Rant and Rave: Middle Eastern, North African, and Southwest Asian Classics and Theatre History

Nabra Nelson: Salam Alaikum. Welcome to Kunafa and Shay, a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. Kunafa and Shay discusses and analyzes contemporary and historical Middle Eastern and North African or MENA and SWANA or Southwest Asian, North African Theatre from across the region.

Marina Johnson: I am Marina.

Nabra: And I’m Nabra.

Marina: And we’re your hosts.

Nabra: Our name, Kunafa and Shay, invites you into the discussion in the best way. We know how with complex and delicious sweets like kunafa and perfectly warm tea, or in Arabic, shay.

Marina: Kunafa and Shay is a place to share experiences, ideas, and sometimes to engage with our differences. In each country in the Arab world, you’ll find Kunafa made differently. In that way, we also lean into the diversity, complexity and robust flavors of MENA and SWANA theatre. We bring our own perspectives, research and special guests in order to start a dialogue and encourage further learning and discussion.

Nabra: In our fourth season, we focus on classical and historical theatre, including discussions of traditional theatre forms and in-depth analysis of some of the oldest and most significant classical plays from 1300 BC to the twentieth century.

Marina: Yalla, grab your tea. The shay is just right.

This is the last episode of our fourth season here on Kunafa and Shay, which was our historical and classical MENA/SWANA theatre season. And today we’ll be reflecting on the season and giving some additional insight and a broader overview of our framework around historical and classical theatre. Because this season has been all about theatre history, it’s meant that unlike the past two seasons, we wrote pretty much the entirety of the episodes instead of having interviews. And we have so many more interviews to do because there are just so many incredible artists from the region. So we’ll have another pretty interview-heavy season for season five, which is performance art, so look out for that. We wanted to bring you something a bit different to break it up the season and give some additional context to the theatre canon that we keep referencing. Plus, I have to say, this is how our podcast got started.

Nabra and I became close friends years ago when we would talk about our shared interests, especially, obviously, Middle Eastern Theatre. And then when I started the PhD, I had a podcast assignment in one of my classes. It was during COVID on Zoom, and I made a five-minute podcast on Zeina Daccache, who you’ll remember does work in the carceral system in Lebanon, and everyone in the class was really excited by it. And I realized that that’s part of what I wanted to do, was to share this with people in an accessible way. And I realized that in a PhD, it can be pretty lonely because you become more and more specialized and the people around you may really care about what you do, they may think it’s interesting, but you can’t call them and just say, “Hey, I found this play called People of the Cave. We have to read it and talk about it right now.”

So I called Nabra on a whim, and that’s how we started Kunafa and Shay. And so I love having these kinds of conversations on the podcast too, because you were all part of this community that we’re working to be in conversation with.

Nabra: Yeah, this season has really been on our minds from the beginning. I mean, I really wanted to be part of this podcast. I mean, when Marina was like, “Let’s start a podcast.” And I was like, “That’s a wild idea. I don’t know about that.” But I did really want to download Marina’s theatre history knowledge and all of the plays she knew about. I was like, this is a great way to do that. So we’ve always wanted to do this, to really talk about some of the plays that we were excited about and also talk about classic theatre because there’s so much work to be done to expand the canon of classics beyond white and Western playwrights. It’s absolutely ridiculous. I mean, most of my career I’ve been working in regional theatre, and I’ve learned that a lot of theatres talk about their dedication to the “classics” with absolutely no analysis on what that actually means.

And, of course, they only mean old white male playwrights, specifically Shakespeare, Ibsen, Williams, Miller, Chekhov, et cetera, and the ancient Greek plays and adaptations of those. It’s very clear that is what their definition is after just scratching the surface. It’s really popular plays, not classics, that they’re interested in. Well-known plays with name recognition in the US is kind of that definition that’s really popular in most major theatres and producing theatres in the US. And it all goes back to capitalism, not artistry. I know this because when given the opportunity, I have tested them by sharing classics from other parts of the world, and there is basically no interest, certainly no interest to actually raise funds and invest in doing these sometimes larger-scale plays in the same way there is interest in raising funds and investing in doing more large-scale Shakespeare.

The one major bite I’ve gotten is when I introduced a Shakespeare company in Wisconsin to Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka, which is a African play from Nigeria, not a MENA play, but that is really my go-to non-Western classic to bring to predominant white institutions because it’s so indisputably a classic and it’s highly literary. He was very highly influenced by Shakespeare, and so it really fits a lot of their criteria and it’s also a very epic play, very large scale. And this theatre actually invited me to do a reading of their play in their winter reading series. It was a really big moment for me and a really exciting moment in my directing career. And they asked me to also send other classic African plays, and we had this huge, amazing cast and a sold-out reading. It was just a wonderful, wonderful opportunity and evening of theatre and really an honor to direct that reading and that play.

And I will say that that theatre has a lot of issues around race relations, but I saw them take a tangible step towards expanding their canon in a way that I’ve just not seen other theatres do. That being said, if you know where I’m talking about, I just want to say for the record, I’m not praising them too hard. I know it’s a mess and a struggle for POCs there, period. It’s just the only example I have, honestly. So that’s really saying something when I’ve been in season planning rooms, I’ve been in the regional theatre world for a long time, and that’s the biggest bite in any world of non-Western classics that I’ve experienced. So, when I say that, it really fuels our dedication to try to tackle the classics in a MENA/SWANA podcast, it’s so essential if that’s what we’re going to be, it is what we are now four seasons in. Even I didn’t know a lot of MENA and SWANA classics.

As I said before, I wanted to download Marina’s PhD, essentially, and just learn everything that she’s learned through her graduate programs, and we’ve only really scratched the very surface this season.

So anyways, I’ve ranted about my personal feelings on why expanding the canons of the classics is important, but Marina can we please get your thoughts on this?

Marina: Yes. Well, first of all, Nabra, I love that you were talking about me as a downloadable resource, which is hilarious.

Nabra: Yes. You’re like one of the library links. It’s like all the things you can sign up for. I signed up for the Marina Johnson downloadable resource, and it’s free. It’s great.

Marina: Yeah, that’s how I feel about being your friend too, so I’m glad it’s mutual. What I love though… So for everyone listening, I just feel like we can just call this “Pulling a Nabra” in the future—but if you’re working at a company and they’re like, “Let’s do Romeo and Juliet.” “Well actually, I just learned about Layla and Majnun. Can we do that play instead?” I mean there are simple ways, I think. I love, Nabra, that you had a play. You were like, “This is the play I recommend when a theatre says they need a classical play.” I think we can all have that. So whether it’s Layla and Majnun, or when someone says, “I want to do a play about Islam,” Instead of saying, “Oh yes, I’ve heard Akhtar’s play, Disgraced, deals with some of this.” You can say, “Oh, People of the Cave has Islamic and Christian themes in it, and it’d be really fun to explore.”

We can get at these same topics, but we can do it in ways that actually broaden something instead of sort of giving the same plays maybe the same time over and over, like Romeo and Juliet. It’s had its chance, I would say, and it’s been done wel,l and we can move on from it. Right?

Nabra: Absolutely.

Marina: Yeah. I also want to point out, so, things we can look at when we’re looking at representation—which is a word that we use too much and too sort of broadly—but sometimes LORT Theatres will have this pattern of saying, “Okay, we’re doing representation,” and it’s by putting an edgy show in their small theatre space because most of them have two or three spaces. So theatres will program a MENA or SWANA play or a new play by a BIPOC artist in the smallest space that they have. So, first of all, great. We’re glad that they’re doing that, but the playwright now gets a smaller check for royalties, the show will have a shorter run, and it’s often not included in the season subscription. So it’s an option that season subscribers can choose. It’s like, I wouldn’t call it investing “lite” in a work, L-I-T-E, and I’ve often found that the edgier the work is in the small theatre; the bigger the name is of the work on the main stage that they’re using to bring in the money. And I have to say it’s often more boring too.

So I’m thinking, I don’t know, a new play by Nabra in your small space, but then we’re doing Guys and Dolls on the main stage. And I don’t know, this gets to me because, yes, I’m glad these changes are happening in small ways and we do have to do incremental change sometimes, but I think if we rely only on incremental change, it perpetuates the idea that the small shows are never going to bring in enough money on their own and we depend on the white shows to foot the bill. And really, you’re programming a play by a MENA artist, that’s great, but have you reached out to MENA audiences before? Have you ever made your space feel inclusive to MENA folks before? Did you schedule your MENA show for exactly when people are breaking the fast during Ramadan?

That’s the motto of, “if we program it, they will come,” but actually that’s not a great motto because if you don’t figure out a way to make your season inclusive in all ways, no one’s going to come. And it’s not the fault of the great new plays by BIPOC artists that you’re asking to do all this work.

Nabra: Oh my God, I’m so glad you brought that up, Marina, because I could go on about this, but you’ve said it in such a great and succinct way. But also, some of the things that, if you are a producer at a larger theatre or leadership that some of the more progressive theatres I know about are at least thinking of doing, are they actually doing it? Is it being implemented? Well, that’s yet to be seen. But you can pay the same across your stages, that is in your capability. And so there are folks who are thinking, Oh, we do keep putting these more edgy shows, I guess the BIPOC shows really in the smaller theatre, but we’re at least going to pay all the artists involved the same as in the main stage, which is a huge step forward in creating that kind of equity across shows, especially for, honestly, newer and BIPOC shows.

And then, of course, I can’t go on enough about having community engagement personnel who are actually working on exactly what Marina was talking about with engaging MENA communities. They’re essential, and having them in concert with marketing and communications departments and personnel is essential. Audience development shouldn’t be a dirty word in my opinion. Speaking as a community engagement professional, it’s part of what you do, and you just need to do it in a way that centers relationship and isn’t extractive or tokenizing as it’s been in the past. And then of course, if you’re a person going to see theatre, go to these shows. And if you have the means, buy tickets even if you’re like an artist or a community member or something that’s getting offers for free tickets or pay what you choose. Really do what you can if you are able to support the show that does tell the theatres what to program in the future. It goes back to capitalism, unfortunately, and the more that that makes revenue, the more they say, “Oh, we can start investing in this work.”

And it’s happening as a trend across the nation that this newer, exciting work by BIPOC folks is what is making money, bringing in audiences, bringing in new audiences, and that’s the future of theatre. So keep proving that to them in any way that you can.

I’m glad these changes are happening in small ways and we do have to do incremental change sometimes, but I think if we rely only on incremental change, it perpetuates the idea that the small shows are never going to bring in enough money on their own and we depend on the white shows to foot the bill.

Marina: Well, and I think because whenever Nabra was talking about, like “What does it mean to expand the cannon?” I was like, well, we have to look at the systems that are producing these plays because otherwise, how can we expand the cannon? I think we want to think about it in classroom settings, of course, we want to think about it in theatre training settings, we want to think about it in our regional and other theatres. What does it mean to actually expand something? And it’s wild because I’m a PhD candidate at Stanford, and when our department programs Shakespeare as part of the theatre season, students are dying to audition. And truly huge swaths of students audition for these plays.

And the students are great; the people who are directing the Shakespeare plays are great, but I can’t tell you why exactly the students are that interested in Shakespeare—if it’s a resume thing, if it’s like this is going to look good, but I do think it comes back to actor and director training, where it’s emphasized that people need to be able to work on the classics, “the greats,” if you will, and they can only do that with particular training. I’m working with an actor right now who wants to study theatre in New York after leaving Stanford, and she’s had a lot of stress about where she wants to study in New York because she doesn’t want to do classical pieces, and that advice is so pervasive. People are telling her, “Well, you have to know how to do the classical pieces.” But I told her what I would tell anyone: if you get good training, you can work on any play. You need to be able to do character analysis, you need to be able to do dramaturgy, script analysis, and then those skills are all transferable.

And that’s how I feel about MFA programs too. I got my MFA in directing at the University of Iowa, which deals largely with new play development. And so I got to work with playwrights and actors on first drafts of scripts, and sometimes I would direct a play and we would get a new scene the night before opening night. And when it came time though to do my thesis production, I was like, “Oh, I’ve directed all these new plays. I need to switch something up on my resume. Should I have Chekhov or Shakespeare?” And I felt really burdened by what are people going to think of when they think of me? And my advisor told me the thing that I really needed to hear, which was, “What piece helps you say what you need to say right now?” Which led me to doing a Palestinian play, my first trip to Palestine; it changed my life because I got that advice. So I think we really just need to think about how we are talking to people about their careers in theatre. Are we just recycling the same advice?

Because I think generally, post-COVID, things have changed, but also if we want the theatre scene to change, we have to give different advice than we got when we were in theatre schools. And I think that advice can be actually, yeah, if you are being trained, then you can do any play. And also when people do intimacy and fight choreography work, there’s a professional who’s brought in to work with you, and that can be the same thing for a play that has specialized knowledge. There’s a dramaturg, there’s a Shakespearean dialect coach, there is something, right? You can do a Russian play without having studied extensively all of the Russian accents. So to sum all that up, let’s think about how we can expand theatre education.

Another example that I want to give as we’re talking about the classics is what does a classic mean? Sometimes we think about classics as from a classical time period, the classical time period, sometimes we think about them as a tried-and-true play.And as Nabra was saying, sometimes it’s tried, true, white, and known to audiences so we’ll get butts in seats to pay for other things in our season. But what I think Golden Thread did this year is a great example of doing both a classic play and a play by MENA folks. So after the genocide began, under the leadership of Sahar Assaf, Golden Thread Productions and Assaf pivoted their whole season to a season for Palestine. The cornerstone piece of this season was Returning to Haifa, which I had the honor of working on. For those who don’t know, the source material is a novella by Ghassan Kanafani called Return to Haifa. Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace adapted it for the stage. It’s a classic play and a major part of Palestinian cultural production and that canon. Golden Thread had to add performances to their season, and all of the performances sold out. It’s the best selling show in Golden Thread’s history by far. So doing this classic piece helped the company because the company was interested in doing what is needed in the present moment. So it worked out beautifully.

The theatre was responding to the needs of the community, the community responded and came to the show, and that can be a model for anyone because, as Nabra pointed out, we can’t escape the late-stage capitalist hellscape that we are sort of all living in. I do want to highlight also quickly a moment that classics can help. So we had Zeina Daccache on one of our past seasons, and you’ll remember that she has done plays like 12 Angry Lebanese based on 12 Angry Men. She’s done Scheherazade in Baabda based on the story of Scheherazade. She’s done these plays in Lebanese prisons and used them to help change literal laws in Lebanon. If you don’t remember, please go back to that episode at some point. We have one where we talk about her and one where we interview her. Love them both, love her. But she really smartly took these classical plays, adapted them to work with her Lebanese actors with whom she was working, and she knew these plays would appeal to the government officials who were going to come to the show.

But she wasn’t just feeding them up regurgitated classics. She made these classics really fit for her people, and she knew what these classics could do. So it was really intentionally choosing them for a particular reason here. So my last point—Nabra, I’ll hand it back to you in a second—but someone recently asked me, “Are there Palestinian plays?” And I was like, “Yeah, of course there are. That’s my whole research.” But this points out the separation for me from the academy to the rest of the world. And that’s why I love this podcast, and I’m grateful to HowlRound because it gives us a chance to talk. We have people who are in institutions and people who are living their lives or who are creating theatre, and there shouldn’t be such a big divide. Someone once told me that my “public scholarship” would look really good on the job market. And I was like, “Public scholarship? What’s that? What does that even mean?” But it’s actually this podcast; it’s about bringing scholarship to people, and that scholarship isn’t in fancy books or behind paywalls or written in dense, unapproachable language.

So actually, in fact, we had three academics that we love on the podcast this season. Public scholarship is a way that we can get past this focus on the classical or bring the classical outside of the academy or outside of theatres in different ways. So those are just several of the different valences that I think of when I think about broadening the canon or moving us past these just classic plays.

Nabra: Yeah. And I want to shout out ourselves and free open access online course that linked to Kunafa and Shay. They reached out to us and was like, “Thank you. We linked to you as a resource, as an alternative to other types of scholarship or written reviews and a great resource for theatre history and practice.” It’s called Introduction to Equitable Theatre Criticism, and we’ll link that here, but it’s a free equity-centered course for folks. And so there needs to be more of… That’s like public scholarship. Again, yes, all scholarships should be public, but we’re seeing I think a shift towards more open access, more opportunity outside the academy, and we’re really both really thankful and honored to be a part of that as well and be a part of that course, and hopefully other folks are using this as a resource more broadly. So I mean, we are so on the same page about classics. We could go on and on.

I mean, we kind of did for a season, but we won’t give you our entire thesis today. We’re both working on scholarship around that, so hopefully that’ll be also available and out there and then we’ll have another season like this. We’re totally on the same page. And we’re so much on the same page that actually the first episode we ever recorded for this podcast is in this season, and that’s largely due to Marina’s unusually specific interest in Tawfiq Al Hakim’s play, People of the Book, but also because we knew that talking about important historical works was an important part of talking about MENA and SWANA theatre more broadly. And we talk about our ups and downs with getting that episode recorded and why it’s in season four instead of season one, which was the original plan, but it was a whole trip. It’s in episode three. Check it out.

Marina: And just clarifying the title, People of the Cave.

Nabra: Oh, my goodness.

Marina: People of the Book is a different play altogether.

Nabra: You’re so right. You’re so right. Excuse me.

Marina: Another one of my obsessions that we were finally able to explore in the season is the classical story of Majnun and Layla. And actually, one of our lovely friends at HowlRound emailed and was like, “Oh, I’m so excited about this because I’m Turkish, and we know this story in the Turkish tradition as well.” So that’s episode two if you want to hear it, and we talk about this classical story and various adaptations. But we don’t talk about the most famous adaptation a lot, which is Romeo and Juliet. You have to go to another podcast for a deep dive into a Shakespeare play.

Nabra: Oh my God. So wait, we’ll never analyze Shakespeare’s MENA classic, Othello?

Marina: No, thank you. Although, that would be hilarious and probably, yeah, unhinged in a great way. I would love to hear Nabra’s take on Othello. Although, I do have on my shelf some different MENA adaptations of Shakespeare plays that are quite good, and some MENA adaptations of Greek plays like the MENA Oedipus.

Nabra: We might do what we said we weren’t going to do. Never listen to us. And I could also never reveal either my love of Shakespeare nor my criticisms of him. They’re both just too controversial depending on the audience. So we’ve got to pay attention to our viewership and not let me go too unhinged with my ideas. You might actually wonder why we pick the order of episodes in the way we pick them, and it’s mostly just which scripts we finish first, or which interviewees get back to us first. But there is usually some rhyme or reason to keeping this general season outline. So we do love those listeners who listen to the season from top to bottom in order. Thank you. I mean, we’re both directors. There has to be a throughline. For instance, we very purposely started this season with the Triumph of Horus, which is the oldest existing script period, and it’s from Egypt, duh. So I had a lot of Egyptian pride and a lot of fun writing that episode.

I’ve actually been learning a lot about ancient Egypt this year, working on a couple projects that center that. Even though most of my schooling was in Egypt, and honestly probably because of that, I don’t know a lot about ancient Egyptian mythology and history until very recently. I think the Egyptian school system is just like, “Oh, they’re in Egypt. They’ll go to temples and pyramids and stuff, and they’ll get that information outside of school. So no need to focus on all of that here,” When actually visiting temples is mostly just walking around and marveling at all this stuff. I don’t usually take tours because I’m Egyptian and the tours are for foreigners, so, oh well, regretting that now but I’m learning now because of these two projects.

One of them is a podcast because I’ve been flagrantly cheating on Marina doing a different podcast. She’s very salty about it, honestly. But this one is a narrative podcast. It’s called The Great Pyramid Scheme, and the showrunner is Layla Abdoh. And I was part of the writing team, and the inaugural season launches this summer 2024. It was so fun to work on. It’s this raucous comedy podcast set during the building of the Great Pyramids of Giza during Pharaoh Khufu’s reign, which I didn’t know before writing the show, and now I know about Pharaoh Khufu. I seriously should have known that. How did I not know the Pharaohs associated with the pyramids? I still don’t know this Pharaoh is associated with the other two pyramids like Giza, so I’m really outing myself there, but I’ll learn. I’m learning slowly. And anyways, the whole podcast is a commentary on labor movements like the pyramid workers are constantly striking and negotiating for labor rights. It is hilarious, and you should definitely check it out when it’s out.

And then the other project is an immersive theatre show that’s produced by Tracy Francis, who we’ve had on the podcast. It’s an all-Egyptian writing team, which is awesome, with me as the writer, her as the producer, and her brother Ryan as the sound designer. And it’s about a property in rural Oregon known as Oculus Anubis, which was owned by a random dentist who committed major tax fraud, and he was really obsessed with ancient Egypt so his property had all these Egyptian statues, including a twenty-one foot sculpture of the Goddess Sekhmet. So this has led to a ton of conspiracy theories about the property and a lot of speculation about it being a cult. But the real story of the dentist owner is even more nefarious. The whole piece is mostly verbatim drawn from articles, court documents, and even the Book of the Dead. It has been also just so, so fun to write, and we’re hoping to premiere it in Oregon or anywhere really in fall or early 2025. So if you’re a company interested in producing or presenting an immersive show, let me know.

What are you working on, Marina? Anything in the sphere of classics or historical theatre?

I was like, “Public scholarship? What’s that? What does that even mean?” But it’s actually this podcast; it’s about bringing scholarship to people, and that scholarship isn’t in fancy books or behind paywalls or written in dense, unapproachable language.

Marina: Nabra, this is great. I feel like I can’t believe you haven’t told me it was called The Great Pyramid Scheme. It’s such—

Nabra: It’s such a good name, right?

Marina: It’s such a good name.

Nabra: I’m so impressed.

Marina: And I just googled Leila Abdoh, and she seems amazing. So very exciting.

Nabra: Yes, I know. And the whole writing team was so great. I love being on a writing team. It’s so fun.

Marina: I will begrudgingly listen to this other podcast.

Nabra: Wow.

Marina: Interesting, classics. I directed The Wolves at Stanford this past winter.

Nabra: Is that a classic? Are we calling that a classic?

Marina: It was a runner up to the Pulitzer in 2017, so it’s been long.

Nabra: That was several years ago. Yes, yes, yes.

Marina: From the classical time period of pre-COVID.

Nabra: Exactly.

Marina: I just worked on Returning to Haifa at Golden Thread, and I also just finished working on another version of the Gaza Monologues with Bay Area Palestinian youth. There were seventeen Palestinian and Palestinian American kids, and then three youth who just have come from Gaza. And so those three kids wrote their own monologues, and it was really heartbreaking and meaningful to hear them and their words. I’m realizing nothing really classical here. I did fight choreography for Titus Andronicus and Zombies, which was quite campy and fun, and intimacy for the musical Assassins. But yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I’m TAing a course in Jordan coming up, I’m presenting at the International Federation for Theatre Research in the Philippines this summer, and I have a bunch of writing projects that I’m doing. Oh, Nabra: we have a co-authored chapter that’s in a book because of this podcast that maybe we can mention here.

Nabra: That’s a very good point. Listen, I didn’t know you were going to go into your whole CV right now.

Marina: I wasn’t doing my whole CV. It’s really cool. Just try and keep up.

Nabra: Listen, I’m also working on a lot of other projects, okay?

Marina: Do you want to tell us about them?

Nabra: No, I don’t. It’s too much. I can’t even remember what I’m doing in my life. Being a freelance artist is weird, y’all. Anyways, but yes, co-author. I’m doing an independent scholarship, which, what a wild time that is. And it’s partially because Marina keeps getting me into it, like this co-authored chapter.

Marina: Yes. So first of all, we had to change our podcast description for the season because it used to be that we called me a theatre scholar, Nabra a theatre artist, and we had to change it because she’s now publishing in the same place as I am.

Nabra: And also Marina’s a theatre artist, so I’m not sure why that was ever… Whatever. We were trying to do something to try to define each other, but we can’t be defined, y’all. We cannot be defined.

Marina: It’s true. We have in our first season a podcast episode called “Complicating Notions of Womanhood,” and we talk about a few different plays that we love and why we think they’re really worthwhile and how they make you maybe think differently about women. And then we were reached out to by Emily Rollie, shout out, who was like, “Hey, I’m working on this anthology. Would you like to adapt this book chapter for the anthology?” And we were like, that sounds amazing. So we did. We wrote about Hanane Hajj Ali’s Jogging, Al Harah Theatre in Beit Jala’s Shakespeare Sisters and Noura, Heather Raffo’s Noura as well, which is great. And so we’ve had a fantastic time with that, and it’s now out in the anthology, so you can read it there. Nabra, what is the anthology called?

Nabra: It’s Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders and Sexualities published by Routledge. So check it out. We’re excited about that piece. It goes deeper than our podcast episode, so you can check out obviously “Complicating Notions of Womanhood,” but we go a little bit deeper, and we explore one play that we didn’t talk about in that episode as well.

Marina: And it’s part of our goal of making—yes, I want this PhD for lots of reasons, and one of them is to be able to write things that undergrads can read in classes that I didn’t get to read when I was an undergrad. And so this is definitely towards that mission.

Nabra: We’re also both in an upcoming anthology that we didn’t know we were both publishing and we’re doing separate chapters, Women’s Innovations published by Bloomsbury. So I’m going to be talking about my play Nubian Stories, and I don’t know what Marina’s talking about actually.

Marina: Women’s Innovation in Hip Hop Music Videos in Palestine.

Nabra: So cool. It’s so cool. Scholarship’s actually cool. This is why I keep doing it for no particular reason other than—

Marina: And no money.

Nabra: My personal… No money or tiny little stipends. I really appreciate the stipends folks give to independent scholars when they do give them, which is amazing. But yeah, it’s just important. Life mission is really important. But anyways, another cool thing that Marina’s always doing is her PhD, and it’s been very overdue for us to have her PhD advisor on the season, Dr. Samer Al-Saber. He talked to us about some very interesting academic terms that he coined of there “resistant ventriloquism” and “postcolonial courtesy,” the former of which, by the way, really unlocked something for me in one of my plays that I’m writing. I was like, “Oh, resistant ventriloquism. That’s what I’m trying to do.” It’s honestly such an accessible, practical, yet highly academically rigorous conversation. So you should definitely check it out. It’s episode four. Samer is just such a great speaker and explains his work so well.

Marina: He is truly one of my favorite human beings. I’m very grateful to have him in my life. And yeah, I can be very sappy about him all day long. But please do listen to the episode because you’ll then be like, “Oh, if I talk to this man, I, too, would feel like, ‘Yes, I could get a PhD and I should be able to communicate these things to different audiences.'” We also have, in the season two episodes on Palestinian theatre, which is of course my research focus, but it’s also especially important to highlight the breadth and depth of Palestinian arts and culture right now when we’re in the middle of this horrifying genocide in Gaza.

Nabra: Exactly. I mean, it can feel paralyzing to see the war crimes that the Israeli government and military are enacting in Gaza, but we each need to continue to support the Palestinian cause and make our voices heard in all of the ways that we can. That can be writing to and calling US government officials or government officials wherever you are, wherever you’re a national, donating to relief funds, going to protests in person, supporting Palestinian artists in your community, and supporting protesters like those at universities across the world. Sometimes protestors also, if you’re following their movements on social media platforms, there’ll be ways to donate or to provide supplies or something like that if you’re not able to go in person for any reason. Look out for those ways to really directly support protestors if you’re not able to be there in person. It also means educating yourself about Palestinian history and culture. So in that way, we’re trying to contribute to spreading awareness of an appreciation for these incredible Palestinian art forms and documenting them for future preservation as well.

Marina: Yes, and in addition to Samer, we had Fidaa Ataya on the podcast in episode eight to talk about Palestinian oral tradition and the incredible work she’s doing with preserving and revitalizing storytelling in Palestine. And I really love the way that, I don’t know….there’s this funny story about how I met Fidaa. So my friend Karishma introduced me to her, and we talked on WhatsApp and she said, “Come, we’re doing a storytelling marathon.” And I was like, “Oh, a storytelling marathon. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds amazing.” And so it was a Sunday. I went to church in Palestine, and then I grabbed a taxi and I was like, okay, I think this is where we’re going. And so I told the taxi driver to go to Kafr ‘Aqab near this school. And so I was texting her, but there was no answer. She wasn’t really getting my messages.

And so I was also texting my friend in Jordan from this cab, and he called the school and the school said, “There’s no performance in this school today. Are you sure you have the right place?” So he texts me and I’m in this cab in an area I’ve never been in, and Fidaa calls me, and she’s like, “Oh, of course, Marina. It’s a marathon. We’re not in the school. We’re starting from the school as our location. Put me on the phone with the cab driver,” And this should speak to the fact that my Arabic cannot navigate us quickly enough from one location to the next. So she talks to the cab driver, we end up being within two minutes of her, and the cab driver pulls over. I pay him, I hop into her car because she’s now there and she drives me around with her to all of the places that the storytelling marathon is going.

So the kids are telling these stories from literal place to place and walking through this village, and it was amazing to see, just really seeing the necessity of stories being told to people who are part of the community and not asking them to do anything different in their day, but saying, actually, this story is worthwhile and it will come to you. There was a woman who was doing tatreez and sewing dresses in her workshop. And so seeing her or seeing the cashier at the local market was also people who were on the receiving ends of these stories. I love that. I’m about to go spend a year in Palestine, inshallah, and for me, writing about the present means looking at the past, and sometimes that means looking at how funding works for different Palestinian theatres because that’s changed so much historically. The funding that has existed no longer exists.

And also thinking about what does Indigenous theatre look like? Sometimes there’s this thought that anything pre the Nakba in 1948, the creation of the state of Israel, and the catastrophe of the Palestinian people, people can think that that is what Indigenous Palestinian theatre looks like. And it’s interesting to have those conversations and to think about what actually does “Indigenous” mean? Because when we think of places, we think of borders often, and borders are actually just these colonial things that have existed, and they weren’t always there. And so there were times prior to 1948 and prior to the establishment of different places where people were just going from what we now call Lebanon or Syria and Palestine into Egypt. The part of Egypt that’s close to Gaza, you see a lot of traditional dress styles that are the same because this border was not a place where people had to stop. It was actually, we were moving from place to place. And so there was cultural hybridity in different ways.

And so I’m not an expert on this. This is not the period of time that I study as far as cultural production goes. I’m actually getting to meet people who do study this time period quite seriously, and I’m excited to get to learn more from them. But it’s so interesting to me to think about what it means to… Because I’ve grown up thinking about borders as these things that are very real as opposed to thinking about them as these things that have been imposed. So yeah, I’m not positive where that whole thought was going other than I’m excited for my year of field work, and I’m excited to continue thinking about what it means to look at Palestinian cultural production and to write about it.

And that’s a promise we continue to keep here on Kunafa and Shay: to present you with a podcast that is by, from, and about the MENA and SWANA region—the podcast that centers us.

Nabra: Marina, you need to stop bringing up things that could be entire, I don’t know, four-hour discussions because I’m just trying to keep it together and not go off on this very exciting and interesting and complicated conversation that I have all the time as well about indigeneity and borders as a culturally Indigenous person whose Indigenous culture was split in half by false borders that now, of course, define countries in Africa. But we go a little bit, I guess, into that in one of the episodes in this season on Nubian theatre, which I’m so proud of. I’m just so thrilled that we got to do that. That is episode six. But we have two episodes this season on Egyptian theatre, which I’m really excited about, of course, because I’m Egyptian—I’m Egyptian Nubian—and it’s just kind of the way that happened. I mean, Egypt has such a rich and long, of course, history of the arts, and perhaps more importantly, there seems to be more documentation of Egyptian theatre that’s accessible, especially in English, because of lots of efforts to preserve Egyptian culture in a way that a lot of other MENA and SWANA cultures are not preserved.

Everyone loves Egypt. Whether they know things about it or not, there’s kind of this cultural phenomena. So we’ve had more of success in finding those plays and information and anthropology around that, and that kind of research has been a big issue in making this season happen. It really just felt like a very daunting season because of the level of research required to really encompass as much of the region as we could within ten episodes.

Marina: Yeah. I mean, there’s been a lot of digging to get information so that we can make this season happen. And as we all know, this can go back to racism in the academy, lack of appreciation for art forms from the region to properly preserve them, especially in the past. And Egypt is in this position of having sites recognized as cultural heritage sites, which can make people feel like there’s a different amount of preservation that is owed there. And I’m grateful for that preservation because it means we are able to do some of the episodes we’ve talked about, and it would be great if we can continue that preservation in other places. So we’re seeing changes in this way as we look for original scripts, especially in translation, or finding resources that are not still centering a Western perspective. It can be difficult, but there is progress being made. And in the Tawfiq al Hakim episode, I talk at lengths about what it meant just to get a copy of that script.

Nabra: And that’s why we turn to contemporary scholars at times to share their innovative research around these historical theatre forums, like a second time guest and a good friend of ours, Dr. Sarah Fahmy, who is not only doing incredible research—especially on Egyptian puppetry traditions, which is the subject of episode five—but is also working with community to revive and reinvent these traditions. It’s really beautiful to see and hear about. I’m actually working with Sarah on grants to reboot and grow her previous work with girls in Nubia, which of course is where I’m from, and I am just dying for that opportunity to do theatre in my homelands. It’s something she did as part of her PhD, and I got super jealous, and now we’re excitedly working on doing that together. So I’m very, very thankful for that. Inshallah it can happen soon. And speaking of Nubian theatre, of course I talked about the Nubian theatre episode briefly, but I wanted to go more into how that happened because we don’t talk about this in the episode.

This episode is a lot about giving context and going deeper into more of the concepts behind this season. And so a little insight into how the Nubian theatre episode happened. I remember I was just on the phone with my mom one day talking about theatre, and she just casually mentioned… She always casually mentions big, giant things, so she just did her classic just casually mentioning a big thing that my grandfather did theatre. And I was just like, why did you not tell me this before? I mean, I wasn’t shocked because my grandfather, his name is Mahidin Shariff, is a very prominent Nubian multidisciplinary artist. I knew he was a famous musician, painter, and novelist, but I didn’t know that he also did theatre. So this made me insistent about finding out more. And through various connections, I got in touch with Nubian Geographic, who was actually just finishing up a documentary on Nubian theatre. It was so serendipitous.

So I got a lot of information from my mom, and then we sat down with Mazen Alaa from Nubian Geographic in episode six, and I learned so much, and I’m endless endlessly proud of my family and my people. And Inshallah I’ll be able to contribute to that long history of theatre making in Nubia.

Marina: And you already do. I mean, for people who haven’t heard Nabra’s play Nubian Stories, it’s a really gorgeous text, so hopefully people will be able to see Nabra perform it, which I know is not her favorite thing to do, perform generally, but she’s a great performer, so don’t let her fool you.

Nabra: Well, actually, we’re working on grants to have my mother perform her own story as Nubian Stories in Egypt. Yes. Because it’s about her life story. And she’s acted before. She was in an award-winning short film back in the nineties with her friend and director and producer Sara Rashad, and yeah, and she’s like, “I’m ready for my reprise as an actress,” And it would just be epic to have her perform her own life story in these folk tales. And yeah, so give us grants, everyone.

Marina: Oh my gosh. For those who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Nabra’s, mom, you meet her and you’re immediately like, “No, of course you should be starring in some sort of show.” She’s brilliant and just has this charismatic presence.

Nabra: Absolutely. And I’ve actually essentially rewritten the script. Not really. I’ve rewritten it as an outline because as this oral historian and a storyteller, a traditional storyteller, you can’t give her a script. You can’t give someone a script to memorize. It’s her life story, and it’s folktales that she learned through oral tradition, so she’s not going to sit down and read a memorized script that I just only wrote to give to people who aren’t her. So it’s really interesting. Maybe we’ll talk about this one day, especially if I can mount this, but how to perform oral tradition, this is also what the Women’s Innovation chapter is about, in a way that’s authentic and supports traditional storytellers. So really a different journey as a playwright to actually have her as the original source material really perform this text and as an indigenous storyteller. It’s a different way of doing theatre, really.

Marina: Yeah. So in this season, just overall, we learned that the entire region has theatre histories that extend beyond what we even set out to learn about. The “Ottoman Theatre” episode, which is episode seven, took us down a whole rabbit hole. There’s so much documentation about the Ottoman Empire, but that history is complex and deeply influenced by so many different theatre traditions from across the region in Europe, since the Ottoman Empire was so global and cosmopolitan. We had to stay diligent to try to tell the story from a non-European perspective since a lot of the scholarship focused on European influences on the Ottoman Theatre, I guess, unsurprisingly.

Nabra: Yeah. We’ve had to think very deeply about how to frame these episodes. We talk about theatre histories that are documented in these different ways that maybe we want to focus on it and document it in a more MENA/SWANA centered perspective, or talking about oral histories and traditional theatre forms that we need to be very careful about how we present that so that it’s centering those traditions in as authentic a way that we can, and that’s why we have so many of these guests to talk about their own traditions. And that’s a promise we continue to keep here on Kunafa and Shay: to present you with a podcast that is by, from, and about the MENA and SWANA region—the podcast that centers us. And we will continue to do that in season five, where we are expanding the very definition of theatre and talking to performance artists. What even is performance art? Well, you’re about to find out in season five.

Thank you so much for joining us for season four. If you have info and sources on classic or historical MENA and SWANA theatre, please get in touch with us because this was only a small sampling of MENA SWANA theatre history, so we will have to revisit again. Thank you so much and see you next season.

Marina: This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of Kunafa and Shay and other HowlRound podcasts by searching HowlRound wherever you find podcasts. If you loved this podcast, please post a rating and write a review on your platform of choice. This helps other people find us. You can also find a transcript for this episode along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content on the HowlRound.com website. Have an idea for an exciting podcast essay or TV event the theatre community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com and contribute your ideas to the Commons. Yalla, bye!

Nabra: Yalla, bye!