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Screening will start at 12:00 Noon US EST; 18:00 Europe; 19:00 Palestine; 17:00 UK; 05:00 New Zealand; running time, 70 minutes; English; performance date, 2023. The screening of the play will be followed by a Q&A discussion with audience featuring the playwrights, Hanna Eady and Edward Mast of Dunya Productions.
About the Play
By Dunya Productions
A woman walks into an autobody shop in the mid-sized city of Herzliya, Israel, and starts talking to a mechanic who works there—the only one at work on a Saturday (Shabbat). This seems quite spontaneous until the conversation progresses and we begin to realize that a mystery is unfolding. One of them is Palestinian, one of them is Jewish Israeli—and by the end of the play, both of their lives will be changed forever by the realities that surround them.
The Return has been produced in Boston, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Seattle to rave reviews, including “a tennis match of the wits” (48 Hills) and “International and intimate affairs commingle to harrowing effect in The Return. [The play] not only humanizes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it reveals new dimensions of its impact” (Bay Area Reporter). “Sometimes a play comes along that’s so seemingly simple, so low-tech, yet so intense, that it reminds you how little is needed to unleash the magic of live theater” (Local News Matters).
About the Playwrights
By Dunya Productions
Hanna Eady and Edward Mast have been writing plays together since they met in Seattle in 1995. Eady, who grew up as a Palestinian in northern Israel, had come to Seattle years earlier for graduate school in directing. Mast had recently returned to Seattle from the first of his many trips to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Their first collaboration was Sahmatah, a play drawn from testimonies by residents of one of the Palestinian villages destroyed during the founding of Israel in 1948. Sahmatah premiered in 1996 in Seattle, and then premiered in Arabic in 1998 on the original site of the village itself inside what is now Israel. Other plays they have written together include Loved Ones: Families of the Incarcerated; Letters from Palestine in the Time of the Virus; The Love Tunnel: A Comedy of Occupation; and The Mulberry Tree, which recently premiered in New York.
In 2019, Eady and Mast founded Dunya Productions, a Seattle-based theater group whose mission is to amplify the voices of the Middle East, North African (MENA) people, as well as other marginalized communities. Through performance art, the group aims to inspire audiences to engage in the global struggle for social and political justice.