THEATER: "Food and Fadwa"

Photo/Joan Marcus

Food and Fadwa opens with a crash course on Palestinian parties, a direct address from Fadwa (Lameece Issaq) to her studio audience that both fills us in on the premise -- Fadwa's younger sister Dalal (Maha Chehlaoui) is getting married to Emir (Arian Moayed), and Fadwa's beloved Youssif (Haaz Sleiman), who also happens to be Emir's brother, is flying back from New York for the celebration -- and then fills us up with an authentic recipe for baba ghanoush. This dish is a lesson in of itself, in that it illustrates Fadwa's tender feelings for her own "spoiled old daddy," her senile Baba (Laith Nakli); it is also representative of this deliciously stuffed play, in that food, family, and tradition are the ingredients that speak to life in war-torn, restricted Bethlehem. Fadwa's cooking show, incidentally, is fiction (it's a device that she uses to cope with the pressure around her), but the friction is real, especially when we learn how much she hates her traitorous cousin, the half-American Hayat (Heather Raffo), a Beard-winning Food Network star . . . and Youssif's employer and, now, lover.

There's no simple recipe that could be followed to describe or recreate the effects of this play; if Fadwa's secret technique involves speaking lovingly to your food, then director Shana Gold's heart must have been overflowing with (deserved) compliments to her cast and crew. That the play itself, written by Issaq and Jacob Kader, has been simmering in development for roughly five years, speaks even more to the fully realized flavors -- so much so that even the necessary table setting of plot and character establishment that consumes Act I comes across as powerful, interesting, and informative stuff. Most importantly, the cultural portion sizes -- and their presentation -- is such that you'll never feel overwhelmed; in truth, you'll feel at home. Familiarity, after all, is the way in which Food and Fadwa truly sinks its teeth into you; there may be valid political reasons for the 24-hour-curfew, or the endless checkpoints that turn the five-mile drive into Jerusalem into a five-hour affair, but from a household perspective, short on food, electricity, and nerves, it's impossible not to be moved.

Impossible, too, not to be uplifted by the hope that blossoms even in these conditions: when war postpones your wedding, turn the meal into rations for your trapped family; when your husband goes missing, show your faith and conviction by refusing to change out of your wedding dress; savor those beautiful moments of cleanliness and clarity: a shaving ceremony momentarily snaps Baba out of his fugue and has him calling for his oud; and make your own future, by planting and preserving the olive trees sacred to your family and food. That's the reason, at least, for the comic presence of Aunt Samia (Kathryn Kates), the constantly smoking and gossiping tough old broad who never ages a day and who knows that the true tragedy of a blackout is in not being able to vote for your favorite singer on Arab Idol: life goes on, no?

Even those who dismiss the cultural aspects of this play as a mere garnish -- such a humorously depicted "visual aid" of the labyrinthine checkpoint system -- and who might call this a literal kitchen-sink domestic drama would have to pause at such consistent performances. Issaq in particularly is a pleasure to watch, slowly fraying from her hyper-friendly "television" personality to a pitiably jealous spinster, her wide smile cracking each time her father slips away. Sleiman's terrific, too, swapping between a slick, jocular bravado with his family and a raw, heartfelt emotion within his attempts to get through to his soon-to-be father-in-law.  As for Nakli himself, his character's moments of lucidity (in flashbacks and occasionally in the present) are so powerful that they make his general confusion all the more devastating. It's harder to speak about Raffo and Moayed's characters: the former's is meant to be overwhelming (and distasteful), whereas the latter's is saddled with the most blatantly (and blandly) scripted portions of the show: it's hard to see Hayat and Youssif as an item.

Despite that, Food and Fadwa remains a treat for your theatrical taste-buds: sweet, sour, bitter, occasionally salty, and overall umami.

PLAY: "The Black Eyed"

Photo Credit/Joan Marcus

The Black Eyed may have just opened at New York Theatre Workshop, but don't think for a second that it is a work in progress. Playwright Betty Shamieh has been working on this powerful show for five years, and it is now (like last month's NYTW show, Horizon) a masterful combination of theatrical craft and intelligent writing, and a human and political exploration of our post-9/11 perceptions, suffused with a subtle staging by Sam Gold and the rich emotions of a talented quartet of women.

The Black Eyed is an important and harshly relevant new work: controversial, but not to the point of self-combustion. Shamieh's questions are chokingly precise--"Why is violence only wrong when we [Palestinians] use it?"--and her answers range from pretty to vague and pretty vague. This is a compliment: she doesn't try to answer questions, but rather questions the answers of complacent people. Rather than settling on the easily inflammable issue of suicide bombing, she widens the scope to all of history's martyrs, and to the women that are their consequence. The angry, disillusioned, young bomber Aiesha (Aysan Celik), is met in her pink-walled limbo by Delilah (Emily Swallow), Samson's famous seductress; Tamam (Lameece Issaq), one of the many callously killed victims of the Crusades; and a young, nameless woman known only by her job, The Architect (Jeanine Serralles), and the hard-to-articulate hopes and dreams of our generation.

The Black Eyed is a hip play, though it bows to classicism. The characters double as a Greek chorus, although their interjections and echoes are used more as punctuation for Shamieh's slam-poetry verse. Paul Steinberg's stage is the audience's section of an amphitheater, all steps and levels, but it's modernized by an ominous wooden ceiling that hangs low above the audience. As for Gabriel Berry's costumes, the different outfits look less like anachronisms than evolutions in design, with similar patterns and blending colors binding these Palestinians together, even as centuries threaten to tear them apart. Director Sam Gold does such an excellent job managing the production values that the tangential nature of the show ends up being cohesive, and the individual plaints of these women add up to building the central dramatic arc.

The greatest surprise of The Black Eyed is its wit. The humor is a skirt for the passive politicizing behind the satire (like a commercial for the United States of Israel and Palestine: "Palreal"), but that doesn't stop the skirt from being pleated with increasingly complex ideas. Nor does the beauty of the gossamer language hide the presence of vulgarity: Aiesha is a bilious character who goads the other women by saying "Crudeness is necessary for clarity." Aiesha never knew beauty in her short life, and it's telling that the few moments of revered speech are reserved for her weapons: "I built something more intricate than the human heart,/hugged it to my chest,/and walked into the biggest crowd I could find."

The script is genius ("Arrogance is confidence that is snuffed out,/resuscitated,/and is never quite the same again"), but simply quoting it separates text from emotion, the too-easy escape from resolution. It also takes away from the wonderful actresses of this show, who stab these words at us with effortless grace. Issaq drops Tamam's prideful carriage just enough to let us see her relish the castration that she will one day exact on her rapists, Celik transforms Aiesha's rage into a terrifying passion, Swallow hides Delilah's guilt and shame beneath layers of silken cloth and silken seduction, and Serralles steals the show with her mastery of The Architect's intense and desperate fantasies.

The Black Eyed envelopes us in the human stories and sufferings of these beautiful, tragic women, and through their eyes, dares to question our callous answers to thoughts like, "So what if terror helped bring down apartheid in South Africa?" "So what if the Black Panther Movement got civil rights workers moving just a little bit quicker?" By no means does Betty Shamieh condone terrorism, nor is her play even about terrorism, but The Black Eyed speaks to the need to be heard beneath it all, and uses what should be the universal language of theater to poke, prod, and plead for understanding.