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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28.3 (2006) 93-102



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Intimate Histories

It has been said of playwright Naomi Wallace that her work mixes politics and poetry. Sharp, witty, and immensely varied, her plays have been widely produced and are some of the most dynamic and politically literate texts of our time. In 1999 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. For the past eight years she has lived in Yorkshire. In Britain Wallace has worked with the National Theatre and with smaller companies, such as 7:84, for which she wrote State of Innocence, and Menagerie, which produced her short play The Retreating World in 2004. Several of her plays appear in a volume entitled In the Heart of the Country and Other Plays. This conversation took place in York, UK, in March 2006.

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I want to begin by talking to you about State of Innocence, and the genesis of that play.

I wrote it originally for a theatre in Scotland, 7:84.1 They asked for a play about September 11th. I wasn't familiar with the 7:84 at that time, but I wrote it for them because I appreciated that they advertise themselves as the last socialist theatre company in the UK. I've been deeply interested in the Middle East for many years now. I have family there, on both sides: Palestinian family through marriage, and my great, great grandfather was a rabbi. So like many families, my family had some interesting mixes. I first went to Jerusalem with the British director David Gothard in 2002, to set up a tour for six American playwrights. We six spent a week there, traveling throughout the illegally Occupied Territories and Gaza. We met with theatre artists in Israel, but our main purpose was to meet with our Palestinian colleagues and to witness the unimaginably oppressive and dangerous situations they work under, especially in the Occupied Territories. For Theatre 7:84, I wrote about a zoo in Rafah that had been bulldozed by the IDF. This brutal, ridiculous action of destroying a children's zoo stayed with me. Many of the animals were killed by the dozers' treads. The turtles were crushed. I have a thing about turtles. I grew up in a rural area of Kentucky. My father often rescued box turtles from the roads and brought them home for us to play with, and then release. I've always admired these slow and careful creatures. But the main incentive for writing the play was a factual [End Page 93] account of an Israeli soldier who was shot by a Palestinian sniper in a doorway in Gaza. The Palestinian mother of this home held the Israeli soldier while he died. That story sparked my interest. At the same time I was wary of the kind of grandiose sentimentality that can surround such a situation. I challenged myself not to allow the play to become a sentimental journey through this very complicated, and yet in some ways uncomplicated, landscape.

To go back to the image of the bulldozed zoo, this is a play about space, and about ruined space, isn't it?

It is, very much so, and its interesting that you say this because I'm doing a theatre project with the Guthrie Theatre of Minneapolis, funded by the Bush Foundation, though not that Bush. This grant sent 11 writers to different parts of the world to write "state of the nation pieces." What I feared was that this project had the potential to become a kind of "scratch and sniff" game, a well-meaning tourist's guide for the visitors of empire, so to speak. So I invited two other writers to write this new play with me, one was Lisa Schlesinger from Iowa City, and the other was Abdel Fatah Abu Srour, a Palestinian writer from Aida camp, just outside Bethlehem. Lisa and I went to the Occupied Territories and met up with Abed. The three of us traveled together and researched the illegal Wall Israel is...

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