Staged Reading of Returning to Haifa
By Ghassan Kanafani
Adapted for the stage by Naomi Wallace & Ismail Khalidi
In 1948, Palestinian couple Said and Safiyya flee their home during the Nakba. In the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, the borders are opened for the first time in twenty years, and the couple dares to return back to their home in Haifa. They are prepared - of course - to find someone else living where they once did. Yet nothing can prepare Said and Safiyya for the encounter they both desire and dread. The reading with music will be followed by post-reading comments with Ismail Khalidi
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Director: Maren Rosenberg, Co-Artistic Director of Uprising Theater
Cast: (* indicates members of Actors Equity)
Said - Amro Salama*
Safiyya - Susaan Jamshidi*
Miriam - Annalise Raziq
Young Said & Dov - Bassam Abdelfattah
Young Safiyya - Christina El Gamal
Reading Stage Directions - Gloria Petelli
Music: Sam Hyson, Oud & Arabic Violin
As part of Uprising Theater’s dedication to radical hospitality, seats for the readings will be offered at no cost to the audience on a first come first serve basis. Seating begins 15 minutes before showtime.
Artistic Directors, Literary Directors, Season Selection Committee Members, Agents, and Casting Directors may call ahead to reserve guaranteed seating.
Praise for the 2018 London production of Returning to Haifa by Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace.
"[Returning to Haifa] offers a moving confrontation between two sets of displaced people and utterly unsentimental exploration of the complexities of home, history, and parenthood...its call for reciprocal awareness and acknowledgment of past injustice seems more necessary than ever."
- The Guardian ★★★★
"A simple, understated version of Kanafani's iconic narrative, bringing spectators into the action with a canny, persistent, unaggressive aesthetic that proved remarkably effective. This version of Returning to Haifa was carefully designed to open, rather than close, a debate on Israel and Palestine in a time of renewed conflict."
- Theatre Journal
"The adaptation demonstrates the control that power & pain exert over individual lives."
- The Upcoming ★★★★
"...As quietly shattering as it is gently complex."
- WhatsOnStage ★★★★
"Kanafani’s parable is even-handed enough to explore the agony of both the exiled Palestinian couple and the Jewish widow...and to empathize with all of them."
- Jewish Renaissance ★★★★
"Returning to Haifa is a beautiful and important play portraying the personal tragedies created because of much biggeracts between humans."
- Exeunt Magazine
"An electrifying eighty minutes of theatre...The beauty of the writing lies in the amalgam of the political and the personal; the connection between individual and global struggles."
- The Spy In The Stalls ★★★★
Writing Credits
Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972), an intellectual and political activist, is one of Palestine's greatest novelists, writing some of the most admired stories in modern Arabic literature. His novellas and short stories, now translated into dozens of languages, are widely regarded as having been ahead of their time, both in form and content. He was assassinated in Beirut by a Mossad car bomb in 1972 at the age of thirty-six.
Naomi Wallace’s plays―produced in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Middle East―include One Flea Spare, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, Things of Dry Hours, The Fever Chart, And I and Silence, Night is a Room and Returning to Haifa (adapted with Ismail Khalidi). In 2009, One Flea Spare was incorporated into the permanent repertoire of the French National Theatre, the Comédie-Française. Only two American playwrights have been added to the Comédie’s repertoire in 300 years. Awards: MacArthur Fellowship, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, Obie Award, the Horton Foote Prize and Ubu Award (Italy). Wallace received the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize in drama and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Wallace is under commission by Headlong Theater in the UK and she is writing the book for the new John Mellencamp musical.
Ismail Khalidi’s plays include Truth Serum Blues (Pangea World Theater ‘05), Tennis in Nablus (Alliance Theatre ‘10), Foot (Teatro Amal ‘16), Sabra Falling (Pangea ‘17), and Dead Are My People (Noor Theatre ’18). He also co-adapted, with Naomi Wallace, two novels for the stage; Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa (Finborough Theatre ‘18) and Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer (Actors Theatre of Louisville ‘19). Khalidi’s work has been included in numerous anthologies and with Wallace he co-edited another, entitled Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora (TCG ‘15). His writing has been featured in American Theatre Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Mizna, Guernica, The Dramatist and ReMezcla. Khalidi holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Produced as part of Right to a Narrative: Chicago 2020.
January 3, 2020 | Right to a Narrative: Returning to Haifa
January 4, 2020 | Right to a Narrative: Layla in Lala
January 5, 2020 | Right to a Narrative: Food and Fadwa
