Joanna Settle Directs Heather Raffo's NOURA at Playwrights Horizons

Playwrights Horizons presents the New York premiere of Noura, a new American drama from 9 Parts of Desire playwright and actor Heather Raffo, continuing her longtime collaboration with director Joanna Settle, November 27-December 30, in the Mainstage Theater at Playwrights Horizons (416 W 42nd St, New York, NY 10036).Produced in association with Shakespeare Theatre Company, Noura was deemed by The Washington Post the "best premiere of the Women's Voices Theater Festival"when it made its world premiere in Washington, D.C. Noura is set in the home of its titular character, a former architect from Mosul. She and her husband now have a successful life in New York, and, eight years after having fled their home in Iraq, they've finally gained citizen status-which Noura, as an Iraqi Christian, is celebrating by planning the perfect Christmas dinner. But when the arrival of a visitor stirs up long-buried memories, Noura and her husband are forced to confront the cost of their choices, and retrace the past they left behind. With compassion and startling clarity, Raffo's play considers a woman's options across two nations, and exposes the fragility of the structures-nationalities, marriages, mores-in which we consider ourselves at home.

Heather Raffo (Playwrights Horizons: The Profane; other Off-Broadway: 9 Parts of Desire, In Darfur) gives an "impassioned" (The Washington Post), "brilliant" (Theatermania) performance as Noura, in a cast that includes Dahlia Azama (Veil'd, I Call My Brothers) as Maryam, an Iraqi Christian refugee who fled ISIS, and is being sponsored by Noura and her husband in the United States; Liam Campora ("The Blacklist," "Blue Bloods," The Dictator) as Yazen/Alex, Noura's son; Matthew David (Glamping, A Streetcar Named Desire, Boeing, Boeing) as Rafa'a, Noura's childhood best friend from Mosul, an Iraqi Muslim OB-GYN living in New York; and Nabil Elouahabi (Oslo, A Tale of Two Cities, "The Night Of") as Tareq/Tim, Noura's physician husband, who longs to have a second child. (Nabil Elouahabi is appearing with the permission of Actors' Equity Association. The Producers gratefully acknowledge Actors' Equity Association for its assistance of this production.) The creative team includes Andrew Lieberman (scenic design), Tilly Grimes (costume design), Masha Tsimring (lighting design), Obadiah Eaves (sound design), and Laura Smith (Production Stage Manager).

Raffo was inspired to write Noura-whose title and certain themes nod to Ibsen's A Doll's House-after leading theater workshops with Middle Eastern women in New York and seeing the feminist drive in their responses to Ibsen's play as well as their many harrowing stories of leaving home. Raffo's new play is the story of a woman's restless mind pushing against the confines of her home life and her past.

Raffo was born in Michigan to an American mother and Iraqi Christian immigrant father from Mosul. At the start of the 2003 War, she had around 100 immediate family members living between Baghdad and Mosul. Over the last decade, particularly in the aftermath of ISIS overtaking Mosul in 2014, all but two have fled the country. In Noura, Raffo keenly explores the spiraling results of America's invasive presence in Iraq, and Iraq's presence in the American imagination-all from within the intimacy of a family home. Her characters are pulled as strongly by the American pursuit of rugged individualism as they are by their need to maintain a collective cultural identity.

The production of Noura exhibits the power of collaboration between two artists who have been in sync for 15 years. Raffo and Settle (Sky on Swings, The Total Bent, In Darfur) began their collaboration and friendship with 9 Parts of Desire, first produced in 2003. Conceived between the First Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and performed after the latter began, that play was an "impassioned theatrical documentary" (The New York Times) that offered a kaleidoscope of perspectives of contemporary Iraqi women characters-composites of women Raffo spent a decade interviewing throughout Iraq and its diaspora. (Incidentally, when Settle was a college student during the First Gulf War, she had moved to D.C. to interview people involved in the military-and their families-around that intervention, for her theatrical thesis project.) As 9 Parts of Desire made its way coast to coast across America over the course of two years, and as the war progressed, Raffo and Settle got to have pressing conversations with audiences-gauging the perceptions of the relationship between the U.S. and Iraq at every stop, reworking the play in each place.

Raffo says of her artistic and personal kinship with Settle, "Those conversations became so integral to our trusted intellectual relationship. That was when I had family members in Baghdad wondering if they were going to live and die in a war and through an occupation. Now my 100 family members are scattered across the world as refugees, and Joanna knows a lot of them. She danced with them at my wedding. And now she's living and teaching in the Middle East [NYU Abu Dhabi]. The conversation has continued in how we each raised our kids; this in-depth way of understanding the stakes is very different than me coming in with a smart, kind, talented new director and saying, 'here's the history of my family and my people.' Joanna lived the history with my family."

Settle's direction of Noura sensitively materializes the psycho-emotional world Raffo creates in her script (which takes place in the household of an architect and coalesces around her character's vivid mind). She says, "Heather and I have experienced so much together. I got married, Heather got married; I got divorced, she stayed married. We've experienced loss. Creative choices are born out of intuition and instinct, and the only thing I have to offer an audience is my subjective perspective. Heather and I have curated our subjective perspective together."

Performance Schedule and Ticketing

Performances of Noura take place November 27 - December 30: Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 7pm, Thursdays and Fridays at 8pm, Saturdays at 2:30pm and 8pm, and Sundays at 2:30pm and 7:30pm.

Critics are welcome December 5 at 7pm, December 6 and 7 at 8pm, December 8 at 8pm, December 9 at 2:30pm and 7:30pm.

Single tickets go on sale October 30 at noon.

A Five-Show Subscriptionpackage to Playwrights Horizons' 2018-19 season is now available ($260, three Mainstage and two Peter Jay Sharp Theater productions). In addition to discounts on all season productions, subscribers receive priority booking and seating, ticket exchange privileges, parking and dining discounts, and exclusive mailings of Playwrights Horizons Bulletins. Flex Passes (customizable bundle, $220+) and Memberships ($45 to join, $25 preview tickets) are also now on sale. Patron packages start at $1,750. Packages are available at phnyc.org.

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