Latest news with #AKnockontheRoof
The Independent
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Conceived over a decade ago, A Knock on the Roof remains a poignant, pertinent portrayal of life in Gaza
Just a few hours before Khawla Ibraheem's A Knock on the Roof, a play about a woman living under Israeli occupation, opens to the press at the Royal Court, Donald Trump's grotesque AI-generated video of his vision for Gaza was released to the world. Could this play – a window into the personal horrors of wartime – be any more timely? Rather than focus on politics, though, Ibraheem offers an intimate personal testimony; there's fear, apprehension, and flashes of humour, too. The reality of Gaza today makes it all the more pertinent. Only someone cold-blooded would leave tonight's performance unmoved. It would be reasonable, then, to assume A Knock on the Roof had been written in response to the current moment. But all the more chillingly, Ibraheem first conceived it as a 10-minute piece back in 2014. It is a fact that shows how little has changed for the Palestinian people. Here, the war-torn city is seen through the eyes of Mariam (also played by Ibraheem), a citizen who pours all her energy into caring for her young child, Noor, and her elderly mother. 'Two wars ago they started using a technique called knock on the roof,' she says. The 'knock on the roof' Mariam refers to is the warning bomb dropped by the Israeli Defence Forces on civilian homes. It alerts them to the fact they've got five to 15 minutes to flee before a larger rocket strikes. This potential 'knock' forms the nucleus of Ibraheem's drama. Mariam is obsessed with rehearsing her escape route. Over and over, she packs her bags in preparation, fashions a fake Noor out of a pillowcase to carry and frantically darts through the streets in the dead of night. Beginning as a game, set to bouncy, electronic music by Rami Nakhleh and mechanical lights by Oona Curley, Mariam's forensically scheduled bomb drill is littered with comedy. She acts 'normal' before racing down seven flights of stairs. She curses herself for not following her friend's advice to keep up an exercise regimen. But quickly, panic starts to overwhelm Mariam's thoughts. What happens if the knock on the roof comes when she's on the toilet? Or, if her son refuses to cooperate as she attempts to carry him to safety? These anxieties are painted vividly in Oliver Butler's production; at one point, Mariam's shadow is pulled in two as an illustration of her inner strain. But the punch of Ibraheem's writing comes from fleshing out her character and humanity. 'I never wanted any of this,' Mariam confesses. Long ago she let go of her dreams of getting a master's degree. There are flares of jealousy and frustration; Mariam's husband has left behind their family to study abroad and as the heat of the war increases, she feels progressively betrayed. Her initially sunny exterior starts to crack and splinter, but with Ibraheem's genuine portrayal, we feel her anger every step of the way. Although we never see any violence, the threat of it is laced deeply into Ibraheem's script. Mariam's story might be fictional, but there are thousands of real ones like it. This is a gut-wrenching depiction of the conditions the Palestinian people have been forced to live in for decades, which goes far beyond the headlines.
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘During wartime, you also do laundry': a new play brings the experience of war in Gaza to the US
'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. 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. 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'. Related: If you want to know how free a society is, look at what's happening in its theatres | Arifa Akbar 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. An avid hiker, he was walking up a mountain when he came across a menacing sign, which read: 'Go no further. Landmines [ahead].' 'What feels like such a safe, beautiful place full of family and art also has minefields all around,' he said. The play almost didn't happen several times due to safety concerns in the region, said Ibraheem. 'Flights are canceled and war is happening,' she said. 'Suddenly, the safety of being in a theater stopped being so taken for granted.' With the show now making its US premiere at NYTW, Ibraheem and Butler say that audiences have generally received the show positively. But some people have complained, claiming that the show is antisemitic because it features a Palestinian protagonist. 'Are we saying that the existence of a character who's Palestinian is dangerous or offensive?' said Butler. 'If a character can't exist on stage like this, then you're saying that that person should not be allowed to exist.' Patricia McGregor, the NYTW artistic director, said the theater had caught flak for debuting A Knock on the Roof. 'I remember seeing somebody [online] saying: 'Oh, you're doing this antisemitic play,'' McGregor said. 'And I think that assumption [comes from] doing a play that centers a mother in Gaza, living her life and trying to make sure her child survives, an assumption which is just not true.' NYTW has a longstanding, although imperfect, relationship with Palestinian artwork and artists. Noor Theatre, which supports Middle Eastern artists, is an NYTW company-in-residence, and in 2012, NYTW put on the group's Food and Fadwa, a dramedy about a Palestinian family living near Bethlehem. In December 2024, the playwright Victor I Cazares, a former NYTW artist-in-residence, launched an HIV-medicine strike after the theater did not call for a ceasefire; the protest caused a storm of controversy, with criticism lodged both at NYTW and Cazares. 'I think there was an unfortunate avalanche of feelings and assumptions about what political alignment was happening,' said McGregor. 'There were differing opinions about what strategies we use to try to get people to pay attention and to change hearts and minds.' Programming artwork like Ibraheem's, McGregor said, is among the most effective things a theater can do to spark conversations and reach across divides. For Ibraheem, A Knock on the Roof provides a rare opportunity to capture the intimacy of wartime alongside the everyday emotions: fear, irritation, joy. One of the most magical moments, she said, is when audiences laugh with Miriam and her attempts to juggle it all. 'I don't want people to sit in on the play and be in solidarity with me,' she said. 'I want them to sit there and to be with me, and once they laugh, I feel that they are with me.'
The Guardian
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘During wartime, you also do laundry': a new play brings the experience of war in Gaza to the US
'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. 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. 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. An avid hiker, he was walking up a mountain when he came across a menacing sign, which read: 'Go no further. Landmines [ahead].' 'What feels like such a safe, beautiful place full of family and art also has minefields all around,' he said. The play almost didn't happen several times due to safety concerns in the region, said Ibraheem. 'Flights are canceled and war is happening,' she said. 'Suddenly, the safety of being in a theater stopped being so taken for granted.' With the show now making its US premiere at NYTW, Ibraheem and Butler say that audiences have generally received the show positively. But some people have complained, claiming that the show is antisemitic because it features a Palestinian protagonist. 'Are we saying that the existence of a character who's Palestinian is dangerous or offensive?' said Butler. 'If a character can't exist on stage like this, then you're saying that that person should not be allowed to exist.' Patricia McGregor, the NYTW artistic director, said the theater had caught flak for debuting A Knock on the Roof. 'I remember seeing somebody [online] saying: 'Oh, you're doing this antisemitic play,'' McGregor said. 'And I think that assumption [comes from] doing a play that centers a mother in Gaza, living her life and trying to make sure her child survives, an assumption which is just not true.' NYTW has a longstanding, although imperfect, relationship with Palestinian artwork and artists. Noor Theatre, which supports Middle Eastern artists, is an NYTW company-in-residence, and in 2012, NYTW put on the group's Food and Fadwa, a dramedy about a Palestinian family living near Bethlehem. In December 2024, the playwright Victor I Cazares, a former NYTW artist-in-residence, launched an HIV-medicine strike after the theater did not call for a ceasefire; the protest caused a storm of controversy, with criticism lodged both at NYTW and Cazares. 'I think there was an unfortunate avalanche of feelings and assumptions about what political alignment was happening,' said McGregor. 'There were differing opinions about what strategies we use to try to get people to pay attention and to change hearts and minds.' Programming artwork like Ibraheem's, McGregor said, is among the most effective things a theater can do to spark conversations and reach across divides. For Ibraheem, A Knock on the Roof provides a rare opportunity to capture the intimacy of wartime alongside the everyday emotions: fear, irritation, joy. One of the most magical moments, she said, is when audiences laugh with Miriam and her attempts to juggle it all. 'I don't want people to sit in on the play and be in solidarity with me,' she said. 'I want them to sit there and to be with me, and once they laugh, I feel that they are with me.'
New York Times
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Practicing for When the Bombs Fall in ‘A Knock on the Roof'
There comes a point late in 'A Knock on the Roof,' a new solo play about ordinary people under bombardment in Gaza, when the boundary blurs unsettlingly and the audience can no longer tell: Is Mariam, the central character, awake or asleep? Are we watching a horrifying reality or a fear that's taking shape in her dreams? Her everyday existence is fraught enough. Portrayed with easy approachability by Khawla Ibraheem, who is also the playwright, Mariam spends her days wrangling Nour, her 6-year-old son, and meticulously planning how she would escape her apartment building if the Israeli Defense Forces attacked it. 'You see,' she tells us in narrator mode, 'two wars ago, they started using a technique called 'a knock on the roof.' It's a small bomb they drop to alert us that we have five to 15 minutes to evacuate before the actual rocket destroys the building.' So Mariam trains to run as far as possible in five minutes, weighed down by whatever necessities she can put in a backpack — plus Nour, a heavy sleeper who will need to be carried if the bombs come at night. She puts him through practice-run paces alongside her mother, who moves in when the unnamed war begins, not because it's safer but just to be with them. Directed by Oliver Butler at New York Theater Workshop, 'A Knock on the Roof' long predates the current war between Israel and Hamas. As a program note explains, the play began as a 10-minute monologue that Ibraheem, who lives in the Golan Heights, wrote in 2014. Much of its further development came in the year before the conflict erupted in October 2023. The immediacy of the current war is what makes this production, which moves to London in February, so timely. Surprisingly, that does not necessarily give it a dramatic advantage. Part of the show's tonal challenge comes from trying to balance comic absurdity with undeniable darkness. Part stems from the banality of ordinary life, still to a great extent unremarkable even when wrenched and mangled by war. The destruction that looms and threatens is as yet, for Mariam and her family, at bay. To the audience, Mariam is friendly and relatable, addressing us directly, nudging us to imagine ourselves in her shoes. How many pairs of underwear would we pack if we had to flee? How far can we run in five minutes? (A voice from the crowd at the performance I saw: 'I can't run at all.') Even as Mariam's anxiety escalates, she maintains her facade. 'I act normal,' she says. This is a motif. But the play, which seems to waver between fleshing Mariam out and letting her remain an Everywoman, doesn't allow us to know her very well. An eventual cluster of details about her relationship with her husband, who is abroad studying for a master's degree, feels inorganic. For the most part, Ibraheem keeps the play's focus tight on Mariam, her mother and sweet, mischievous Nour; when it opens wider to take in the city around them, it gains a welcome heft. Butler, returning to the theater where he had such great success with 'What the Constitution Means to Me,' tries to encourage a connection between actor and spectators by seating some of the crowd onstage and leaving the lights up on the audience for a good chunk of the show. Both elements feel like obstacles to our immersion in Mariam's life. (The minimal set is by Frank J Oliva, lighting by Oona Curley.) 'A Knock on the Roof' wants to draw us close and deepen our understanding. I'm not sure it succeeds at that. But we do leave knowing that Mariam, whether awake or asleep, has been trapped inside a nightmare all along.
