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In the ballroom of Houston’s Arab American Cultural and Community Center, the cast of The Revolution’s Promise bends into forward folds, articulates consonants, and speeds through tongue twisters (the classic “She sells seashells by the seashore,” and, echoing U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett, “Bleach blonde bad built butch body”). But while a more traditional troupe might be preparing to portray fictional characters or historical figures, these Houston-based actors are performing the testimonies of living and dead Palestinian artists.
The Revolution’s Promise is a joint project by Artists on the Frontline, a global organization focused on “cultural resistance,” and the Freedom Theatre, which is based out of the Jenin refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. In the hour-long play, the collected ruminations of Palestinian creators are performed as monologues by actors abroad. The show has been staged around the world, from New Delhi to Oslo to Santiago, and on July 20 and 21, it comes to Houston as part of the inaugural Falasteen Arts Festival, named after the Arabic word for Palestine.
The show consists of fifteen testimonies, compiled and edited by the playwright Zoe Lafferty, who is also an associate director at the Freedom Theatre and founder of Artists on the Frontline. Its throughline is an oral history of a theater company in Jenin. Nestled into this frame are several independent monologues from dancers, musicians, and poets. Many of the stories speak to the persecution faced by Palestinian creatives. In a segment titled “Prisons Within Prisons,” four actors perform monologues simultaneously, describing sudden arrests, brutal interrogations, and torture to the point of near-death.
“The entire purpose of this play, the entire purpose of this festival, is to raise awareness about the genocide in Palestine,” says Maryam Aasif, codirector and co-organizer of the festival, which also includes film screenings and visual art. (Israeli officials have denied that its assault on Gaza amounts to genocide. “Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s reference to Amalek [a biblical term for an enemy nation of Israel] was not an incitement to genocide of Palestinians, but a description of the utterly evil actions perpetrated by the genocidal terrorists of Hamas on October 7th and the need to confront them,” reads one January 2024 statement.)
The Gaza Health Ministry reports that more than 38,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed since October 7, while a recent letter published in the Lancet, a British medical journal, estimates that the number of deaths exceeds 186,000 out of the 2.1 million living in Gaza at the start of the latest conflict. The letter noted that counting deaths in Gaza has become increasingly difficult because of the destruction of the territory’s infrastructure. Still, even more conservative official Israeli estimates are stunning, at 15,000 as of May. The Revolution’s Promise illuminates the stories underlying the gruesome statistics. “Palestinians, in news and in broadcasts, are presented as just numbers,” says Aasif, who came to Houston from Pakistan by way of Canada. “We don’t really get to hear the perspectives of real people, so it’s very important to make sure that we’re hearing straight from Palestinians themselves.”
Aasif—who wears beaded word bracelets that read GAZA and FREE ♥ PALESTINE—hopes to keep the conflict at the center of the production. Early on in the rehearsal process, she made sure that her actors were well-versed in the country’s history and continued persecution. She also made it a point to cast affected parties: “The Revolution’s Promise is written by Palestinians, so our first priority was to give the platform to Palestinian actors.”
One of these actors is Nour Alia, a Palestinian American who grew up in Alief, a suburb southwest of Houston where students in the public schools are native speakers of more than ninety languages. Her grandparents are survivors of the Nakba, the Arabic term for the expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. To this day, Alia says, every time her grandfather puts his head down on a pillow in Alief, he mentally traces the streets of Akka, today known as Acre, his home city on the northern coast of what was then Palestine, so that he never forgets where he came from. “That’s the kind of love that was ingrained in me by my grandparents,” Alia says. “They made sure that even though I haven’t seen it, I’ve at least felt Palestine in that way.”
Though she’d acted frequently throughout middle school and high school, before auditioning for The Revolution’s Promise, Alia had not been onstage in years. “When I saw the casting call, I knew I had to audition,” she recalls. Whenever she felt nervous about returning to the theater, she reminded herself: “This is for Palestine. This is actually bigger than you.”
Alia plays two roles: Rania Elias, a Palestinian activist and former director of the Yabous Cultural Center in Jerusalem, and Arna Mer-Khamis, an Israeli Jewish and pro-Palestinian human rights activist. Alia is conscious of the nuances that come with playing real human beings, whether they’re alive or dead. “We don’t say that we’re playing characters,” she explains. “We say that we’re playing people.”
Shahd Shahroor, a Houston-based Palestinian American filmmaker, has starred in some of her own short films, but this is her first time performing in a theater—as long as you don’t count her experience as “an elf in the background in elementary school.” Here, Shahroor plays Dareen Tatour, a Palestinian writer who was imprisoned by Israel in 2015 after publishing her poem, “Resist, My People, Resist Them,” on Facebook. Accused of inciting violence, Tatour spent five months in prison and two-and-a-half years under house arrest. When she was released, she left for Östersund, Sweden, where she lived for several years before returning to the West Bank. “She’s very unapologetic in how she speaks and how she stands up for Palestine,” says Shahroor. “I want to make sure that I do justice by her for this entire play.”
Though she prioritized casting Palestinian actors, Aasif emphasizes the importance of having a diverse cast. Aasif codirects with Antonio Lasanta, who is Black and Puerto Rican. Jesús Sanchez, who plays Palestinian cartoonist Mohammad Sabaaneh, has found parallels between Sabaaneh’s story and that of his El Salvadoran family, some of whom he says were “disappeared” by the military during the Salvadoran Civil War.
In almost all of our conversations, Aasif and her actors stressed the political potential of The Revolution’s Promise. “There’s a hesitancy where [some] people think that art isn’t political, while I think that art is something that is inherently political,” Aasif explains. “An artist’s job is to present the true colors of our era. And if you’re not doing that—you’re just not doing art, baby.”
Alia references a saying by Juliano Mer-Khamis, the cofounder of the Freedom Theatre: “The Third Intifada must be a cultural one.” (Intifada is an Arabic word that literally means “shaking off” and is often used to refer to a rebellion or uprising, including two major ones in Palestine from 1987 to 1993, and from 2000 to 2005.) Many of the artists featured in the play have been attacked, imprisoned, or killed for their work—an erasure of Palestinian culture intertwined, Alia says, with the eradication of its people. For the Houston cast, the play is a way to make these important voices heard a little louder, and much further, from home.
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