Three updates
I am currently in rehearsals for the world is hours, a hybrid devised-scripted play about revolution and protest.
The play was commissioned and developed by the Acting Department in the Syracuse University Department of Drama.
the world is hours and is a partially scripted/partially devised ensemble piece (using live music, movement, and text) for 9 actors around the idea of revolution/protest focusing on the personal as political and the decisions that drive young people to speak up while testing what happens when their backs are up against a wall. At an unnamed college, a protest goes out of control when counter-protestors set off fireworks and police start firing rubber bullets into the crowd who disperse in a panic. 8 of them stumble upon a room to hide in – a room that has been lost to time built on the bones of failed revolutions. But they soon discover they’re not alone in the room and when they try to leave they find the door is inexplicably locked shut. They have to contend with one another, their differing politics, and their personal demons as they become a Chosen Family. But when the door does finally open, what will they do with their newfound indoor utopia when the world outside is still in tatters?
My solo-musical piece How to Watch an Immigrant have a Racial Nervous Breakdown will be a part of PWC’s open season.
How to Watch an Immigrant Have a Racial Nervous Breakdown is an audience-immersive musical solo-performance that examines the Neither-Here-Nor-There experience of 7 different immigrants trying to navigate their new lives and identities. Taking inspiration from Whoopi Goldberg’s Spook Show and John Leguizamo’s Freak, the piece examines varying degrees of being an Immigrant in the West and questions around if and how they can ‘truly belong’. TW: MENASA Racism.
My EST/Sloan commission Miss Curie of the East will have its first public reading as part of EST’s New Light Reading Series in November 2024.
Egypt’s 1st nuclear scientist, Samira Moussa Aly, wanted to invent a nuclear cancer treatment that would be as available and as cheap as Aspirin, driven by the death of her mother from the deadly disease. She inadvertently created an equation that helped the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a woman and a Muslim in a male-dominated field she unexpectedly broke all kinds of barriers attracting the attention of powerful players on the political world stage in the West. While she worked to heal the world, they worked to use her talents for other purposes, until she died under mysterious circumstances. Today she is completely unknown outside of Egypt. Set against the turbulent political shifts in Egypt and the political machinations post-WW2, Miss Curie of the East pulls the existing fragments of a remarkable life to reconstruct a scientist who could have irrevocably changed the world for the better had it not been for her gender, her religion, and her nationality.
