A Good Day to Me Not to You

by Lameece Issaq

A 40-whatever dental lab technician’s assistant gets fired and moves into St. Agnes Residence, a woman’s rooming house run by nuns. There, she must finally come to terms with the untimely passing of her younger sister, who died while giving birth, and face the consequences of her own untaken path to motherhood. All while fending off the verbal assaults of her unpredictable and sometimes deranged cohabitants. A fictional solo show based on many true things.

Lameece Issaq is an actor and writer, and Founding Artistic Director of the Obie-winning company Noor Theatre. Lameece has appeared in several regional and off-Broadway theater productions, including The Fever Chart and Stuff Happens (Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Ensemble) at the Public Theatre, The Black Eyed at New York Theatre Workshop and Noura at The Old Globe. She has narrated several audiobooks, including Saudi Arabian author Manal Al-Sharif’s timely autobiography, Daring to Drive and most recently, Matt Wallace’s epic fantasy, Savage Legion. Her play Food and Fadwa premiered off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop, a piece she co-wrote, co-produced and starred in and in which Variety magazine praised her performance as “stunning.” Her other writing includes short plays, Noor and Hadi Go to Hogwarts (Theater Breaking Through Barriers) and Nooha’s List, part of the compilation play Motherhood Outloud (Primary Stages), and the feature film Abe, co-written with Jacob Kader, directed by Fernando Grostein Andrade, and starring Stranger Things’ Noah Schnapp, which premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. www.lameeceissaq.com.

this is not a memorized script, this is a well-rehearsed story

by Dima Mikhayel Matta

Queerness is a construct. So is language, and so is this play. Nothing about this performance is reliable, the performer questions gender, memory, sex, identity, and her relationship with Beirut but gives no answers to comfort you or herself. A refusal to romanticize, a resistance against orientalization, she is left with deconstructions that she cannot put back together. This is the story of a failed relationship, with a partner, with a city, and an attempt to carry this knowledge without breaking.

Dima Mikhayel Matta is a Beirut-based writer and actress. She received a Fulbright scholarship and completed her MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University in 2013. She has been acting for the stage since 2006. In 2014, she founded Cliffhangers, the first bilingual storytelling platform in Lebanon, and hosts monthly storytelling events along with parallel events such as storytelling workshops and performances. Cliffhangers is a non-profit initiative that aims to give a platform for marginalized voices and serves as a safe space for people to share their stories. Her first play, “This is not a memorized script, this is a well-rehearsed story,” an autobiographical play on queerness and her relationship with the city toured in London, New York, and Belfast, and premiered in Beirut in February 2020. She is currently working on her second play.

Memorial

By Arianna Stucki and Adam Ashraf Elsayigh

Memorial is a verbatim play that tells the story of the Christchurch Muslim community during and following the two mosque shootings that occurred on March 15th in Christchurch, New Zealand. The play chronicles the impact of the shootings, and systems of violence, through the words and experiences of seven citizens of Christchurch, focusing on the friends and families of those who were lost in the attacks and telling the story exclusively through their own words. Memorial deeply engages with the traumas of the friends and family left behind after the shooting centering around the themes of migration, diaspora and the experience of otherness and xenophobia both within and outside communities.

Adam Ashraf Elsayigh is an Egyptian playwright, dramaturg, educator and producer living in New York. Through his writing, Adam interrogates how intersections of queerness, immigration, and colonialism inform our daily lives. His producing initiatives provide opportunities for artists across the Global South, with a particular focus on the Arab world, to develop, present and produce theater transnationally in equitable ways. Some of Adam’s plays include Memorial, Jamestown/Williamsburg, and Drowning in Cairo. Adam is the Co-founder of The Criminal Queerness Festival in partnership with National Queer Theater. He is a fellow at Georgetown University’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics and a co-host of The Queer Arab Podcast. Adam’s work has been seen at IRT Theater, Dixon Place, Golden Thread Productions, and The NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center. Adam holds a BA in Theater with an emphasis in Playwriting and Dramaturgy from NYU Abu Dhabi. Adam is an Adjunct Professor at Hunter College.

Arianna Gayle Stucki is an MFA Acting student entering her third year at the Juilliard School, (Group 51). Born and raised in Utah, USA, Arianna’s undergraduate education at NYU Abu Dhabi in World Theatre took her to 18 countries over the span of 4 years, studying theatre practices from Ireland to India to Italy. As an actor and playwright, Arianna is most interested in theatre’s power on a global scale to help us encounter difference without fear. She sends gratitude to her mother, her family, her mentors, and her entire global community for their constant support. Onwards.

Third Person Singular

by Diana Fathi

Third Person Singular explores the gulf between the past and the present, between Tehran and New York, between one heartbeat and the next. Art, love, violence, and loneliness intermingle to paint a portrait of the space between ‘he’ and ‘she’. This is the Third Person Singular.

Diana Fathi is an Iranian multi-disciplinary theatre practitioner pursuing her M.F.A in Dramaturgy at Columbia University. She grew up in Tehran, where she learned that everyone has an untold story to tell. So she’s decided to be their storyteller.

Our Mothers, The Ghost Story

by Haleh Roshan

Ali and Farzaneh are half Iranian, and as American as it gets. Mari, their mother, who immigrated after the revolution, hates the Islamic Republic and has raised her children to succeed in white, capitalist America—which doesn't include speaking Farsi, or very many other traditional "Iranian" elements. Instead, Ali and Farz grew up in Miami, much more familiar with Cuban culture than their own, and each has indeed "succeeded" in life thus far. So why does it always feel like some critical part of themselves is missing? When their aloof, mysterious grandmother, Layla, passes away in late 2016, they return to Miami for her funeral... But Layla has some final, ulterior agendas for her estranged daughter and very American grandchildren. Our Mothers, The Ghost Story is a haunting of places and times, and a joyous mourning for how global revolutions unmake and remake generations.

Haleh Roshan (she/they) is an Iranian American writer with hereditary neuropathy (CMT). Her work fuses leftist politics with intercultural narratives to challenge global capitalist power structures and trouble conceptions of individual identity and ability. Her plays A Play Titled After the Collective Noun for Female-Identifying 20-Somethings Living in New York City in the 2010s (2019 Corkscrew Festival) and Free Free Free Free (2018 O'Neill NPC Finalist; Exponential Festival) are published by Dramatists Play Service. Pilots include Bellwether (2016 AFF Second-Round Semi-Finalist) and The Legitimate (2019 Screen Craft Quarter Finalist). Currently she is working on a climate-based science fiction novel, also in development with AMC, and a fantasy novel adaptation of the Thousand and One Nights based off the original Persian romances and the true history of the Achaemenid and Sasanian empires. @halehroshan