History and Theater: How Do We Tell the Stories that have been Silenced?
East Side Freedom Library, 1105 Greenbrier Street, Saint Paul, MN 55106
Saturday, September 16, 2017 from 3:00-4:30PM
Free and open to all
What happened at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon, thirty-five years ago (September 16-18, 1982)?
Why don't more of us know this story?
This special event features a father and son, historian and playwright, Rashid and Sim, who are in town for the staging of Sim's play SABRA FALLING, which opens on September 15 by Pangea World Theatre at the In the Heart of the Beast Theater's space. The play's opening on the 35th anniversary of the massacre adds to its timeliness.
Rashid Khalidi is a world-reknowned historian and the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. Among his ten books is UNDER SIEGE:PLO DECISION-MAKING DURING THE 1982 WAR, which explores the Sabra and Shatila massacres, which are the subject of Sim's play, SABRA FALLING. Sim was born in Beirut and raised in the U.S,, graduating from Macalester College, then earning an MFA from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. He has been a Many Voices Fellow at the Playwrights Center and an Emerging Writers Fellow at the New York Theatre Workshop, and is currently artist-in-residence at Teatro Amal in Chile. He is the co-editor (with Naomi Wallace) of INSIDE/OUTSIDE: SIX PLAYS FROM PALESTINE AND THE DIASPORA, and he has had several plays professionally produced.
Ismail Khalidi is a Palestinian American playwright, poet and activist, as well as an actor, educator and journalist on occasion.
Khalidi holds an MFA from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and is the author of the award-winning play Tennis in Nablus. His plays have been produced and read at theaters and universities around the country and abroad, including Atlanta's Tony Award-winning Alliance Theatre (Tennis in Nablus, 2010). Khalidi's other plays include Truth Serum Blues, which was commissioned and produced by Pangea World Theater (2005), Final Status, and most recently, Sabra Falling.
Khalidi's writing on politics and culture has appeared in The Nation, Guernica, The Daily Beast, American Theatre Magazine, Remezcla, and The Atlanta Journal Constitution. His poetry and plays have been published by Mizna, where he was recently a writer-in-residence. Khalidi is the co-editor of Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora (TCG, 2015) and is co-adapting Ghassan Kanafani's Return to Haifa for the stage. Khalidi currently lives between New York City and Chile.