In "The Beekeeper's Daughter" by Karen Malpede, a pregnant Muslim refugee from Bosnia is embraced by an eccentric American family on an island in the Adriatic. The island is a sanctuary, but it is only a short distance from the region's genocidal civil war. What happens between them turns everyone's life inside out and upside down yet results in a healing journey. Theater for the New City (TNC) and Theater Three Collaborative will present the piece June 2 to 26, directed by the author, in TNC's Cino Theater.
In the play an American poet lives in self-chosen exile on an idyllic Mediterranean island, attended by his older sister, a beekeeper. His Dionysian male lover is visiting. The location is a short hop from the conflagration in Bosnia. The poet's adult daughter, a human rights worker, arrives there with a pregnant, traumatized Bosnian Musim woman, hoping to expose her, a rape victim and refugee, to the Beekeeper's nurturing influence. The contrast between the self-satisfied Americans and the desperate Bosnian woman is marked and shocking. As everyone reacts to the distressed woman's plight, they all experience changes in their relationships, accusing each other of abandonment and re-examining their commitments to each other. The refugee, named Admira, is a rape victim and has experienced the cycle of hatred and retribution that is driving the war. She is bent on self-starvation, declaring "If I die, my son can live. He won't have to grow up to be a killer. If I die, he won't have to remember." She gives birth to a healthy baby boy and the group is challenged to unite and care for the infant until she is emotionally strong enough to face him.
Malpede says, "The play is not about the refugee problem in Europe, but how a refugee can affect us in the healing process." Her play offers an unusual perspective on the current refugee crisis and it's not one of blame. It portrays our hostility toward refugees as fear of our own empathetic reactions. Malpede explains, "Kindness matters. People are afraid of refugees, supposedly because of what they might do. Really, people are expressing their fear of what empathizing with someone else's trauma will awaken in themselves. In the face of their suffering, we actually shut down our own emotional capacity. That's what we fear. Each character in this play is completely changed by opening up and allowing Admira's story into their lives. They don't know who they are until the end of play, and then they are quite different. They have to take care of the birth of Admira's child and that affords a new life for everyone."
The play adapts structures and influences of a classical tragedy, reworking them into a modern anti-tragedy, in which healing, gender fluidity, imagination and love actually triumph over the legacy of brutality and murder. But it's not a "happy ending" in a conventional sense; it's more like a resolution of a mythic chapter in the great tragedy of mass migrations that we are witnessing today.
Karen Malpede will direct the cast of five, featuring her long-time collaborator, four-time Obie winner,
George Bartenieff, as the poet, Evangeline Johns as his beekeeping sister,
Jenny Leona as the refugee woman,
Najla Said, as the human rights worker daughter and PJ Brennan as the poet's young Dionysian lover.
The play was written in 1994 while Malpede and
George Bartenieff were visiting a castle in Umbria that was only 300 miles from the raging Bosnian conflict. The situation of the world being in two realities--feeling far from the scene of a crisis, while simultaneously close to it--has recurred today. Malpede says, "Here we sit imagining ourselves as the most enlightened people in the world while across the river, it's a savage horror show."
Theater Three Collaborative, co-founded by Malpede, Bartenieff and the late Lee Nagrin, first produced this play to acclaim in Italy, where it was "best play" at the Dionysia World Festival of Contemporary Drama in 1995. Malpede directed it the same year at Lee Nagrin's Florence Mission Project (Lafayette Street/Bowery). In 1997, when staged in Brisbane Australia, the play was called "witty, passionate, a deep, subtle, rich journey confronting the audience with horrors while celebrating unforeseen possibilities for human goodness." An Off-Broadway production on Theater Row that year was not staged by Malpede; she now regards it as creatively unsuccessful. The current refugee crisis prompted Theater Three Collective to revive the play for the value of the insights it reveals. Malpede writes, "We wanted to revive a play we've always loved at this time in history, when we are facing a rise of cruelty and xenophobia against refugees, immigrants and Muslims. We want to use our art to provide a magical haven for audiences who are eager to feel their own empathic reactions."
The Cino Theater at TNC will be transformed for the production into four locations on the island in which the play takes place. Michaelangelo DeSerio, who also designed Malpede's "Extreme Whether" in 2014, is designing the set. Lighting design is by Bessie winner Tony Giovannetti. Costume design is by Sally-Ann Parsons and
Carisa Kelly. An original score is composed by
Arthur Rosen. Downtown actor/celebrity
Penny Arcade will perform post-show at a benefit evening to be announced.
Writing about "The Beekeeper's Daughter" in his foreword to a forthcoming collection of Malpede's plays, critic and theater historian Marvin Carlson praised the playwright as "prominent among only a handful of dramatists seriously concerned with global and national political issues." Malpede's eco-drama, "Extreme Whether" (TNC, 2014), was recently performed in Paris during the U.N. Climate Conference in December.
Karen Malpede (playwright and director) is author/director of 17 plays including "Us," "Better People," "Blue Heaven" (all presented at TNC), "Another Life" (National Theatre of Kosovo, Gerald W. Lynch Theater, Irondale, TNC, RADA Festival, London), "The Beekeeper's Daughter" (Dionysia Festival, Italy, Theater Row Theater), "Prophecy" (NY Theatre Workshop, New End Theatre, London) and "I Will Bear Witness" (Classic Stage Co., New End, London, English Theatre, Berlin). She is editor of "Acts of War: Iraq & Afghanistan in Seven Plays," "Women in Theater: Compassion & Hope" and "Three Works by the Open Theater" and author of "A Monster Has Stolen the Sun and Other Plays." Other plays and short fiction are published by Applause, Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Healing Muse and elsewhere. Her writings on theater have been published in The New York Times, TDR, Torture Magazine, Howelround, and elsewhere. A McKnight National Playwrights' and NYFA fellow, she co-founded Theater Three Collaborative in 1995. She has taught dramatic literature, playwriting and writing at Smith College, New York University and the CUNY-Graduate Center's Continuing Education program. She is currently on the theater faculty at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Theater Three Collaborative, Inc. was founded in 1995 by the late Lee Nagrin,
George Bartenieff and
Karen Malpede to create, develop and produce poetic, character-driven plays on crucial topics of the day. The organization also creates and hosts Festivals of Conscience, talks and talkbacks with public intellectuals, activists and specialists in the fields of each play.
Theater for the New City is a Pulitzer Prize winning community cultural center and one of New York's most prolific theatrical organizations, producing 30-40 premieres of new American plays per year, at least 10 of which are by emerging and young playwrights. TNC productions have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and over 42 OBIE Awards for excellence in every theatrical discipline. It has won the award for excellence in theater from the Ibero Americano Festival de Teatro in Bogota, Colombia; the City College Alumni Award for Excellence in Theater, the
Edgar Rosenberg Award for Excellence in Theater and most recently, the Acker Award for Excellence in Nontraditional Theater. TNC is also the only Theatrical Organization to have won the Mayor's Stop The Violence award.
