“Them,” written by Palestinian playwright Samah Sabawi, focuses on a young couple in a war zone as they debate whether to stay or leave. It captures the wrenching choices people are forced to make in wartime, as well as the humorous, joyful and mundane moments of everyday life that persist despite the violence. A production of the play will run through Aug. 23 at Portland Center Stage’s Ellyn Bye Studio.
Malek Najjar, professor of theater arts at the University of Oregon, received special permission from Sabawi to stage “Them” in Eugene and Portland. He joins us with more details about the play and its relevance today.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The play, “Them” focuses on a young couple in a war zone as they debate whether to stay or to leave. It was written by the Palestinian playwright Samah Sabawi. It captures the wrenching choices people are forced to make during war, as well as the mundane, humorous and sometimes even joyful moments of everyday life that persist despite the violence. Malek Najjar directed a production of the play first in Eugene and now in Portland. It will run through August 23rd at Portland Center Stage. Najjar is a professor of theater arts at the University of Oregon, and he joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Najjar: Thank you so much for having me.
Miller: I don’t want to give spoilers, and I assume you don’t either, but can you describe the basic setup of the play?
Najjar: Sure. There’s a young couple, Omar and Leila, living with their baby Marwan in an unspecified war-torn country. The playwright herself says in the Middle East. So we have a sense that it is placed there. And they’re in a terrible situation because the war is encroaching upon their city and they have to start making very, very difficult choices. Do we stay, do we go? If we stay, we could literally be killed with coalition air strikes, with the attacks by the right forces, the left forces. If they go, they face a perilous journey to the coast, getting on a raft that may sink in the Aegean, then ending up in a refugee camp interminably. And so there are no good choices here.
And I think that the play is trying to help us understand that people do not leave their homes most likely because they’d like to. Most of the time they’re push factors, not pull factors that are taking them. And Sabawi’s definitely trying to tell us that these people deserve our empathy and we should value these people, not as problematic individuals coming to take our jobs or to take over our countries, but rather as human beings who are suffering and who are desperate for a better life. And I think that this play is really an opportunity for audiences to experience that and to understand that these are complicated situations that are not so simply defined by the media and, unfortunately, by politicians mostly.
Miller: How did you choose this play at this moment?
Najjar: So, several years ago I was invited by my colleague, Jamil Khoury at Silk Road Rising to direct a series of Israeli-Palestinian plays. And so we read through tens if not more of scripts from Israeli writers, American Jewish writers, Palestinian writers, American Arab writers, and I have read some Samah Sabawi’s “Tales from a City by the Sea” about Gaza. And we very much like the play, but we just didn’t have the cast for it, so I’ve always wanted to work on one of her works. And when I received this award from the University of Oregon, I decided to visit her work again and I found this play that she had written several years ago, and it was one of those things where it just felt right. So I wrote asking if we could have the royalties from her publisher. They put me in touch with her, and may I read what she wrote back?
Miller: Yes, but I just want to understand. So, if you have the royalties, meaning…?
Najjar: Whenever you produce a play, you have to pay ‒ not have to, you should ‒ pay the playwright or publisher a certain amount of money per performance. So $50 per performance, $100 per performance, etc. And so I asked if we could even have the rights to perform the play, and if so, how much would they charge? And Samah Sabawi donated the royalties to us because she told me something very personal in this email.
Miller: Please, yeah, and if I have it with you.
Najjar: I do, yes.
Dear Malek, thank you for reaching out. I’m afraid my family is not okay. We’ve lost tens of family members, and the horror still continues. But we are, and I am resilient. The bombs will not strip us of our hope or our faith in humanity. It would be an absolute honor to contribute in any way to opening hearts and cultivating empathy.
Miller: What do you know about what was going on in her life back when she wrote this play?
Najjar: She was living in Europe, and she saw some neo-Nazi protests break out and they were right outside of her hotel. She was absolutely horrified and so she decided to write this play. And she said it came out of her just within hours, the first draft just came out of her. And then, of course, she refined the play. The play was staged in Australia, and it toured many of the Australian cities at that time in 2017. And so the play, although was written around the time of the Syrian civil war, which is really if you try to dig into where perhaps its most definite origins would be Syria during the civil war. However, it reads as if it could be any civil war anywhere: Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, it could be Palestine. It is part and parcel of life in this world.
Miller: The play is called “Them.” It is a word that shows up a number of times. It’s a common word in the English language. So, maybe I wouldn’t even have been aware of its use in the play if it hadn’t been the title, but it stands out here and there. I watched it last night. What does the title of the play mean to you?
Najjar: Well, I am them. I’m a child of immigrants. My grandfather and his wife escaped the Ottoman occupation of what was then Syria but Lebanon now to come to this country. Unfortunately, his wife passed away here after having two children, so he went back, remarried my father’s mother, and then my father re-immigrated in 1945. My mother emigrated here in 1958 after the civil war in Lebanon in 1958. She was a nurse, a young nurse working in Lebanon, and my wife immigrated with her family in the 1980s when my wife’s mother was severely injured during a bombing attack in downtown Beirut.
Miller: Everybody on both sides is fleeing, war, conquest, tumult to come here.
Najjar: Exactly. And you know, Lebanon is a beautiful country, and nobody wants it. The Lebanese love Lebanon and they want to stay there, but the internal and external forces have made it almost impossible. And so when people can, they flee. Not because they want to, but because of the situation and sadly because of the West’s intervention. I hate to add that, but it’s true, has caused many people to flee that country. But, if you ask pretty much any Lebanese if they’d like to go back, they’d say absolutely, it’s just not tenable.
Miller: How much was your own family’s story, or your own family’s stories, on your mind as you’ve been working on this play?
Najjar: Well, I grew up around Arabs from all over the Middle East: Armenians, Turks, Jews from the Middle East. And you know, I met people who were literally forced out of these countries, either from the Armenian genocide, from the events of 1948, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006, the list goes on and on. And so these people would tell me these sad stories about having to leave their homelands, leave their families behind and losing many family members within the wars. My own family, we’ve lost members during the wars and many of my family members suffered. And so this is very, very personal to me.
And now with several of our Palestinian friends, this is not uncommon hearing we’ve lost tens of family members. Just imagine that not one, not five, tens of, and this is the kind of burden that people are carrying every day, and yet they’re living in this country, working every day and having to act like they’re in a state of normalcy, when in truth they’re deeply wounded by this horrific conflict. I have Israeli friends as well who are similarly absolutely wounded by what is happening there, but unfortunately, we’ve all found that we have very little say whether it’s in Israel, whether it’s in what’s happening in Palestine, Lebanon, or in this country in changing any of these events. We are disconnected from the power structures and therefore we’re powerless.
Miller: You have a small number of professionals who are a part of this production, but for the most part ‒ and as I just said, you’re a theater professor at a university ‒ this is a student production with actors, designers, crew members being students. What has it been like to work on this play in particular with young people?
Najjar: You know, it’s fascinating because once you ask these students to partake on this journey, it’s amazing how they throw themselves into the work. And not just as actors, of course they do – memorize lines and blocking, etc., that’s fine – but it’s the deeper commitment to telling a humane story about people who perhaps they have no connection with, but yet they’re willing to take that empathetic leap into the lives of others and take that moment to say, what would I do if I had been born there? What would I do if I was living in this situation? And so I just really appreciated the fact that they went on this journey with me. They’ve really given so much of themselves to that part of the process. Because putting on a play, yes, it’s complicated and difficult in its own way, but it’s that deeper work that matters, the work of putting yourself in the shoes of someone else who is suffering and letting yourself take that moment to empathize with them deeply and to look at them as valuable human beings who deserve to have their story told. And for that I’m deeply grateful.
Miller: Have you given them homework, history to read?
Najjar: Sadly, I have. Images, books, and films ... It’s very traumatizing. It’s very traumatizing to read these things, to look at these images, to watch these films. “The White Helmets,” for instance on Netflix is just a deeply moving documentary about the Syrian civil war and what these aid workers did to help people, but yet that is necessary. There, there’s no dancing around that. It’s a lot like looking into the sun, you know? You must look into the light and be somewhat blinded by it because otherwise you’re really not doing the deeper work that’s required to tell a story like this. And ultimately, they did that work and they did take the time to understand this very complicated situation.
Miller: We had been focusing, for obvious reasons, on the trauma and the terror here. But as I mentioned briefly in my intro, that’s not the only emotion that the play evokes. There are silly moments. It’s a young couple who is at one point at a number of points trying to find moments of intimacy despite the bombs, despite a crying baby or a baby who doesn’t sleep as much as certainly the father wants. How did you approach those moments of humor or lightness?
Najjar: Well, the one thing that stood out to me watching my family go through the Lebanese civil war was that when the war wasn’t directly affecting them at a certain time, they were living their lives. They were going to parties, they were holding gatherings, they were going out, they were living life. And I think that so often you read plays about war and they’re so dirgeful and heavy and sorrowful, but they don’t show the other side, that people are desperate to live and desperate to enjoy their lives despite living in the circumstances because they have nowhere else to go. It’s not an option to leave, so they have to make a life there. So I love this play because it does have humor. It does have people being ribald and funny and inappropriate. And also, moments where they have to reconcile with the more difficult choices. So for me, I think Samah Sabawi did a great job of giving us both sides of that of that life rather than simply focusing on the most depressing or sad elements of it.
Miller: Can you tell us about the live music that is almost, I shouldn’t say almost, it is a character in and of itself in the play in the experience.
Najjar: It is. So several years ago, I directed a play at the University of Oregon called “Scorched” by Wajdi Mouawad who is a Lebanese Canadian author and I was looking for musicians. Wayne and Denise Gilbertson live in Eugene and are wonderful musicians who play many instruments – I mean, a whole range of instruments – and they were so gracious in wanting to be part of a production at the university and their live music was just the perfect compliment. And the beautiful thing about them is, all I had to do was give them the general notion of what’s happening between the scenes, and they ran with it. They improvise music every night. They play pre-written pieces, they play classic Middle Eastern pieces, but it is such a joy to hear that music complement the play as it did then and as it does now because it lifts everything. And to have live music on the stage and to see them playing and hearing that music without any acoustic accompaniment – we don’t have any microphones, it’s all acoustic – it is wonderful, and I think that it takes the play to a much higher level.
Miller: We just have about a minute left, but I’m curious what you’ve been hearing from audience members in Eugene and now in Portland.
Najjar: I’ve been hearing many positive things. I’m so grateful for the people who’ve been leaving comments on our website because they’ve been sharing the fact that they felt this play was necessary, that it was moving, and that it was something that was important for us to be hearing at this time, especially in a time of anti-immigrant rhetoric and the unfortunate crackdown on so much of what this nation has been founded upon, which is the acceptance of immigrants and their contributions, valuable contributions, to our society. So that has been heartening to me.
Miller: Malek, thanks very much.
Najjar: Thank you so much for having me.
Miller: Malek Najjar is a professor of theater arts at the University of Oregon. He is the director of a new production of the play “Them.” It’s up now through August 23rd at Portland Center Stage.
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