 Here is to come Marvin and Phillip and Marvin. We have a hostage. Come on, come on, come on. We're back. Hi. Hi. That's either hi or hi. I think it's a lie. I think it's a lie. I think it's a lie. Let's go now. Oh, okay. Great to see you. Yeah. It's been a long day. Yeah. So let's sit down right away and enjoy. Hi. So maybe a little bit of light in the audience and a tiny bit less perhaps here up here. That would be great. So again, thank you for staying and I think first of all another round of applause for that. Amazing. Not as in the original length will be three and a half hours, right? Three and a half up to four. That is just an excerpt of the marvel of this truly unique and unique and exciting place. So maybe we start out very first. The question we called it a classic place. They are really well known. They are sophisticated works of dramatists. How come they are not shown more, not shown at all in the western world of western theater? Yes. Well, it's a complicated question, of course. And I think the simplest answer really has to do with general cultural dynamics. That is, it's not just the Arabic theater, but Arabic culture generally for a long time. This is not a current problem, but it's a problem that goes back for decades, for centuries really, that Europe has looked upon the Arab world as a kind of strange other place that you can make up fairy tales about and you can enjoy as a kind of semi-mythic place. But it's not a real place that you feel any particular obligation to understand. And that has carried on through in politics and economics and in the arts as well. Finally, today we are becoming more aware of and interested in the Arab world, but it's a very slow process, and it requires the overcoming of generations, centuries of indifference or outright prejudice. That's the enormous hurdle to overcome. The Arab world is the object of analysis. It doesn't speak for itself. It exists to be spoken about. So while in any university you can find multiple political science courses or history courses that present an interpretation of the events of the Middle East. It's very rare that you can encounter the voices of people in the Middle East about those events, and certainly you're very unlikely to encounter the artistic practices or the literature of that region. The Arab world exists to be spoken about, not to speak itself. I'm representing the Sundance Institute Theater Program, and I'm the opposite of an expert on this. I don't know if the opposite of an expert is. Aneafite. Marvin is really the person that knows this world. But having entered the world, I think it would be five or six years ago, and we are in the midst of a long-term initiative to engage with artists writing in Arabic. That's our criteria. When I first went to Beirut and Amman and Cairo and Tunisia and Morocco and met with artists and saw the work, when you ask artists in the region what they think of America, there were two answers. America is the great destroyer, and America is the great hope. So there's a sort of schizophrenic relationship with America. I can't really speak for Europe, but for the America for sure. Most of the artists that we have begun to engage with really had never met American theater makers. So it became sort of our mission, if you will, that we were going to connect people, kind of a bridge between those two cultures, and that's what we've begun to do and we continue to do. But I do agree that all the maps of the world are made by European or American or white colonialists. That's the way we've seen the world, and so what you've said is exactly right. And that is hopefully beginning to shift a little bit. At least in this country, there are a few organizations that are committing themselves to finding ways to be truly cross-cultural. And I feel like I'm just beginning that journey myself. I'm working with contemporary young emerging playwrights. So it behooves me to begin to understand this body of literature, and I sat today reading the book you edited on Wanda's, which was really extraordinary, and then to be here tonight as well. So it's an early part of a journey for me, but I just agree with you both. I mean, this is my also analysis of it, and yes, and to all of that. It's just that I also believe that not only that the Arab world has been like looked at to be for the West or other parts of the world to observe or take things from, but at the same time is that I don't believe there's a formalized theory for Arabic storytelling. Arabic storytelling has been around for a long time. People have been in public spheres telling stories, but unlike other parts of the world, like Sanskrit theater or no, or even what Aristotle did with the Western world, no one said like, or at least no one had written a formalized theory about what that kind of artistry is and giving it its own name and also writing. And if it does exist, it doesn't exist in a way that's translated to other parts of the world of letting people know that this is the origin of Arab theater. This is the indigenous art form of theater in that part of the world. I just want to say that I was just in Germany last fall. We're going to do a playwriting lab with newcomer Syrian artists of playwrights that are in the European Union. We're going there in May, I know we get actually. And even now in Germany, without thinking about it, I'm sure there is an impulse to expect that the Syrian writers are going to write about the war. And when you speak about to the Syrian playwrights, many of them will say, I don't feel like I have the ability to, I've been here six years. I'm watching it on the internet like you are. I'm not even there anymore. So I don't actually feel like it's authentic for me. Some of them will say to write about it and the expectation that was coming from Europeans, that that's the stories that they should be telling. And in fact, they're telling a huge range of stories from love affairs and personal stories and stories about their pets. And many are writing, of course, about the journey west, but the expectations was interesting that Westerners think that this is the story we need to hear, that you need to write. So I think it perpetuates itself, that notion of coming from our perspective. Karim, a question for you. Do you think how relevant are these plays for American audiences? Will they work? Is it just that they're overlooked? Well, I mean, I really was responding a lot to what Phillip was saying and what I'm hearing on the panel is that particularly when you're looking at producing these plays in America, that's what we're really asking about, is sort of we are so, at least in my perception as a Middle Eastern theater artist who's creating new work about the Middle Eastern experience, be that the Middle Eastern American experience or really what it's like to sort of live in the skin of an Arab or a Muslim. Within the American theater, I really don't think there is even, there is the beginning of a Middle Eastern theater movement, but I think it's very nascent. I think it's very, very early. And as I often say when I ask questions like this, like we as creators of Newark are still building a canon of work within the American theater, the work that Sundance is doing, bringing voices from around the world, but it's still a very new movement. So it's interesting when we look at this deep, rich history of classic plays, is I think very difficult for a Western audience to sort of even begin to access the past because they're so not even accessing the present and the way that a lot of the stories are sort of overly politicized, looking at a very specific facet of the Arab experience. It's still extremely limiting. So I think as the sort of canon of Newark grows, I think both artists, like the artists that are generating the work, such as myself, and then other people will start to look into the history and sort of build that out more, which you can see happening in the Latino theater or in the Black theater, but not so much in the Arab theater because it's still a growing movement. I'd like to build on that. I think it's an extremely important point that actually there are two points that I think need to be made. It is very important to realize that although there really is a great deal, not nearly enough, but a great deal of interest over the last decade or so in Sundance as a major pioneer in this, not only in the Arab world, but in the East African project, and there really is no other organization in the United States that has committed itself in the way that Sundance has to the degree of the geographical range. And there are other kinds of initiatives. We've had here at the Segal Center the representatives from the Royal Court Initiative a year or two ago, which is a smaller but similar kind of outreach. This is enormously important and enormously new work. People have not really done this until very recently. And what it is doing is absolutely invaluable, which is the encouragement of young playwrights in the non-Western world, particularly in the Arab world and in Africa. And it's starting from really kind of ground zero and has become more and more sophisticated about, as was suggested, helping these people find their own voice not trying to come in as the teacher instructor of this is the way you ought to write a play. A very, very difficult negotiation, really. It's as difficult as the subject of the last play. Who's going to be the master and who's going to be the flip-flop? And what does that mean? But it is tremendously important and it's going on. There's a lot of this in Germany, indeed, as has been mentioned. Having said that, then I want to pick up on this the general comment of we're still very early days doing this, but we're nowhere looking beyond the living young playwrights and the process of development. This is absolutely critical, but let's imagine that we were, say, Martians coming in and saying, well, okay, we really want to develop an international interest in an awareness of earth, theater, consciousness. But all we're going to do is talk about new playwrights. Forget about Shakespeare, Morgere, and the Greeks and all that. That's what we've done, and that's what we continue to do with the Arab world. And that's why this is a modest attempt. One more point I could go on and on, as you could tell about this, because I'm something that I'm very concerned with. But it's a point that has to be made, and that is that the Germans are not too bad about this. And the French are not too bad in different ways, and the British are not as good, but okay, the Americans are hopeless. They're hopeless. And by that, I mean, let's say, okay, what does it take to get from here to seeing plays from the Arab world, especially from the Arab classical tradition being presented in New York? Well, ha, ha. If the New York theater does not do Morgere or Schiller, how the hell do you expect them to do Wanous? We are such as a culture, so incredibly isolationist and ignorant of anybody else in the world, except maybe the British, as far as theater is concerned. We don't care about what's going on in the Russian theater today, or what's going on in the French theater, or the German theater. The Arabs are so far out of our can that if we're not even interested in our neighbors, the people who have a great deal of culture in common with us, how can we expect our theater to go and stretch further and look at Africa or the Middle East? This is part of it. I mean, I often despair of American culture in its isolationism, and I just have to, I think this is a, at this point, almost insurmountable problem. We're chipping away at a glacier, but at least we're chipping away. But I do not expect to live to see the New York stage presenting any plays like this, nor do I expect my children to live to see it. I hope you're all right. Come back in 20 years, and we'll talk about it. You know, it's interesting. I used to be the chair of TCG and TCG Theatre Communications Group, which is the umbrella organization for all the not-for-profit theaters. There wasn't always this tension in that organization because we service, you know, 800, 850 regional theaters. And it's a tiny, tiny percentage of artistic directors who even have the curiosity to think about programming international work, much less classical era plays or what have you. And so we've begun to try to figure that out. If you're going to be working with these young emerging playwrights, you know, and you want to communicate their work to Western audiences as well as audiences in their homelands and diaspora, you know, you have to begin to educate and encourage the artistic leadership of American theaters to think beyond whatever small circle of titles they think about and, you know, that's wonderful. Since you bring up TCG, I have had a lifelong interest in IBSON, and I volunteered 30 or 40 years ago to regularly monitor TCG and collect programs from productions of the non-profit theater of IBSON in this country. When I started this, which was about 30 or 40 years ago, every year I had dozens of play, IBSON plays, presented that has steadily, steadily declined so that every year now in the regional theaters in this country there will be maybe four or five IBSON plays and they will all be Doll's House or Head of Galburn. That's what I'm talking about. Just to go back to the Arab classic plays and you say there is, of course, the complication of the reception of the audience, but couldn't the case be made that the dictator or the play with the flip-flop, like in the tradition of the theater, the ridiculous or the back, isn't it a universal message? Would we know if names would be changed? Could this come from a European or American? Let's say it was a European or a Mexican or an Argentinian playwright or a Congolese playwright. All of these countries have plays that are wonderful and totally relevant to us, but we're not going to do them. Relevance is not the problem. Ignorance and isolationism is the problem. I have a question about Arab theater. Arab theater, of course, also does rely on Indigenous theater or on Hakavati or others. Still, it looks at the West in a way, of the theater of the absurd or the ridiculous. Is that kind of a tension or is that, so it's a Western model, almost, that it also is being used. How is that solved at the moment in the contemporary playwriting, theater-making? So I would just mention that, you know, for example, when Yusuf Adrys authored the famous collection of essays about reinventing the Arab theater grounded in Indigenous theater or when you think about Saddle Bonus' use of the Hakavati in his theaters manifestos. The first thing to note is that they were all writing in the 1970s. It was all a kind of, in some ways, it was a backlash against the Arab Renaissance and the ideas of adopting European literary forms to create a new Arabic vernacular. So in some ways, there's a historical moment where there is a rejection of thinking through European theater models as imported and a desire to imagine them as connected to Indigenous traditions. But in point of fact, Bonus in that same collection of theater manifestos has a beautiful essay about Brecht. So in fact, it is a syncretic art form. And Bonus and others subsequently cease to use that vocabulary. Even in North Africa with the Masr Tafalia and the Ethyafalia tradition, the festivalizing of theater, you know, they're more recent. I mean, what's really exciting right now in Morocco are the theater collectives and it's very much a director's theater. And so there really is a kind of historical moment where the question of origins is of particular importance. But I don't know that that's a really relevant question at the moment for the theater makers. So I mean, to kind of circle around, I mean, in some ways I just, I'm not sure that... I think the question has a kind of historical significance. I don't know that the question really informs what the different companies are doing at the moment. I think, I'm sitting here thinking, it sounds like I'm just preaching hopelessness, but it must be said that you're speaking of Bonus. Bonus was just produced at the Comédie Francaise. I mean, this is the leading theater in France. We don't have anything quite like this, but it would be sort of like Lincoln Center or BAM, I mean, some obviously big major theater. And the French National Theater has also, in recent years, produced Jalila Baccar, who is one of the leading playwrights in the Arab world. She's Tunisian. So it is, the times are changing, and I think I'm not terribly optimistic about the American theater in this regard, but it's possible. I think the regional theaters are more likely to do it to New York, but it is being done. It's not as though the West is just not doing anything about this now. Yeah, and I'm not mistaken, the Comédie Francaise production was directed by Suleyman Al-Bassan. So it's a Kuwaiti, British Kuwaiti director who's taking it upon, and the comédie is actually being responsible about the director's voice being of the region as well, which I think is really, really important. I mean, I just watched that, there's a very famous interview, I'm sure you know it with Juan Nuz, when he was very sick at the end of his life. It's on video, it's actually an extraordinary interview with him, and he was obsessed at the end of his life with Israel and says in the early part of this interview that his whole life has sort of been a waste because of his having to deal with this sort of ongoing Israeli sort of presence in the world and what that has done, and now it's a completely different world politically. I mean, Israel is still doing what Israel is doing, but the artists are not, I don't think, except for the Palestinian artists perhaps, obsessing in the same way that Juan Nuz was obsessing about Israel. There are other issues now, issues of mobility and issues of, you know, not being able to live in their own, well, Syrians for example, not being able to live in their own countries, many of them, although there are playwrights and there are directors and theater makers working in Damascus and other places in Syria right now, but the political situation has changed as well, which has changed the story-making, I think, too. So, you know, and everything's, the velocity of everything is so different right now. Even when you hear Juan Nuz speaking, that was like 1997, you know, in 2017, it's a different world for all of those artists, completely different world. So I think that's really influential as well. Should be maybe since we are a little bit oppressed of time now we would go on a little bit, but I would really like also to ask our audience, and we have such a good audience here today, and thank you all for coming, but also I was impressed by the numbers today and also the interest. So some comments or remarks or questions towards the panelists or about the place, we do record it also live, so we will give you the microphone and... I'm trying my ignorance, but I find the rubric classical Arab theater confusing from the point of view of the place I saw it today, I didn't really know much about Arab theater, but it seemed to be the material and the format was quite modern. So when I think of classic theater, I think of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Scheller and Gertre. What is the advantage of that genre, of that nomenclature as calling it classical Arab? And what would be classical Arab theater in parallel with the classical western theater? A white theater of Renaissance or something of that sort? Glad you asked that, because I've been pushing for a number of years for more attention to be paid to Ibn Daniel, who wrote in the 13th century and wrote three plays that have been preserved that are better than anything anybody in Europe wrote for the next 200 years. Do we know him? No, that's my point. But even though there is, and there's a continuing performance tradition, but your point is well taken, that is there are these odd exceptions, but the fact is that the European idea of theater, the European model of theater, really didn't get started in the Arab world until the late 19th century. It was brought in by colonialism. The British, the French and others brought in their style of theater. And so, although in different parts of the Arab world it developed in different ways, if we think of theater in the western sense, this is from the late 19th century on. And so, when we're talking about the classical Arab theater, what we essentially mean is the flowering of that theater in the mid 20th century, from say around 1920 to 1960 or 70. But it's a different time scale we're working with. Another question or remark? We're going to give you the mic one second. Right. I'm just interested in the marvelous play we just heard. How was that received in Egypt? From my recollection, the play was not received well and it was banned. I just don't know exactly what year it was banned, but I know, going back to what we were saying, that Europe has showed interest in those playwrights and those works early on, so I believe Idris actually had his play staged somewhere in Germany a year after it had been banned from Egypt. That's what I remember. Maybe the timeline is not exact, but politically it was not received well. Idris had to take it out. He took it out to Europe to produce it. Was that during Nasser? Yes. The play was written in 1963. Idris is the only one out of this canon of playwrights that wrote that play a few years before the Arab defeat. The tension with the Nasser regime has happened. It started showing its oppressive teeth in the early 1960s. The issue of censorship is also worth talking about, because it still exists in many of the countries that we're talking about. In Lebanon, for example, there are censors and they come to read your script and make decisions about whether or not your play. There are a lot of Lebanese artists who work around that and go ahead forward even when the censors tell them they can't, but it's real and there have been people who are in Lebanon imprisoned as well for new work. I don't know the history of the decades, but I do believe that the censorship issue has existed in all of these countries at some point, sometimes more strictly than others, and so that has really inhibited a lot of people. It is inhibited, but my wife who majored in Spanish literature used to quote a professor of hers who was a big Cervantes fan saying, all the best literature has been written in prison. This is not entirely ironic. Certainly it is true that although it comes and goes almost always throughout the Arab world, there's been continuing problem with censorship, but it is also true and obviously the things are connected that as a whole, and I must just quickly say parenthetically, we're all falling into the trap. We all fall into the talk about the Arab world as though it's all one thing. The way we talk about it would be like if we said the European theater, so there was really no difference between Great Britain and Latvia or wherever, so we must remember that. Having said that though, it still is true that generally speaking throughout the Arab world, the theater is political, at least in the most general sense, and I think today shows that very clearly that even if the play is not directly talking about some political figure, it's always talking or almost always talking about power relationships in a way that let's say very few western traditions as consistently do. That may be another reason why it doesn't export so easily. It's relevant, but there are not a great deal. I mean just look at the tradition of American playwriting. We're very interested in dysfunctional families. We're not very interested in power relationships. Of course there are exceptions, but this is really the rule in Arab playwriting. Yeah, and just anecdotally, this play when it was produced in Egypt, it was actually produced on the National Theater, which is a theater that belongs to the government, so there's that tension of like, the governor at that time was producing art, but at the same time a play like this would go on. But the thing I would like to add to what Marvin had said is that most of the Arab writers around that time relied heavily on symbolism and allegory. So while most plays were not directly talking about something that's necessarily happening now politically, there's always that burning political symbolist allegory that always comes out in those scripts. I'm glad you mentioned that because in almost every country, I believe, there has been at some point or still is a national theater that states supported and then they're the independent artists, and it becomes very tricky, especially right now, when you go into a country and meet the artists to be aware of the various sort of factions and where the funding is coming from. Sundance is indie, right? So we only work with independent artists and we have to learn, even if you go to Jordan, there's a kingdom. And the Jordanian film commission funds the laboratory that Sundance is engaged in doing with young filmmakers, has done incredible work, but there are filmmakers who will not work with us in that or did not work with the film. So it's a huge learning curve, but I also wanted to mention around censorship that we were very fortunate last month the Kennedy Center had invited us to present two works from Palestine that we had developed at Sundance. And it was kind of amazing to be at the Kennedy Center, that giant edifice for four sold out performances of two plays by Palestinians, and the Palestinian artists themselves were deeply moved that they were in the capital where our current president is a half a mile away and it was theater from Palestine and it was a play about, you know, one about, both were about the return to Palestine and they were profoundly moved and it was sold out and it was American audiences coming to, one of the plays was in Arabic with subtitles. So I was, I mean it was a small version of it but it gave me a little bit of hope that there were Americans living in D.C., theater goers incredibly curious and loved hearing the stories that were being told. Yes, this is a very important contribution I think and one must add to that that a number of years ago as you know the Kennedy Center had a program, had a festival called Arabesque in which they had one of Solomon Al-Basson's plays, the first one done in this country, first Arab play done in a major professional theater in this country and also they had a secondary play by Jalila Bakar, the Tunisian I mentioned. So these have been, and they were very well attended and very well reported on in the media. Not that it has anything to do with censorship but we got signals from our CUNY security uniform. Censored right now, aren't we? Yeah, and we are over time. Normally we have to be out at 9.30, we already went a little bit over time. Thank you also, Joy, you know, for putting this together and also for you to be traumatoric on all three plays. The theater is alive, there is a scene. Please do check out our upstages. It shows what is going on. There's a great tradition. There's also Lila Bak, there's the North Theater here. So it is truly a wonderful, great field of theater. We don't know about, and in New York City should take attention to this. As we all know, over 50% of everybody living in New York City is no longer white. It is not reflected on the stages. It's not reflected in our cultural context. And this is a contribution and also it enriches our lives and to see how questions of form and content are being solved by the writers. So thank you again everybody. Thank you for coming and sitting all here. Thank you as an audience for being with us. And now we have to move up super fast and thank you.