and a more complicated type of oppression: an all-pervasive Western superiority, subordinated by an epistemological and ontological clash of civilisations and citizenship. Ameena, Mariam and Reyhana are jeopardised by identity markers of inferiority as women, Arabs, Muslims, and refugees. The three women come to Germany on fake passports or through illegal routes, either by walking across borders or coming by boats. They are aware that their nationalities, religion and race cannot grant them legal entrance to Europe – especially after the Arabic Spring/upheavals. They belong to a geographical area where lives are ungrievable.

Nooria

February 23, 2021/0 Comments/in 2000, Iraq, Political /by midetheatre@gmail.com

Nooria is about a female corpse-washer, whose work is to wash dead female bodies before they are placed in their graves. Nooria meets Death as a male figure and, through an external monologue, starts a ghostly dialogue. Nooria recalls milestones in her life: her marriage to a soldier who went to the Iraq–Iran War and never came back; the financial hardship that she and her young child suffered during the economic sanctions; the patriarchal and systematic oppression practised upon her as a lonely woman with a young child. Nooria was not aware that Death has come not for her but for her son, as he was about to die in a bomb explosion. In a fantastical move, Nooria decides to take her son back into her belly to protect him from Death, and covers her body with one of the shrouds around her. The play utilises shadow theatre as a background to Nooria’s grotesque monologue, and the choreographers behind the huge translucent screens reflect her frustration, anxiety and fear.

Skeleton of an Elephant in the Desert

February 23, 2021/0 Comments/in 2017, Diaspora /by Martin Zebari

Skeleton of an Elephant in the Desert focuses on loneliness and murder. It’s about four characters in a destroyed city, about a circus on the frontlines of battles, about unmarked and un-murdered corpses, about a sniper postponing the death of a nurse, about who is documenting the incidents, and about the last witness.

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