The Voices of Palestine

Shortly before arriving in this country last month, Palestinian actor Imad Farajin saw a newspaper photograph of a Palestinian boy sleeping as he sat on a large, sun-splashed rock near an Israeli checkpoint he was not allowed to cross.

Behind him stood an Israeli soldier, holding a gun.

Farajin says he imagined the boy to be “dreaming of a better life in which he could go where he wants, do what he wants,” adding, “I wondered what Americans would think of this boy.”

Palestinian dreams and Palestinian despair are what Farajin and nine of his colleagues with the Ramallah-based Al Kasaba Theatre have put into “Alive From Palestine,” a series of monologues and scenes the actors have drawn from their daily experiences during recent waves of conflict. They will present the show, subtitled “Stories Under Occupation,” Friday evening at the La Mirada Theatre, before heading north for another one-time showing Sunday, at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts. The performers enact their dreamlike narratives--they bear overtones of Isaac Babel short stories and the political theater of Bertolt Brecht--in Arabic, but English translations appear on screens at the side of the stage.

The actors arrived in Los Angeles this week after a run of five performances at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., where the production was part of the seventh International Festival of Arts and Ideas, an 18-day, state-funded offering of dance, music and theater from around the world. The Palestinians’ appearance there provoked debate and drew high praise.

Well before Al Kasaba arrived in the United States, members of New Haven’s Jewish community divided over the very idea of a production that they worried depicted a purely Palestinian point of view. Others called it superb art. Festival managers combined the show with panel discussions and lectures describing Jewish perspectives. The New York Times ultimately ran a review that fervently recommended “a plaintive, almost supplicating” production showing “a terrible helplessness and sadness and an anger that is provoked by what feels like oppression.”

The group’s California trip is being paid for by several Arab American and Palestinian-oriented organizations: American Friends of Palestine, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and Humanity on Hold. Humanity on Hold’s Web site depicts events in the Middle East from a Palestinian point of view, including an image of an Israeli soldier with the words “Born to Kill” etched on his helmet. The site includes a Web memorial, a list of hundreds of names, including Jewish ones, of people who have died in the last 22 months.

Nicole Ballivian, a film producer in Hollywood who conceived of the visit, says she raised $24,000 for it because her husband, Bashar Daas, has acted with the group and because “it is important to put a human face on what everybody is seeing in the news. Americans don’t know what living under occupation is.”

Several of the actors gathered in the enveloping coolness of the bar area of the Holiday Inn in Hollywood this week to talk about the intimately painful connections between their lives and their art. The production, which consists of material the actors wrote themselves, is unlike anything Al Kasaba had done in its more than three decades as a leading Palestinian theater. Over a nine-month period, starting after the second intifada erupted on Sept. 28, 2000, they created hundreds of pieces about life under siege, from which they selected the 13 in the show.

In addition to Farajin, 26, other actors from the group who gathered for a collective interview about its tale of war and art included Georgina Asfour, 25; Khalifa Natour, 37; and Hasam Abu Eisheh, 43. They were joined by Amir Nizar Zuabi, 25, the director and designer of the show, and George Ibrahim, general director of the Al Kasaba Theatre. Most of them live on the West Bank or in Jerusalem.

Al Kasaba, which has a 400-seat theater in Ramallah, and another with 100 seats in Jerusalem, traditionally works as a conventional repertory theater, putting on productions of Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Max Frisch and other writers. After the uprising started nearly two years ago, the theater became the site for readings of poems and stories in honor of the rapidly increasing number of dead.

At first, residents of Ramallah came to express their grief and anger, but the evenings slowly turned into encounters between an audience and performers from the theater. The actors began writing their own stories of people who filled the theater and those beyond it, stories in which human grief often mixed with bleak humor: lovers trying to meet despite checkpoints, giving each other poison-gas canisters and bullets as romantic gifts; parents separated from children, sometimes at the funerals of children.

One sketch inspired during that time tells of a woman who buys a tin of olives, only to find they are rubber bullets. Another is about a woman on a telephone who panics at seeing a missile come in one window, only to sigh with relief at watching it go out another.

“We added on layer after layer,” says Zuabi. “We added a thematic layer, and the dramaturgy of the inner piece got better and better.” Asfour wrote about her brother, shot as he drove the family through an Israeli checkpoint.

Her brother, driving Asfour and her sister, had just passed through an Israeli checkpoint on the way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. “The bullet entered through the trunk, through the back seat and through him.”

Though he had been hit in what is generally considered a resilient part of the anatomy, it was a pretty serious injury. He had to go to the hospital. Asfour says her sister, next to her in the backseat, would have been hit had Asfour not been holding her close because it was cold. “Who shot him? We don’t know. But we saw other cars that had all been shot at the checkpoint.” In one of the play’s monologues, she tells how such things have become normal.

During the interview, she recited the section in Arabic, in a lilting voice: a song of resignation.

“Death has become normal, and / bleeding has become normal too. Fear and despair are normal / The checkpoints are closed? It’s normal, we’ll go round the back, what do we care..../ My brother had a bullet in his behind? Normal....”

One day, in the old city of Jerusalem, Eisheh overheard an exchange between a woman on a cell phone with an older son calling from London--just after the funeral of her younger son. The woman put on a bright face to sustain her own faith and give courage to her son. She does so, performed by Eisheh, in the play. Each time she relates more bad news--that the caller’s uncle is in jail, that her brother has been shot, that his sister has been divorced--she repeats the phrase “praise God.” “Your Uncle Jawad, I didn’t tell you. / Your Uncle Jawad was martyred / but praise God his kids are all right. / The little one was shot / in the eye but he’s all right....”

“I heard this woman in the old city, and there was a power in her,” Eisheh said in the interview. “There was a power to survive.”

Some of the stories are fables. An Arab pleads with King Solomon, the biblical King of the Jews, to take his people away from the embattled land of modern Israel. The actor pleads: “Don’t return my white donkey / King Solomon. Just take / your people away from here. / We don’t want anything from them. Just take them away and relieve us.”

Clearly, this show insists on the Palestinian perspective. There is no direct mention of suicide bombers. One piece talks of an explosion, a person who declares, “they’ve hollowed me out ... wow, a big hole, if you look inside / you’ll see I have become a red waterfall. I traveled tick-tick-tick / from the world. Bye-bye me.” The reference could be to a suicide bomber--or it might be the bloody explosiveness of the whole Middle East.

When the New Haven festival was being planned, its director, Mary Miller, responded to the first rumblings of controversy by bringing the script to local Rabbi Herbert Brockman. Says Brockman: “My first reaction was, ‘They’re making theater in Ramallah! How wonderful!’ It is better to be expressing oneself through art than violence. I read the script and I came away thinking that this was fine art.”

Others reacted more fiercely, sensing that the play portrayed Israelis as the enemy and because Palestinians who die from Israeli weapons are depicted as “martyrs.” In the end, the festival combined the play with the presentations that put it into a larger context of Jewish views and history. About 40 sign-carrying protesters showed up at the performances.

“It is painful to watch for anyone who identifies with Israel,” Professor Steven Fraade, who teaches ancient Jewish history at Yale, says of the production. He had heard rumors that it was anti-Israel but concluded that the piece was “not propaganda.”

Sitting in Hollywood, members of the troupe were divided about what happened in New Haven. “It was a circus,” says Zuabi, the director. The play, he says, was swallowed by the Jewish community’s determination to turn a human statement into a political debate. “The play is art. It is shaped by political circumstances, yes, but it is art.” Ibrahim takes a mellower view. “We came to the heart of the lion. We came to America, and we brought this to where the American Jewish people live. We had to accept that.”

From San Francisco, the troupe will take “Alive From Palestine” to London for 11 performances, then to Sweden. But they probably will not perform at home for quite a while. The region is in turmoil. It is hard for people to get to the theater amid the curfews and checkpoints. The future of the Al Kasaba Theatre, like the rest of the Mideast, is uncertain. Ibrahim has long hoped to start a theater school, but can’t see it happening soon.

“The truth,” he says, “is that no matter what dramas we put on the stage, what happens in real life is much more dramatic.”

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“Alive From Palestine,” La Mirada Theatre, 14900 La Mirada Blvd., La Mirada. Tonight at 8. $25. (562) 944-9801. Also, San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, Sunday at 7 p.m. $35. (415) 392-4400.