Who Gets to Speak in Palestinian and Iranian Narratives at ReOrient 2026
by ReOrient Publications Dramaturg Marina Johnson
As a dramaturgy team member of the fourth partnership between Golden Thread Productions and Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA), Publications Dramaturg Marina Johnson takes us inside three ReOrient plays that explore Palestinian and Iranian stories and urgent questions about testimony, censorship, and spectatorship: Camouflage by Ahmed Masoud, Dare Not Speak by Hassan Abdulrazzak, and Regarding Antigone by Banafsheh Hassani.
ABOUT MARINA JOHNSON Marina Johnson recently graduated with her Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from Stanford University. Prior to Stanford, Johnson received her MFA in Directing and taught at Beloit College. She recently directed plays and led workshops at El Hakawati (Jerusalem), Al Harah Theatre (Bethlehem), and ASHTAR Theatre (Ramallah). She is currently living in Palestine, working as a director, dramaturg, and trainer.
For its thirtieth anniversary, Golden Thread Productions’ ReOrient 2026 Festival of Short Plays turns its attention to Palestine and Iran. Since its founding in 1999, ReOrient has sought to challenge reductive representations of the Middle East by foregrounding the multiplicity of voices, aesthetic forms, and political positions emerging from the region and its diasporas. In 2026, we find ourselves addressing these issues with renewed urgency, especially around these two countries on which ReOrient is focused this year.
How can theatre help us make sense of today’s events in the Middle East? Bringing Palestinian and Iranian stories together gives us a space to sit with and process what is happening, especially when both countries are so often talked about in terms of war, security, diplomacy, and crisis. Palestine continues to face the ongoing devastation of Gaza and violence across the occupied Palestinian territories, while debates over how, and even whether, Palestinian suffering can be named and represented continue here in the United States. At the same time, Iran is emerging from a period of mass anti-government protest and violent government crackdowns amid a war initiated by a joint U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign. In each context, the struggle over political power is also a struggle over narrative: over whose testimony is more legitimate, whose deaths can be publicly grieved, and what forms of dissent are allowed to be articulated. About this year’s theme, Artistic Director Nabra Nelson says:
“This year’s focus on Iran and Palestine was not planned, but to me it is also not accidental. Out of 83 submissions, these are the plays that the selection committee recommended, and that speaks to the power of art that speaks to the moment. Art fulfills our need to gather in times of division, to understand differences, and to discuss nuance. These plays do just that. Art can make positive change by shifting the way people think. And with so much information and misinformation about Iran and Palestine, engaging in the nuance and humanity that art brings can help us to synthesize information, have deep discussions, and grasp the complexity of the situations.” (Nabra Nelson)
The plays in this year’s festival approach storytelling about Palestine and Iran in very different theatrical forms. Across these works, the question is not merely what theatre can say about Palestine and Iran, but what it means to speak at all when speech, silence, visibility, and representation have themselves become sites of political struggle. Camouflage begins with fragmentation: its four young Palestinians live in their own cities across the region and demonstrate how forced displacement, siege, and dispossession can produce profoundly different Palestinian experiences. Dare Not Speak shifts from these lived experiences to the problem of representing Palestinian violence onstage while cleverly exposing censorship disguised as artistic neutrality. Regarding Antigone pushes the question further by confronting the audience itself, repeatedly asking why spectators continue watching rather than intervening.
Camouflage by Ahmed Masoud explores seminal moments in four young lives. Their stories emphasize that there is no single Palestinian identity or experience: decades of occupation have separated them across Syria, the West Bank, Gaza, and inside the Green Line. Yet placing these four characters within one play also reveals the shared histories and structures that continue to connect them. This year’s ReOrient production experiments with their separation in a new way, presenting its four scenes split up throughout the evening, allowing audiences to leave and return to these characters and their different worlds over the course of the program. Masoud originally wrote the play for a single actor to take on all four roles, as well as the many characters they encounter. ReOrient is taking a different approach, casting four actors in the central roles and drawing on the larger ensemble to embody the additional characters. The result offers another way of thinking about what it means for these four distinct Palestinian stories to stand on their own while still being part of something shared. About this strategy, Masoud offered, “The play was designed to respond to what is happening at different moments in time…. The play was written with this flexibility in mind.”
First, we meet twelve-year-old Thaer, a Palestinian refugee from Yarmouk camp in Syria, who flees after his home is bombed. He and his friend Salman camouflage themselves with leaves and branches to escape the fighting, but Salman eventually turns back while Thaer continues toward Europe. Next in Ramallah, seventeen-year-old Nibal struggles against expectations surrounding gender, marriage, and her father’s position within the Palestinian Authority. One day her father introduces her to Wissam, calling him their new family gardener, who turns out to be more than he seems in this moment of the resistance. Then we move to Gaza, where twenty-year-old taxi driver Zeid searches for romance. Dating is hard enough. Now try Tinder in Gaza. How do you find a match when unemployment, social expectations, and life under siege all impact your love life? Finally, Sami, a Palestinian actor in Haifa, confronts Israeli stereotypes that repeatedly require him to perform Palestinians as terrorists or caricatures. Sami reflects that he might just as easily have been born a refugee in Gaza or Syria, lived under occupation in the West Bank, or shared his grandfather’s continuing displacement after 1948.
The play places their four distinct experiences in conversation: the Nakba, exile, occupation, siege, borders, and the demands to adapt or conceal oneself reverberate differently through each life. The final sequence recalls movements from all four stories, physically linking experiences that political borders have separated. And, although their experiences are unified because of the violence that Palestinian people have experienced, when asked about the performance, Masoud said: “I hope that someone will invite people to laugh. We do have a sense of humor and we do like to laugh as people from Palestine, and often people complain about this; they want to see us as perfect victims and we are not. We still want to laugh and smile, and we want that to spread across the world.”
Dare Not Speak by Hassan Abdulrazzak is a short satirical play about Palestinian storytelling, censorship, and the ways cultural institutions depoliticize Palestinian suffering. It stages a meeting between Hind, a Palestinian writer, and Natalie, a representative of a supposedly progressive theatre. Hind pitches a play about a little girl fleeing south with her family while an occupying army shells the north. A tank attacks their car, killing most of the family. The surviving girl spends hours on the phone with the Red Crescent begging to be rescued, but she is eventually found dead. Natalie insists that her theatre supports diverse and progressive work but considers Hind’s play too “political,” “activist,” and “on the nose.” In a conversation I had with Abdulrazzak, we talked about how the character of Natalie is very real in theatres we all know well but, “they don’t see themselves as censors. They see themselves as people of really good taste, who know what their audience wants.” Hind must decide whether this theatre is ready to tell her story, or if Natalie is ready for what happens if she tries to suppress it.
The play never says her last name or where the girl was, but many audience members will remember the story of the six-year-old Palestinian child Hind Rajab killed in Gaza in January 2024. The play itself emerged from a project responding to Arts Council England’s controversial 2024 warning to funded organizations about “overtly political or activist” statements. Cutting the Tightrope, commissioned by London’s Arcola Theatre, brought together a group of playwrights whose individual contributions were presented while refusing to identify which writer authored each short play. This context gives the play’s concern with institutional censorship an additional layer: its form and authorship were themselves shaped by a theatrical climate in which political speech carried potential institutional consequences. Two films have now been made about Hind’s story, but Abdulrazzak uses this short form and satirical style to give Hind the voice and agency that the theatre institution within the play attempts to suppress.
Regarding Antigone by Banafsheh Hassani is a metatheatrical play in which a single performer moves through a series of characters, telling each of their stories in the first person. Rather than narrating the experiences of people subjected to political violence, the performer repeatedly becomes them, blurring the lines between testimony, reenactment, and lived experience. Blood accumulates on the performer’s body and onstage as they move from one character to another, making it impossible to leave one death behind when the next story begins. The play is subtly set in Iran, but Hassani shared that her intention is that it can happen in any theatre, now – “One of the things I didn’t want was for people watching it who are unfamiliar with these stories to think that this is a story that happens in a faraway land to Brown people; I wanted them to feel like this could be anybody anywhere.”
The performer first becomes a mother whose son was forcibly disappeared seventeen years earlier and who is targeted herself after years of demanding answers. She then becomes a teenage guitarist, enthusiastically imagining her future before a tragic end. Next, she embodies a young protester who tries unsuccessfully to prevent another woman from being taken by security forces. Injured, she returns home without realizing the grave severity of her wounds. Finally, the performer becomes a schoolchild in an authoritarian educational system that isolates and disciplines the children until they believe they have no future. Gradually, the first-person storytelling blurs the lines between character and performer. The performer reveals that they belong to a theatre company rehearsing Antigone as an act of political resistance, the Greek tragedy of a daughter who kills herself after defying the king to bury her brother, in spite of urging from her sister Ismene and her love Haemon. Members of the performer’s company have disappeared or died one after another, their Ismene, Haemon, and Antigone actors among them, and the survivors have continually assumed the roles of those they lost. Now the performer is the only one left. When talking to the playwright Hassani about her characters, she shared that “each character that [she] came up with is made up of all these real people that [she had] heard of or [knew].”
Because all these lives pass through one body and one first-person “I,” their deaths accumulate rather than appearing as isolated stories. The performer carries the blood of each previous character into the next, and the direct address implicates the audience. The “I” continually speaks to a “you” who watches but does not intervene, perhaps because they think, after all, that they are here just to watch theatre. Hassani uses the single performing body to connect Antigone’s questions of state violence and resistance to a larger question about spectatorship: how many deaths can an audience witness before the act of just watching makes them complicit?
These three ReOrient plays, Camouflage, Dare Not Speak, and Regarding Antigone, trace a movement from the fragmentation of the Palestinian experience to the institutional suppression of Palestinian testimony, and finally to the ethics of witnessing state violence in Iran. Each play refuses to allow suffering to become abstract, passive, or safely depoliticized. Instead, they insist on theatre as a space in which testimony is embodied, contested, and placed directly before an audience. These plays are shifting the question from Can theatre represent political violence? to What happens once that violence has been represented on stage, and what responsibility does witnessing create? Together, the plays suggest that listening is not enough; once an audience has been made a witness, it must decide what to do with what it now knows.
Experience these stories for yourself at the ReOrient 2026 Festival. See the plays, spend time with the questions they raise, and join the conversations that continue long after the lights come up. Don’t miss your chance to encounter Palestinian and Iranian stories in a space where they can be heard, questioned, and interact with one another.