Kennedy Center Welcomes 'Alive From Palestine'

What distinguishes "Alive From Palestine" is its pedigree. Performed in Arabic with English surtitles, the piece spotlights everyday Palestinians and their efforts to survive under circumstances humiliating and horrifying, from enduring endless security checkpoints to military attacks. The seeds for the piece, Ibrahim says, were planted in the ruins of a Ramallah police station that had been bombed by Israeli warplanes. A makeshift stage was constructed on the spot, and Palestinian musicians, dancers and poets gathered there "just to sing and dance and speak monologues."

After a few weeks, Ibrahim moved the event into his theater, and Al-Kasaba's actors began creating monologues. The best were rotated in. "We were sold out every week," he says. (Its evening performances in the Terrace are sold out, too.) The show ran for nine months in Ramallah and then, after the troupe was invited to a festival in Egypt, "we chose the best monologues and we made out of it a play." A young director, Amir Nizar Zuabi, created the staging.

Cairo is where Basma El-Husseiny, managing director of Al Mawred Al Thaqafy, an organization that arranges support for Arab artists, first saw "Alive From Palestine." She was impressed by the intimacy of the storytelling -- the effort to give heart and meaning to extremely personal dramas.

"The staging is very simple and very beautiful, visually," says Husseiny, who advised Alicia Adams, the Kennedy Center's vice president for international programming, in the selection of artists for "Arabesque." "The strength of the play is that it is based on real stories, not on celebrities. It isn't political analysis and doesn't give historical perspective. It's about real people."

The often-rapt reception from the outside world for "Alive From Palestine" took Ibrahim by surprise. "We didn't know what we had," he says. From the company's original base in Jerusalem and through its move in 2000 to Ramallah, he has long been in the business of bringing theater to Palestinians. His early experience on children's television -- which he left after he no longer felt comfortable working on an Israeli broadcast -- led to his developing theater for Palestinian children that he took on the road. "I used to go all over . . . to [half-]deserted villages with no electricity. It was very tiring, very hard. But I was happy doing this."

In Ramallah, where Ibrahim serves as Al-Kasaba's general director, he has put on plays by Lorca and Ibsen, and for children ("Cinderella"). Lately, too, he's been concentrating on normalizing the training of Palestinian actors. (At that seminar in Cairo, Kaiser says, "he was the most challenging of my students. He asked many hard questions.") He recently signed an agreement for the first school of drama in the Palestinian territories, in partnership with a German university.

Ibrahim is eager for "Alive From Palestine" to be seen here; he added a special performance of the play for local high school students Friday morning.

One natural venue for the play, however, is not on the agenda. Asked whether he'd like to see the piece done in Israel, Ibrahim says yes. "I used to tell my people that this kind of play should be performed for Israeli audiences," he says. "I have tried once, but my people tell me, no, it is not time."