To The Good People of Gaza: Theatre for Young People
The first anthology of youth plays from Gaza and the wider Palestinian region, this timely collection ties together nineteen plays produced by Theatre Day Productions, one of the foremost community theatres in the Middle East. Written by playwright Jackie Lubeck, this collection responds to the siege on Gaza and the Israeli military operations from 2009 to 2014, reflecting how Gazan youth deal with trauma, loss and urban destruction.
In the nineteen plays within this anthology, the reader and theatrical producer witnesses experiences of a forgotten youth, besieged by a silent international community and a brutal wall. The plays are arranged into five different thematic series, which include family entanglements, loss and the fundamental goodness and resourcefulness of human beings.
Jackie Lubeck is a multi-national no-national playwright, living the better part of her life in Palestine. She is the co-founder of Theatre Day Productions (TDP), an organization that is both a production house for youth theatre and a training center for drama. Lubeck works throughout the Palestinian Territories but the biggest operation of TDP is in the Gaza Strip where she is both a writer and a designer. TDP built two professional theatres in the Gaza Strip: in 1998 (for the municipality) and in 2006 (for TDP). Previous to this, she was a co-founder of El-Theatre Company (not to be confused with the Palestinian National Theatre). El-Hakawati created original plays on the Palestinian experience between 1979 and 1990 in addition to building the first theatre in Jerusalem. Lubeck's life is in two acts: both Palestinian. Jackie also says she was born and bred in Brooklyn.
Samer Al-Saber is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Stanford University, and faculty member at the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. He teaches courses concerned with identity, race, and ethnicity and his international research focuses on the cultural dimensions of the Arab World, the Middle East, and Islamicate regions. A director and writer, his fieldwork intersects with theatre practice.
