 than human rights circles. And I always wondered like, what would it have been like to be on that boat? I also like, you know, being a very precocious and like rule-breaking child, I would go on like Facebook groups for like queer Egyptians, et cetera. And so I knew a lot of people who were like 20 in 2001, and they became my friends. And I would like, even if they were not on the boat, they knew people who were, or they knew people who had been arrested, or they knew people who had had similar incidents happen to them. And obviously this is all informed by class and the intersectionality of regions and so on. I was like, even before I moved to the US, I was very much like a third culture kid living between a lot of different places. So I had a certain access to privilege that was different, but I always like was interested in that. And it like, when I came into, again, my first playwriting experience with Abhishek, my playwriting mentor in that class, he asked us like, what are things you want to write about on day one? And I always thought like, I want to tell stories of more gay Arabs. And that has evolved over time, like since I have migrated to the US, I've finished college. I have become much more interested in migration. I've become much more interested in gender non-conformity and transness. I'm much more interested in my work, becoming more holistic than just talking about like a gay cis male experience. And I'm thinking about class much more critically, but it continues to, not just as a playwright, but as a TV writer, as a dramaturg, as a producer, I am interested in telling stories about people or communities, not in a tokenizing way, but exploring people's experiences and rendering people who have not had the chance to be represented fully in ways that are. And often that intersects with my own experience, but it does not always. And I think that that's okay. Absolutely. So many brilliant things you said there, Adam. And I want to highlight how you spoke about seeking stories sometimes to help you understand and bringing also Carol Martin. She's one of my favorite scholars. I'm so glad to learn. Like I want to ask you more about that class. Oh my God, who would love her in real life? I love her definition of documentary theater saying that it's superior to mainstream media because it's subjective not because it's subjective. And just resonates with what you're saying about seeking these stories to understand and it's also like really bringing your own, sometimes personal history to them and sometimes not really, sometimes just, and that was my experience doing documentary theater. My drive has been, when I do documentary theater has always been, there's something that happened that I cannot wrap my mind around it. I cannot really understand how could this happen? Or, you know, so, and that would be the starting point, but then the research and the process kind of inform the outcome and the process itself. So this is also so great. I want to ask you like, because you spoke about all of this, how do you see the process different between writing a documentary piece like Memorial, for instance, which is totally based on, I believe, on verbatim interviews that you and your collaborator, Ariana Stuckey, is that how you say the last name? Stuckey, Ariana Stuckey and yourself, you did interviews with survivors of the shooting that happened in New Zealand. And then Drowning in Cairo, which is, which takes a real event as its inspiration, but then you go on and you craft a story that's not necessarily true, right? About centered about the life of these three Arab gay men. Like how is that process different for you as a playwright? What's, you know, how do you experience it? I'll name that every play is different. So I've only made one documentary of verbatim piece so far. I'm about to start my second one, which I can't talk about yet, but my second one will not be the same as the first. It will not start with the same kind of interviews. It might be documentary, but not verbatim. And same with my plays. Drowning in Cairo is not my only fiction or narrative play. And each one has had a different story. Drowning in Cairo came again from me hearing this every time I talked to an older Egyptian gay man, hearing the ghost of Queen Boat being like what people always talk about me being like what was this event? Me also like being a nerd. I was initially a sociology or social research major. I just read a lot of human rights reports about it. And so I had all this knowledge. So it's not a documentary, but it's very much based on like details of what happened on that boat. And then hearing people talk. And I did speak to a couple of people who had been on the boat before writing, not with the intention of writing. It was just that we had been in the same space. But I will say that character is often where I start with fiction or narrative work. I'm often like who is this person? I credit this to Jessica Blank and to my friend Ariana Stuckey who introduced me to Jessica Blank. The idea of the core wound of who is this person? What is their backstory? Where did they grow up? What is the street they grew up on? Who was their first date? Who was their first crush? Who was their first kiss? Were they middle class? Were they upper class? When we are meeting them, what is the thing that they're hiding from? What is their core wound that they're always not trying to avoid? And then what is, how do they have the craft of their lives and what is their coping mechanism so that they cover that core wound? And then what are, the plot of the play has to basically destroy that core wound and they have to actually change or transform is how I, or maybe they don't, but that's the point. But that's how I often think I always start from character. I'm actually just while we're talking about different medias like just starting to move from theater to other mediums, screen mediums and like working with collaborators who don't start from character. I'm so lost. People are like, what if this happens? And I'm like, but why is it happening? Like for me, who's story is that? I'm also a very slow writer until I'm not. So I can spend like eight months developing character. But once I really know the characters and I start writing a draft, the draft will come out in two weeks. But like it's never, I can't do that without living with the characters for months and months. I'm like almost trying to become them. Yeah. So that's how narrative stuff work. With Memorial specifically, I won't talk about like my documentary theater process because I think it'll be different with every piece. I know that upcoming piece will definitely be different. But with Memorial, I want to give credit to Ariana Stuckey who was my dearest friend in the world. And when the event happened, I was traveling and she reached out to me and I didn't know that it was happening. Actually, the first thing that happened was a couple of people reached out to me to ask me if I was okay. And I was like in Sweden at the time. And I was like, yeah, why wouldn't I be okay? And then they told me about it. And I was like, oh, that's terrible. But also at the same time, there were attacks on Jewish synagogues in Pittsburgh and there were things happening in England. And I was like, for me, all of these events like equally are horrific. Like I'm not more affected by this event because it happened to a musk. But Ariana was really, really affected by the event. And we got to talking a lot. And I was curious why are you so affected by this event? And she really had the impulse of like going there and she thought I could make a documentary play but also maybe I go and people are not ready and that's okay. And we both studied with Carol and so we knew all the processes. We knew how like Laramie Project did it. We knew how Yale Firebird did it. We knew how the Truth and Reconciliation people in South Africa did it. And people often would speak with trauma victims. She also studied a lot on trauma years out. And so the fact that she was going two months in was like, is it right? Are you ready? And so on. But we ultimately decided that she would go and if people were not ready to talk to her, that was fine. And so yeah, I wanna give credit to that. The interviews were done by Ariana. She conceived of the piece. I was initially functioning as a dramaturg before I became a co-writer. But I was also supporting her with like my knowledge of Islam and like helping draft questions for the interviews. And simultaneously once an interview was done, I was leading a team of like 30 transcribers transcribing all the interviews. But she did all of that. And she went there and surprisingly, 17 people really wanted to talk to her. And they all had something really relevant. And not all of them were Muslim. Some of them were part of the government. Some of them were people who were very upset. They were gun rights advocates. People who were upset that the New Zealand have taken such strong gun law precautions. But it was people from different facets of life in Christchurch who wanna talk to her and had something serious they wanted to say. And so we came back with thousands of pages of transcripts and we just started building. And it became like, we have thousands of pages. We can write 15 different documentary plays. What is the play? What is the thing we're actually trying to explore? And we made that the guiding question. And that for us became how do humans, individuals and communities attempt to create narratives to overcome trauma? And how do they process an insurmountable loss that causes trauma? And then from there, we were interested in also how these different ways of coping with trauma could hurt each other or intersect with each other. And so that's how memorial was built. But yeah, this is the very long answer to your question. That's a great answer. Thank you so much. And you're right. Like I think with every documentary piece the process is different because the material you're using might be different. In the memorial case, I believe it was on the interviews but sometimes if you're using like hybrid, what we call hybrid documentary when you're using documents or studies or other material, it's definitely it becomes a different process. I wanna pause for a moment because we have a question actually in the chat and I wanna lift it up from American Iraqi poet Bo Boussoulael, hello Bo. Bo's asking, theater has so much to do with the human body and that is part of its power for me to see the narrative inhabited by someone so close is magical. How much of a sense of the body enters your work as you write? As a queer writer, are you even more aware of the human body since the body of a queer person has for so long frightened theater producers into only presenting them as stereotypes on this stage? Yeah, thank you. That's an excellent, excellent question. I think I used to be, again, my bankrupt, I was as a teen or as like a child. I read like, I was the kind of person who read like one book every day. And so I came from such a literary background. And again, when I came into college I wanted to study literature. So when I first made this transition to playwriting, I just like kept, we had this one theoretical professor who always talked in every play we would talk about, she would ask us the first question after was how do these bodies function in space? And I, 18 year old me was like, that's such a annoying question. What the fuck does that mean? Sorry, expletives. And that question is so important to me now. It means so much because as I, my plays used to be like talk, talk, talk, talk. And drawing in Cairo is one of my earlier plays. So it is more that than some of my more contemporary plays. But having seen more plays and seen how bodies function and embody text, I think playwrights have such an intense responsibility of thinking about you have the responsibility that you're putting words in someone's body and putting someone's mouth and what that means and how bodies function differently. So yes, as a queer, I was very, one of the first observations I had when I was meeting people who had been on the queen boat or people who even knew someone who were in the queen boat. And you know, queer people, not stereotype, but often there's like levity and fun and humor and sarcasm and irony. But like the way people embodied or would look down or would look differently as they were talking about this thing was something I was really fascinated, not fascinated or like, you know, sad to see but also somewhat like intrigued by as an anthropologist or as an artist. But yes, I think like in the play, if you see it, when you see it, there is very much like how each of these men's bodies and movement and physicality fundamentally changes as a result of this incident and how this incident, how their bodies are being policed within this incident is very much part of this. And it's become more of a thing in my work in later pieces with, and thanks to the, again, to quote or to give credit where credit is due to my collaborator, Ariana, for whom bodies and like how the bodies are embodying and taking up space are like central to how she makes work and that, and so she brought that background to us building Memorial and that became very central to how we were thinking about it. For example, Memorial has in its current draft requires seven actors or seven bodies on stage and some of these tracks are hard to cast. Like our lead is a Bangladeshi man in his late fifties who is disabled or is in a wheelchair and is paraplegic. And even in New York, like we were most of the, where there's the biggest abundance of actors, it is almost impossible to cast this role entirely accurate, entirely authentically, or would be all of these demographics in mind. And so we've always had the question of what does it mean if a different kind of body is embodying these words? And how do we acknowledge that to our audiences? So we're not claiming that Fareed's man is not disabled or so, but how do we create the dissonance between the body or emphasize and explore what it means that there is a dissonance between the words that were told in the body of the actor? I mean, we could think about that with like something like Hamilton or what does that dissonance mean? And so what we did in Memorial is we actually have recordings from the actual interviews. And so this doesn't happen the whole script, obviously. It happens like maybe five times in the script, but an actor who's clearly not 59 or Bangladeshi or paraplegic will say the line. And then the recording of the actual person will say, and it is a moment that invokes humility for the actor because they then realize that like, I will never fully be this person and I'll never fully be able to experience what this person did. But it's also a reminder for the audience that these actors are like coming in as themselves with their identities telling you the story rather than like, they are these people. So yeah, that's again my short answer. Yeah. That's great. Actually, I just want to highlight again one thing that you asked about and you beautifully responded to, which is the idea of like stereotyping characters like queer Arab or queer in general. And this is one thing that really stood out for me when I read Crowning in Cairo. And that was it really offers a very complex alternative reality, like a narrative to the often simplistic and reductive narrative about what it means to be gay in the Middle East. So that was something that, I really enjoyed in this play. We don't want to give away obviously like the story or more juicy details, but that's something that I hope audiences will be able to see. It's very empowering in its own way. So Adam. And I want to actually add to that and say that you challenged me a little bit in the beginning of our collaboration in a way that I really appreciated where it's again, I wrote this play when I was in college, but up until like three months ago, the character descriptions in the script were like describing how each of these three men looked in my head when I was writing them. And Sahar was like, okay, but that's not what we want to put in a casting call. We actually like, who are these people? Like what is their characters? What is their personality? What is the thing that makes them tick? And I suddenly found myself writing like two sentences about each of these men that like was so much more important than the fact that one of them was short or lanky. Like it didn't match. Like it was, and I was like, oh, right. Like I've thought about like the closet bro-ey dude as like who ends up being a policeman. Again, like, sorry. I was like a 200 pound muscular dude with a big mustache, but like, what if he's not that? What if he's actually like very fam? And that's part of what this character embodies. And so we became interested in like what it, cause I don't think people's, the archetype, like what we think, like if you look at what someone looks like in a photo and then how they actually embody that body is not like, is more often than not, not accurate to what our stereotypes and what our brains want to make snap judgments about. And so I was very, I'm very excited by how we are going to complicate some of these things with how bodies take our bodies morph. Me too. I can't wait really to be in a rehearsal room with you, Adam. I want to say like this conversation is just a starter really for us. I'm hoping we're going to have many more of these around drowning in Cairo, especially when we start working. And I wanted really to use it as a chance to introduce you to our community, get to know you a little better. So one thing I did is I reached out to friends and collaborators you've worked with. And I have some surprises for you. So we have, I have a surprise guest. Wait, what? I was not. Yeah, you're going to be like, let's see. We have a surprise guest waiting in the wait room. I want to admit right away, please Wendy, can we have our guests join us? Literally what is happening right now? Show your face. Oh my God, hi. Hi Adam. I'm so crazy. People watching, this is Amin El Gamal, Egyptian-American actor, active in theater, film and television that I've had the pleasure of meeting recently in person. And obviously we spoke about drowning in Cairo and about you, Adam. And I said, you know, we have Adam in a no summary. Can you come and say something about your experience reading the play in 2018? Because for those of you who don't know, Golden Thread actually gave drowning in Cairo. I believe it's very first home in a development workshop with Evren and Taranj and others. And Amin was reading Moody. So, so hi, I'm so happy that you're here. I'm so happy to be here. This is so fun and so exciting. Wow. I just wanted to share, Adam, how profound that reading was because I grew up in the Bay Area and I struggled, you know, I had my own internal struggles and my struggles with my family culturally and a lot of progress has been made. But even so, a lot of times we don't talk about these issues explicitly and the reading gave such a safe space for us to just unapologetically bring this stuff up and like shine a spotlight on it and to be surrounded by all these people, like these tons, you know, and my parents, my brothers. These people I actually grew up with and some I don't know as well, but to be and to do it in a place where I grew up was incredibly profound. It was frightening. But it was also like, it gave the community an opportunity to show up and to be supportive, which I don't think we always, we don't always do. And a chance to have like a safe space for like some kind of dialogue. So I just wanted to share that experience with you. I have so many feelings right now. Sahar, why did you do this to me? This is much like an Oprah move. That is such an Oprah move, actually. No, but yeah, I don't know what to say. I mean, we had a couple of, when I was still in college, when I was developing it for my thesis, we had a short workshop that was in India with my playwriting mentor and then one in Abu Dhabi, but obviously in neither of those, did I actually work with a queer error person? And I remember I was having, again, I had not decided to move to the US at that point yet. And I was having this existential crisis of like, I can't present this play in Egypt. It's also in English because I'm like, was raised in a certain way in a certain place. And so it's not actually accessible to most of the queer Egyptian community. I can't really present to the UAE where I lived either. And I don't know who this plays for. I don't just want to present it to like white audiences. And Catherine, again, shout out to Catherine. I really wish she was here. Catherine was like, send this to Everyn, send this to Golden Threat. I actually didn't know Everyn at that time. She said, send this to Golden Threat. And I did. That was just like a cold, random email middle of the spring of my senior year. And I didn't hear back for like a few months. And then a few days after graduation, I was still in Abu Dhabi. And I got this email and I was like, what? Like, what do you want to do with my play? What is happening? Who are you? And so I called it my graduation trip. I flew to San Francisco. And I've always wondered who this play was for. I never, never thought that it's audience. First of all, I never thought that I would work with a queer Egyptian actor whose experience is fundamentally different from mine because I did not grow up in the U.S. at all who was gonna find value in working on this play. And so just having the privilege of doing that, of being with you and seeing you, seeing people be affected by the work. Cause, you know, as a writer, you're always like, like, does anybody care about this as much as I do? Does it matter? Is this just all like vanity? And so just seeing you, I mean, and then obviously working with Khaled Abul Naga who directed that reading. That's right. Again, a very intergenerational conversation between three different queer Arab men from across contexts was so profoundly meaningful. And then having our audiences, again, be like a group of like diasporic, mostly Egyptian, mostly Arab American, older, not older, but like older women who are primarily not queer, who were there for this work. Like I just never thought that like an Arab straight audience would sit through this play and be like, yeah, that's fine. We are finding value and meaning in this. And just seeing that, I'm like, they took me out for like, with a bottle of champagne after it. And I was like, people actually like appreciated this. And I never thought that I would. And honestly, like I always, I credit Evern because he was the person who read that play from a cold email. I credit him for identifying Khaled as a person. I credit him and then casting Amin and other Egyptian folks who were in the piece. But I think like, I don't think I would have moved to the U.S. or like continue to write plays if it weren't for that experience. And so it feels like such a homecoming to, for this play like many years later to be getting its premiere here. That's so beautiful. I just want to send our regards to Evern Ochikin who is our very own resident artist and also right now in the Associate Artistic Director at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I want to send regards to Khaled Abonega who did a fantastic job on that piece. Obviously to Taranja Ghazarian, the champion of it all and to you both. So I mean, I want you to stay on please because we have more surprises for Adam and I want you to witness and experience that. So I'm gonna invite Wendy. So some folks Adam wanted to share some messages and questions but they really did not, weren't available to join us live but they did send some video messages. So I want to show you the first. We want the name that like Sahar Phich this to me as, I want people to know that I did not come here with the expectation of like being serenaded. No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We're gonna like have like an open work session, playwright director talk about our backgrounds like with people and I was like, that sounds cute. Let's do it. I didn't know this was gonna be like a whole thing. It's all about you Adam. You're our star. I wanna talk to you and hear more We'll get more time. You can do that offline. And I hope you're looking at all the love we're receiving in both of you in the chat. This is so intense. I'm so happy. Yeah, that's great. Wendy. Hi Adam. Terribly sorry that I was unable to make it for the live online celebration of you. I hope you know that I'm incredibly, incredibly proud of who you are, who you've become and all that you have yet to achieve. Super, super excited for your premiere of drowning in Cairo with the Golden Thread team. I think it's going to be a wonderful exploration of the work and I really think it's the kind of material that needs to be on our stages today. So I wish you well. I wish you a lot of good, good vibes as you move into this process. I wish you love, growth, lots of luck and I can't wait to be bringing all my colleagues and friends to watch in the spring, I believe. So in the winter, big, big hugs and I hope to see you again soon. Mabruk, see you. Oh my God. How can you even know Karishma? Like I have questions. Well, I have to give credit to Catherine Coray because I was like, Catherine, give me some names. And obviously you know what, I'm genuinely like Catherine is. Oh my God. But I have to say, so this is Karishma Vahgani a producer, researcher, theater maker from Vahsa, Kenya, for those of you who don't know and she's currently pursuing a PhD in theater and performance studies at Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. And I can't wait to meet you Karishma when you watch this. You'll hear this, Adam. Yeah, Karishma is one of my dearest, dearest friends and when she got into, when she was like started her program at Stanford and then just a few weeks later I learned that you were going to feature the play in the season. I was like, oh my God, I've got to come see you more often. And also like, I want you to like be a part of every part of the process of this place. Karishma is also the key producer on Memorial and is just one of the most brilliant people who does like, not just like work between the middle between, she's from East Africa and not just work between East Africa and the US but she's very interested in South-South collaborations and she deeply inspires me as a director and a producer. And yeah, I know some of Karishma's friends are also here in the chat. Hi, Marina. Hi, Marina. And yeah, we can't wait to meet Karishma at Global Thread and learn more about your work. I, we have two other messages. My God, two. Yeah, we've done some research. Let's see Wendy. Hi. Hello, Adam. It's Arianna tuning in from our sweet graduation photo in our kitchen. For those who don't know me, my name is Arianna and I am a close friend slash often collaborator slash roommate of the wonderful Adam El Sayi. And Adam, I was thinking of when I very first spoke to you, you told me that you had the hopes of someday creating a play out of the Great Gatsby and specifically that what you loved about the Great Gatsby was the fact that the story sometimes breaks out of time and space in exciting ways that gives us the best experience of the story. And for anyone who's coming to see Adam's work, that's what you'll receive. That's what you'll get is, I think Adam is an incredible crafts person of narrative and how one event leads to the next event in ways that still are surprising and innovative to the form and to the story itself. So my question for you, Adam, would be what excites you so much about narrative in theater about using story events leading to the next events in theater? And how do you get inspired to play with them? What inspires your choices within narrative structure? That's kind of heady, but I bet you'll give a good answer. So much love from New York and I'll see you soon. We had to bring in Arianna, come on, Adam. What is, I barely heard her question because I was gonna go, wow, this is wild. This is Arianna's thinking. Did I ask the question? I don't know, it feels. Just to say to everyone this thing, Arianna is an actor and playwright and current BNMFA acting student at the Juilliard School and Arianna is the friend and collaborator Adam was referring to when he spoke about memorial. And Arianna is asking you about what inspires you in the narrative structure? Like, I think we did speak a little bit about that, but I'm happy to have you listen again to the question. Here, no, no, no, I think I have it together. Wow. I think when I first wrote, I mean, I can talk about my work generally or like I wrote drowning in Cairo linearly. And it was actually really boring as the first draft when it was linear because you were seeing these kids as they were like figuring out they were queer, but there wasn't, I was interested in, I'm interested in how we see things in retrospect. I'm currently dramaturging our town, which is one of my all-time favorite plays not because of all the like Americana stuff, but because of the third act where we see Emily looking at her 12th birthday. It's funny, our town was never a direct influence on driving in Cairo or I never thought of it as such, but I'm interested in like these moments of mundanity or moments where it's just like, here's a bunch of kids that are just talking about like Britney Spears and that's it. Like it's just 12-year-olds, or 13-year-olds talking about Britney Spears, like who cares? But they actually, when you know like what happens next and what it means, it means so much. And Rajiv Joseph's play, gruesome playground injuries was the most direct like thing that I looked at and was like, I think I wanna do that. And yeah, that last seat, the question that weirdly always comes up in every talkback is, okay, I don't wanna tell you what the last scene is. People ask why we end at the last scene. And I always say because it's not linear, that's what I can't tell you. And people ask why we end there. And I've always thought like we end there because knowing what these kids thought was their lives were going to be and seeing them full of hope about what that life will be, knowing what their life actually ends up being is more profound than anything that I can like write about like them saying out loud. Like I don't think that's as profound as like just the structure of it. It's funny, I'm actually working on another, the first project that's like very directly like about queer Egyptian life, it's post-Egyptian revolution. So it's very different project and it's not for theater, but it's a project that I started thinking about non-linearly a few years ago. And just now after it's been not working for years and like I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working. And I realized that my first impulse, which was to start seven years into the future and then go back is actually what I need to do to make everything that we see as a flashback relevant. So I'm always interested in like what, or I'm also interested in repetition. Thanks to Ariana, that's more credit to Ariana into like you hear a statement and then, or you see a moment and then you see another moment that's like later before and then you see that first moment again and that first moment means something different. I think, I don't know who said this. It's like the A, B to A star. Like it's a weird nerdy playwriting thing that I don't know how to describe properly right now. Moving on. I wanna say one thing that you just said like also without giving too much of the play because we're not there yet. But I wanna say like one thing also that I read in this play and I wanna ask, I mean, if you would agree with me that there's so much obviously like heart wrenching sorrow reflected in the play and the story of the three young men. But at the same time, there's something for me that kind of felt that this is also a celebration of life and love. And that became really something that I wanted to highlight. I mean, the phrase that kind of sticks with you is those who tell, don't die. This we can say, right? We can say that that's the play starts with. I think it's the one who really insisted on that being there. Yeah, I like it. My impulse ethos with writing was always like to tell a story for of people and for people not of people only but for people who have not been represented and or have been represented badly. And for me, it is very much that. I would just say Dominique Morso recently tweeted who's an incredible black playwright, African American or the black American playwright. She tweeted something about how critics always describe black plays as like black joy or black pain or black trauma. And it's like, no, it's both. Yes, it's like, we all overcome. We all like as marginalized communities and not just marginalized communities, everyone goes through shit, right? Like who doesn't? And sometimes you can get arrested and something you can do that, but like sometimes you also laugh with your friends and like talk shit and dance to Britney Spears and like sometimes you're horny and make bad choices. Like that's just the reality of like being a human. And I'm just not interested in like joy or trauma or pain as pair as like binaries, but like things that create each other. Right. I mean, sorry, you're invited to speak and I just took over. That's okay. No, I agree with you. I think that life is not a comedy or a drama and it's most interesting and most profound when the tone, for me, I'm really interested in how like tragedy and like comedy almost can converge at the same time. Like sort of like the check off thing where one person's life is falling apart and the other person's in love and joy and they're in the same conversation somehow, but not, I always find that the most interesting work because that's more how life is. But yeah, I mean, I can see the concerns with marginalized communities and their sort of pain being mined as some sort of balm for like Western guilt or whatever or a way to like, I know there was a conversation with like these incredible black centered plays on Broadway, but so many of them, also there's the conversation about how so many of them are about like trauma and like how you balance that out. So yeah, it's complicated. I also like, and this is a little bit different, but I guess it's a question for you because we have different background, I was curious what you think the role of diaspora, queer Arabs, artists might be in relation to stuff that's going on like in Egypt, like that's depicted in Brown and Cairo because we do have privilege, and it's not so much what can we do to like assuage our guilt, but like what is our role in the conversation of without getting in territory of like pinkwashing or like demonizing the Middle East further, you know? I mean, just the way you're asking that question tells me that you're the right person to actually have a role, which is to say that like, I've heard the bad version of that question from like an older white gentleman in the talk back where it was like, so how do we fix this in Egypt? And it's like, no, stay out of it, stay in your lane. But like as someone who is of that descent who grew up in the US, like as an actor, I would say your role is like the same way any artist's role is it's like embodying stories that matter and telling them and telling them in ways that are authentic and sincere to what the lived experience of the actual character or person is. And I would say that like, that role is more profound and more important for you because let's face the reality, like for a play like Drowning in Cairo, someone who was born and raised in Egypt who still lives in Egypt cannot go and act this play in a local theater in their hometown. And so like the fact that you are representing them and hopefully like, I hate Zoom for like plays, I hate Zoom theater, I don't want to make Zoom plays, but hopefully like a live stream one day, I don't know, I don't know if we actually have live streams in this production, but like for future things, I mean, like telling our stories in ways that are important for that in ways that are actually seen by people who they are about. And I have complicated feelings about that myself. Like just because I grew up in Egypt doesn't mean that I have the authority to tell the story. Like I grew up between a bunch of places. I have a lot of class privilege. I don't think my experience of queerness is the same as like your average Egyptian gay person. And so, but like, and for a long time, I think between drowning in Cairo and the project I'm currently working on, there was a solid couple of years that I was like, I shouldn't be telling queer Arab stories, but like I also have privilege and I have training and I have passion and I have privilege of like having built my career around telling stories, which is something that a lot of people can do for a variety of economic, cultural, social, like security reasons. And so like, I may not be the best person to tell the story, but I can be conscious of that and try to bring the right people, which is why I'm also passionate about producing and like being a literary manager in this theater. I can think about other ways to cultivate that, but I think that's a profound question. As long as it's not pinkwashing, I mean, I do like, like whatever. It is an excellent question, really. Yeah. It's just so funny to be talking about pinkwashing while wearing all pink, but anyway. It's not related, Adam, it's okay. We can't wear pink. I love it. I just want to say that at some point we have a conversation about language in the play and it's a bilingual play. And I know that you have some drafts that the Arabic kind of is more at 50% or more. So actually like, this is a question that has been on my mind. And you did speak briefly about this, but do you think it's important to take these stories back to the communities that they came from? And what would you need to do? Like what should become, maybe something needs to be compromised to be able to do that given the atmosphere and the hostility against homosexuality and queerness in the Arab world. So is this something that's on your mind, for instance, in response to the audience? I think what I have talked about like a potential Beirut production down the line, there are a couple of places in the Arab world where it's possible. I think the story would have an impact with the Lebanese queer community as well. We can't produce it in Cairo right now, but maybe we will in three decades. I don't know. But I know that like I've had to make, I wouldn't say compromises, but I've had to make adaptations or shifts for it to like have a life on American stages. And I have realized that like, it's also, again, the onus is not on me to tell the story of like for every Arab queer. What I can do like if I'm developing a workshop for like new emerging queer playwrights or like teenagers to try and really include like a couple of Arab queer playwrights who maybe are not, who are not gonna like go to NYU, who are not going to have like the privileges or access that I have had the privilege of having in my life. But so that they can write in their communities and they can build with their communities and they can do the work that I can't. Like I think I used to, again, a few years ago, used to have this fantasy about like I'm going to, one day I'm gonna come back to the Middle East and like, you know, start a theater company and do things for queer Arabs. And it's like, I could one day, but maybe I'm not the best person to do that. Maybe what's best is for me to like do the fundraising for that and empower is not empower, but like give access or resources to someone else to do that. Cause yeah, I think it's important to also know like where are not our strengths or our contexts. Yeah, absolutely. We are at our time, but this is the last No Summary episode for 2021. And I wanna extend our time a little bit because we have one more message and question for you. Adam, Wendy, please. Hi Adam, a very, very good afternoon to you. I hope you're doing very well, my friend. I'm so excited to know that you are gonna playwrights who's going to be produced by Golden Thread Productions this year. That is wonderful for the theater community, for the audiences or Golden Thread production has because your work deserves to be in more main stages more than ever now. I think you know how highly I think of you when you're writing your commitment as an artist and of course I think the more the world has witnessed to that the better it is. Also at the same time, I think I'm gonna take this opportunity actually to ask you a question which is about how has your thought on the relationship between form and content changed over the years? And I'm asking this because right from the time when you were a student, you were so enthused by the idea of finding the right form and content. And in all these years, you have worked in quite a few different playwriting forms from documentary to writing stuff that is more autobiographical and also being at the forefront of queer writing. So I'm wondering as you move to another phase of your life of writing, how do you see the relationship between form and content emerge in your own work? Looking forward to your answer and to everything that you have to say in general and to more of your writing. Take care and bye-bye. Oh my God. Do you wanna tell us? I know that I actually referenced all the people that you brought in. It's, I know it worked perfectly. I wouldn't, I know people might think that we would be. I promise you, I actually did not know about this. I actually did not know about this. I know, I know, I was like smiling inside. You know, I was so happy. You're referencing everyone. This is Abishak Majrumdar, playwright, theater director, scenographer, visiting associate professor of practice of theater at NYU Abu Dhabi, and Abishak is Adam's teacher and mentor. Yeah, so Abishak is the person who taught me my first playwriting class when I was like 18. Oh my God. He also would always ask me deep questions like this and I always was like, I don't have a smart answer for you. You are like the smartest person I know. Stop. So I would say, I think I used to be so, this is embarrassing to say out loud. I used to be so anti-experimentation. I think I wanted to tell like the naturalist stories in the most traditional sense of that word. Like I wanted to just stage real life. Like I always was like, why can't dialogue just be like, how are we talking real life? Very Chacovian. And Abishak was like, no, but there's more. Like that works for certain things and there's more. And the first play I read in his class was very that, was very like Chacovian. He always described it as. And I think I've learned more than ever that most of the time I want form to be determined by content would just to say that like, especially as I'm working across forms now, not just live audiences, but I've just seen a lot of, I've just like, I come up with ideas and I'm like, this is gonna be like one, two hour play. And then I start writing it and I'm like, actually maybe this is a screen thing or maybe it's not linear like I was saying. And so content for me has always been where I start and character as I said, character is always where I start. And that often been in forms form. So yeah. Well, thank you so much. I don't know what to say, so I'm gonna cry. Thank you so much. Yeah, I really, we just wanna celebrate you Adam and tell you how much we are happy to be producing drowning in Cairo as part of our main stage season in 2022 and get to know you. And again, create this chance for our community to get to know you. I'm sure we're gonna have many more of these conversations. We're gonna be hosting a workshop, hopefully in January around the play. And we'll see, like we'll try as much as possible to engage our community in every step of the way. So I just wanna say that it's been such a privilege and pleasure to have you here with us today to close this, you know, no summary for 2021. I mean, I'm so, so grateful to you. It's been such a pleasure to get to know you more closely recently. And I look forward to all our future conversations and working together, hopefully, soon, inshallah. I'm so excited. Yeah, so, and I wanna thank, you know, the special guests, Kereshma Abishak Adriana, also who appeared on video. So grateful for you and looking forward to connecting further with all of you. I would like to thank HowlRound for hosting this session and all of our sessions this year. The program offered nine new episodes in 2021. We hosted around 27 artists from various backgrounds and ethnicities, including playwrights, directors, storytellers, makeup designers, artistic directors, founding members of emerging MENA theater companies, Swana queer artists, cultural advisors from Turkey, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine and the MENA diaspora. And all these episodes live on Golden Threads website and on HowlRound. Thank you always to Wendy Reyes-Christiel for their technical support and to the rest of the Golden Threads small but mighty team, Michelle, Linda and Nadine. And big thank you to you, our audiences, without whom really nothing would make any sense. We love you and we hope to see you next year in person and online. If you're not already on our email list, please sign up today so that you stay on top of our programs and events. We just launched a new era campaign for Golden Threads. And if you would like to support our work and the voices we bring to you, please consider making a donation. More information on that on our website, goldenthread.org. We're always looking for volunteers and board members. So talk to us if you're interested. It really takes a village to make great art. Thank you everyone. Thank you again, Adam and Amin and goodbye for now. This was wild. Amin, Karishma, Ariana, Abhishek, I will definitely be sending you long, tearful messages but thank you. Sahad, I can't believe you put this together. I don't know what to say. I can't wait to be in the rehearsal room again and with you, Adam, hopefully Amin. I'm teasing. Okay, I'll stop. Bye, everyone. Bye. Thanks for having me. This was really wonderful. Good to see you both. Love you both. Bye bye. Thank you. Bye.