Noor Theatre Announces 7th Season of Highlight Reading Series

At the heels of their Obie Award win, Noor Theatre is gearing up for another innovative and riveting season. As the barrage of issues affecting Middle Eastern communities across the globe grows, this unique company continues to create a dialogue between their artists and audiences, and shed light on these varied and complex perspectives.

This fall, Noor kicks off its 7th season of Highlight, a reading series that sheds light on the talents of playwrights of Middle-Eastern descent,on Monday, September 26th, 3pm and 7:30pm, with two presentations of Dead Are My People, Noor's first full length play commission, written by Ismail Khalidi (Tennis in Nablus). The play, directed by Charlotte Brathwaite (Shasta Geaux Pop) and accompanied with music by Hadi Eldebek, follows a Lebanese man who flees his home in the mountains of Lebanon during World War I to make the journey to the U.S. where he navigates the real and imagined lines of the Jim Crow South. Grappling with the legacies of white supremacy, immigration and assimilation, Dead Are My People promises to be an unexpected journey to the core of American experience. Featuring: Doug Chapman (In the Shadow of the Water Tower), Peter Ganim (Lapse), Nadine Malouf (May in the Summer), Rocco Sisto (Obie Award, Quills), Hadi Tabbal (The Hour of Feeling), and Chinaza Uche (Mother of George).

On Tuesday, November 15th, Highlight continues with Fireworks by Dalia Taha (Keffiyeh/Made in China), translated by Clem Naylor, directed by Katie Pearl (Obie Award, Nita and Zita). In a Palestinian town, eleven year-old Lubna and twelve year-old Khalil are playing on the empty stairwell in their apartment block. As the siege intensifies outside, fear for their safety becomes as crippling as the conflict itself. This piece was first performed at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Sloane Square on February 12, 2015.

Highlight's December reading on Tuesday, the 13th, is Noura, a striking and timely re-imagining of Ibsen's iconic Doll's House, by Heather Raffo (9 Parts of Desire) and directed by Joanna Settle (The Total Bent). Told from inside the marriage of an Iraqi immigrant family to New York, the cultural pressures on this marriage differ from Ibsen's, but speak both directly to modern marriage and the leaving of home. It is full of magical realism, the power of language, and the contemporary challenges of violence and ISIS. This play comes from over three years of research in the Arab American communities in NYC. Heather worked from an embedded position with Arab American women on both the telling of their stories and the re-imagining of the many Noras in their personal lives.

All Highlight readings will take place in New York Theatre Workshop's 3rd Floor Rehearsal Studio at 7:30pm: 83 East 4th Street, New York, NY, 10003. Audience members are invited to stay for refreshments after each reading. Seating is limited; reservations are strongly suggested. RSVP@noortheatre.org.

In the spring, the 3rd Annual 48 Hour Forum will gather 30 artists from diverse backgrounds to create a night of plays based on current events, capping off the year. As New York's only theatre representing voices of the Middle Eastern diaspora, Noor is often asked to respond to the barrage of news coming out of the Middle East and beyond. Often, news breaks and it is several years before we see something on stage about it. This headline-inspired festival remedies that by bringing together five playwrights, five directors, and twenty actors to create five short plays in just 48-hours based on the news of the day.