‘En tiempos de guerra, también se hace la colada’: una nueva obra trae la experiencia de la guerra en Gaza a los Estados Unidos | Teatro

“How far can you run in five minutes?”

It’s a critical question the actor and writer Khawla Ibraheem asks the audience during her solo show A Knock on the Roof. The play follows Miriam, played by Ibraheem, a young mother training to survive an Israeli bombing in Gaza.

“A quarter of a mile,” someone replies.

Miriam meditates for a beat. “That’s really slow, you know,” she says as the audience laughs.

A Knock on the Roof is a blunt and poignant work, named after the Israeli military’s practice of “roof knocking”, in which residents are notified by a warning bomb that they have just five to 15 minutes to evacuate before a larger missile flattens their homes. The play, which opened Monday at the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) as part of the Under the Radar festival, brims with love, wry humor and grief as it follows Miriam’s obsessive training to leave her home.

In the 85-minute show, Miriam sets a series of five-minute timers and rehearses how she, her son and her elderly mother will flee from their seventh-floor apartment after the “roof knock”: down the stairs, as the elevator will be out of order; past Yasmeen, her know-it-all neighbor on the third floor; over the loose floor tile in the stairwell; and, finally, out the door.

‘A Knock on the Roof is a blunt and poignant work, named after the Israeli military’s practice of “roof knocking”.’ Photograph: Joan Marcus

Along with the anxiety of the impending roof knock, the solo show includes other details about Miriam’s life under Israeli occupation, including how she raises her young son while her husband studies abroad. For instance, she spends long stretches of time waiting for the electricity to be restored, which Miriam comments on as she monologues about the other frustrations of her day. The shelled-out buildings in her neighborhood are rendered via eerie projections, juxtaposed with colorful umbrellas and an expansive beach.

These specifics aren’t written voyeuristically. They’re simply facts of Miriam’s life, just like Miriam’s expansive facial routine or her nosy mother or her adorable but stubborn six-year-old son. “We don’t get the story of those people that survived this war [and] their experience,” Ibraheem told the Guardian. “And about the fact that during wartime, you can also do laundry or laugh with your mother and son, or you need to do daily things to survive.”

Miriam, a fictional character, is a culmination of Ibraheem’s research, dozens of conversations with people from Gaza and others who have experienced war, and dashes of Ibraheem’s own life to fill in differences between the two. Miriam “is a fighter. She’s strong. Not only in terms of a war,” said Ibraheem. She is “basically a single mother raising a child in an impossible place alone, and she’s making the best out of it”. Miriam and Ibraheem overlap in significant ways: their proclivity towards sarcasm and their experience with war. “I come from a place where war has recently become a state of mind,” said Ibraheem, who’s Syrian and lives in the Israeli-occupied, annexed Golan Heights.

Though she hasn’t experienced a “roof knock”, which mainly happens in Gaza, Ibraheem felt compelled to write about the subject, as she empathized with people “paying the price of a war [they’re] not a part of”, Ibraheem said, calling Golan Heights’ situation a “soft occupation”. “I never saw a tank in the state of the Golan Heights. I never needed to run from a soldier,” she said. But, farmers in the Golan Heights struggle with the cost of water and maintaining the land, while Israeli settlers enjoy such privileges for free. Residents of Golan Heights cannot enter Syria due to border restrictions, but they can visit Palestine. “This is like a historical coincidence that I’m in touch with the Palestinian people,” Ibraheem said.

The play brims with love, wry humor and grief. Photograph: Joan Marcus

Still, Ibraheem and her community have experienced the violence of war. On 27 July 2023, 12 children were killed by a rocket while playing on a football field in Majdal Shams. “When a rocket lands, [it] does not know how it’s killing and why it’s killing,” she said of the tragic event. “We experienced the loss of the war between Israel and Hezbollah, although we are not part of [that] war.”

Ibraheem first conceived of A Knock on the Roof in 2014 after reading an article about people in Gaza packing preparation bags in case of missile strikes. Inspired, she wrote a 10-minute monologue, called “what does it do to you when you know that in five to 15 minutes your house will be gone”, Ibraheem said. In 2021, Ibraheem and the director Oliver Butler further developed the excerpt into a full-length play, using Miriam’s evacuation drills as the through-line. “What I saw was just a really clear engine for a story and the beginnings of a character who might become consumed with preparation,” said Butler of Ibraheem’s early idea. The fact that the play remains relevant more than 10 years later is “terrifying”, said Ibraheem.

Ibraheem and Butler, who called Ibraheem a “theater soulmate”, have remained in close collaboration after first meeting in 2019 at the now defunct Sundance Theatre Lab in Park City, Utah. Ibraheem was developing a comedy called London Jenin in collaboration with the Freedom Theatre, a Palestinian community theater in the Jenin refugee camp. The play focuses on two Palestinians in a UK immigration office practicing their entrance interviews while debating on relocating to London versus remaining in their homeland. Ibraheem’s work, Butler said, often includes themes of “trappedness, freedom and rehearsal”.

In May 2023, Butler, who is from Connecticut and lives in New York, visited Ibraheem in Golan Heights to continue working on A Knock on the Roof. The trip proved a “creative dream” but a “massive education”, Butler said. When he first arrived, seven people in Gaza were killed by an Israeli rocket, putting the entire region “on the verge of war”. Performing a reading of A Knock on the Roof in Ramallah, located in the West Bank, exposed Butler firsthand to checkpoints.

Un ávido excursionista, estaba caminando por una montaña cuando se encontró con un cartel amenazante que decía: “No sigas adelante. Minas terrestres [por delante]”. “Lo que parece ser un lugar seguro y hermoso lleno de familia y arte también tiene campos minados por todas partes”, dijo.

La obra casi no se llevó a cabo varias veces debido a preocupaciones de seguridad en la región, dijo Ibraheem. “Se cancelan vuelos y hay una guerra sucediendo”, dijo. “De repente, la seguridad de estar en un teatro dejó de darse por sentada”.

Con la obra haciendo ahora su estreno en los Estados Unidos en NYTW, Ibraheem y Butler dicen que el público ha recibido la obra positivamente en general. Pero algunas personas se han quejado, alegando que la obra es antisemita porque presenta a un protagonista palestino. “¿Estamos diciendo que la existencia de un personaje palestino es peligrosa u ofensiva?”, dijo Butler. “Si un personaje no puede existir en el escenario de esta manera, entonces estás diciendo que esa persona no debería ser permitida para existir”.

Patricia McGregor, directora artística de NYTW, dijo que el teatro ha recibido críticas por presentar A Knock on the Roof. “Recuerdo haber visto a alguien [en línea] diciendo: ‘Oh, estás haciendo esta obra antisemita'”, dijo McGregor. “Y creo que esa suposición viene de hacer una obra que centra a una madre en Gaza, viviendo su vida e intentando asegurarse de que su hijo sobreviva, una suposición que simplemente no es cierta”.

NYTW tiene una relación duradera, aunque imperfecta, con el arte y los artistas palestinos. Noor Theatre, que apoya a artistas del Medio Oriente, es una compañía residente en NYTW, y en 2012, NYTW presentó la obra del grupo Food and Fadwa, una comedia dramática sobre una familia palestina que vive cerca de Belén.

En diciembre de 2024, el dramaturgo Víctor I Cazares, un ex artista residente en NYTW, lanzó una huelga de medicamentos contra el VIH después de que el teatro no llamara a un alto el fuego; la protesta causó una tormenta de controversia, con críticas dirigidas tanto a NYTW como a Cazares. “Creo que hubo una avalancha desafortunada de sentimientos y suposiciones sobre cuál era la alineación política que estaba ocurriendo”, dijo McGregor. “Había opiniones diferentes sobre qué estrategias usamos para intentar llamar la atención y cambiar corazones y mentes”. Programar obras de arte como la de Ibraheem, dijo McGregor, es una de las cosas más efectivas que un teatro puede hacer para iniciar conversaciones y tender puentes.

Para Ibraheem, A Knock on the Roof brinda una rara oportunidad de capturar la intimidad de la guerra junto con las emociones cotidianas: miedo, irritación, alegría. Uno de los momentos más mágicos, dijo, es cuando el público se ríe con Miriam y sus intentos de hacer malabares con todo. “No quiero que la gente se siente en la obra y esté en solidaridad conmigo”, dijo. “Quiero que se sienten allí y estén conmigo, y una vez que se ríen, siento que están conmigo”.