Plays in Time by Karen Malpede

Author:Karen Malpede [Malpede, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783208890
Publisher: Intellect Books Ltd
Published: 2016-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

On Prophecy

Najla Said

I first met Karen Malpede in 2004, when I responded to an email about an event she was organizing. I did not know Karen at all, and I don’t know through what channel I received her email, but volunteering to help read the names of the dead in the beautiful vigil she put together at the close of the first year of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ was one of the most serendipitous decisions I have ever made.

In September of 2001, having already embarked on my professional theater career, I was stopped in my tracks by the events of September 11th, which affected the only ‘safe’ home I thought I would ever have (New York City), and gave me a sudden, new and ill-fitting identity (‘Arab-American’) that I felt pressured to fully inhabit on a moment’s notice, despite the fact that it meant nothing to me.

2003 brought the invasion of Iraq and my father’s death, so by the time I met Karen in 2004, I knew right away that there was a reason I had impulsively come to help her out.

After the event, we stayed in touch and became friends. By early 2006 she had expressed her interest in writing a play for me and Kathleen Chalfant, my theater idol. I was completely flabbergasted and flattered by her offer. Karen, Kathy and I began to meet frequently to discuss what we might want to work on together, and for the first time in my professional career, I felt I had found ‘my people.’

Our conversations veered from the Abraham, Sarah, Isaac story in the Bible back to modern-day Iraq and Palestine, circled back around the Greeks and classical theater and culminated, ultimately in Prophecy. With Kathy and Karen, I felt I had found the people who understood the complex connections always firing in my brain; connections that took my thoughts everywhere and back and always turned the personal into the political and vice versa, while still delighting in the lyrical constructions and rhythms that only a deeply gifted, sensitive writer can compose.

Prophecy did not really begin to come together until the summer of 2006. I was alone in Lebanon, visiting family, and the summer quickly turned from a beach holiday into a nightmare, as Israel invaded on July 12th and a month-long attack began on my mother’s home country once again.

My Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (that up until that point I didn’t even believe really existed) jolted me into a heightened state of awareness and fervor, and I began sending long email missives to everyone on my contacts list, one of whom was Karen.

Karen Malpede bears witness; she listens to what her collaborators are saying and feeling and to what they are not saying and feeling. By the end of the summer she had finished Prophecy, and it was beautiful and full and magnificent.

Somehow, she had taken everything I had said and expressed and created three different women for me to play, each of which had a substantial story line, an

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