Rubble

“You have 58 seconds to leave your home. Run.” 

Gaza.  An abandoned theatre. The scent of coffee and its color, the memory of a past love, the fear of death–as if everything depended on that moment.

RUBBLE is a dramatic imagining of the celebrated poetry of Mahmoud Darwish (translated by Fady Joudah) and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, that follows a family in Gaza as they live a life interrupted by scarcity, bombardment, surveillance, and eviction. In an abandoned theatre, a Poet guides us through the turns of circumstance that have wracked this place, repeatedly besieged for millenia, and their implications for the spirit of a people struggling under this immense adversity.

In the piece, poetry is a language of the human spirit that defies binaries imposed by occupation. It refuses to take sides or play games. It identifies the human price paid by those under siege, and the beauty lost to those who oppress. It is more than consolation : it calls the characters back to themselves under circumstances that would otherwise render them hopeless, beyond the reach of their own humanity.