5 days ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
This Palestinian woman's solo show insists on hope over hate
She's always either too Arab or too Israeli, both at casting calls and in the rest of her life. You people are all terrorists, the Jews and Americans say, but then a fellow Palestinian theater maker tells her that all the musicals and Shakespeare she wants to do means she's not fighting enough for the Palestinian cause.
What's more, in 'Home? A Palestinian Woman's Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness,' Hend Ayoub can't simply find her identity by going home. There isn't one — not in the sense of freedom, self-expression and implicit belonging. In her autobiographical solo show, when yet another prejudiced casting director tells her to go home, she hurls back that she's not sure where that is.
'Home?' — whose San Francisco Playhouse world premiere opened Saturday, Aug. 2, at Z Below — never comes out and says so explicitly, but it builds an alternative home for its writer-performer: the theater. When naysayers in audition rooms see Ayoub's name or passport as red flags or deem her accent too thick, she can cut out her own space in the form of the very show we're seeing.
The one-woman show, which heralds the return of San Francisco Playhouse's Sandbox Series of stripped-down world premieres, maps out how oppression works from birth. Not only do neighborhood kids call her 'dirty' and 'stinking,' saying she deserves to die; adults on TV and in person reinforce her peers' hate. History books at the school she attends say her grandmother's life story never happened. She learns to whisper her language in public.
As she grows up and turns her sights toward a theater major, she has already mastered another, more urgent kind of acting: how to repress her incredulous, expletive-laden rants and present a glassy, submissive facade to the powerful.
One of the foremost pleasures of the piece, directed by Carey Perloff, is the expressive range of Ayoub's countenance. When she absorbs world-shattering news, her eyes are like pools whose bottom has fallen out. Imitating the American accent she had to learn to act in New York (after already mastering a Jewish Israeli one), she sinks into her nasal passages to give each sound a soupçon of seagull squawk.
A thrust of the lower lip, and she's her older brother. A retraction of the spine, an elongation of the vowels, and she's a jowly school principal whose entire body language screams, 'Please don't hurt me!'
These powers, along with Ayoub's white-knuckle emotional commitment, sustain the show through occasional longueurs and hesitations with lines. While Ayoub mostly distills her text to the most potent and evocative anecdotes, her beat-by-beat plotting can grow wearying, and the show offers few surprises. A little girl excitedly dresses up as a princess, a mother coughs, and an Arab tries to pass through security at an Israeli airport — we know all these scenes will end badly, even if we don't know exactly how.
It's not easy to find an ending for a story about Palestinians and Israelis, which Ayoub explicitly acknowledges. But as images of starvation in Gaza horrify the globe, her play insists on hope in the same place she first encounters hate.
If children can be sadistically cruel, they can also be pure, generous and brave without making a big deal about it, as if there's no more natural way to be. It's a lesson adults would do well to learn.
