SABRA FALLING to Make World Premiere at Pangea World Theater

Pangea World Theater will present its first production of its 2017-2018 season, the world premiere of Sabra Falling by Ismail Khalidi.

This darkly witty and powerful play takes place in the Sabra refugee camp during the last days of heavy Israeli bombardment of Beirut, Lebanon. Marking the 35th anniversary of the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila camps, the play explores the dangerous theatre of life and war, and the role memory and love play in the quest to resist and survive.

Sabra Falling opens September 15th, 2017 at The Avalon Theatre located at 1500 E Lake St, Minneapolis, MN 55407. Performances run September 15th - October 1st at 7:30pm Thursdays through Saturdays, and at 2:30pm on Sundays. Tickets are $18 general admission, $15 groups of ten or more, and $12 for students and seniors. For more information visit our website, www.pangeaworldtheater.org. Call 1-800-838-3006 to reserve your tickets.

Playwright Khalidi takes audiences to the city of his birth at one of its darkest moments. It is August 1982, and war-torn Beirut is under siege from air, land and sea. Set in the Sabra refugee camp, the specter of a massacre looms as the Akawi family receives an unexpected visitor that brings the past rushing back and alters the course of events to come.

Khalidi's parents lived through the brunt of the civil war in Beirut in the 1970s and early '80s and gave birth to three children amidst the unspeakable bloodshed of the Israeli invasion of 1982. Khalidi and his family fled to the United States in 1983, never to return. His play, Sabra Falling, is an ode to his parents and to the politics, humor, tragedy and the importance of that historical moment.

Reflecting on the process of creating Sabra Falling, playwright Khalidi shared, "I have, over the past three plus years had the opportunity and the pleasure to develop my play Sabra Falling with Pangea World Theater. In this time, and due to the multi-faceted support from Pangea, the play has evolved from an image and the initial inkling of an idea, to a production-ready two-act play on the verge of its world premiere."

The ensemble will include Adlyn Carreras, Lina Jamoul, Michael Karadsheh, Adri Mehra, Jawdy Obeid and Mohamed Yabdri. The play is written by Ismail Khalidi and directed by Dipankar Mukherjee.

CONVERSATIONS:

Post-Play Discussion
Friday, September 15, 2017 // Post-Performance
The Avalon Theatre
Post-performance talkback with playwright Ismail Khalidi.

The East Side Freedom Library, Pangea World Theatre, and Mizna present:
History and Theater: How Do We Tell the Stories that have been Silenced?
Saturday, September 16, 2017 // 3-4:30pm
The East Side Freedom Library
Pangea is partnering with The East Side Freedom Library and Mizna to host a conversation with playwright Ismail Khalidi and his father Rashid Khalidi, a world-renowned historian and the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. The conversation will explore what happened thirty- five years ago at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon.

Pangea World Theatre and Mizna present:
Memories of the 1967 war and the impact of Sabra and Shatila
Saturday, September 23, 2017 // 5-6:30pm
The Avalon Theatre
Story sharing at the Avalon Theatre hosted by Mizna.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Born in Beirut to Palestinian parents and raised in Chicago, Ismail Khalidi is a 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.

Director Dipankar Mukherjee is the artistic director of Pangea World Theater. He has been leading the organization since its inception over a decade ago. He was invited to join the artistic community in the Twin Cities as a resident director of the Guthrie Theater. He has international experience in creating theater in UK, Canada, India and here in the US. He is a recipient of the Bush Leadership Fellowship award to study non-violence and peace methodologies in India and South Africa. His aesthetic on stage is informed by social justice and equity. His work is politically relevant and deeply spiritual. He has worked closely with noted South African playwright Athol Fugard and has addressed issues of race and reconciliation while creating theater. Dipankar facilitates processes that disrupt colonial, racist and patriarchal modalities of working and collaboratively searches for an alternate way of working. He was recently awarded a Bush Leadership Fellowship for his artistic work on non-violent methodologies post racial and religious violence. He serves on board the The Lake Street Business Council and Mizna.

Pangea World Theater illuminates the human condition, celebrates cultural differences, and promotes human rights by creating and presenting international, multi-disciplinary theater.

Pangea World Theater is a progressive space that brings thinking artists from very diverse backgrounds and ethnicities together to create art for a multiracial audience. As we create work at this particular time in history, when cultural and political divides are rapidly shifting, Pangea offers itself as a place where a mutual respect for differences amongst our artistic collaborators exists, not merely a tolerance for diversity. This is a core value of our artistic vision.

"Our creative cosmology can be represented by a circle where the participating artists inhabit an indispensable space in the circumference, and only the "work" lies at the center. Our aesthetic is enriched by the journey of exploration to and from that center energized by intercultural dialogue, the memories and experiences that artists bring with them, different styles and traditions and the creative process itself. This aesthetic is not fixed; it includes the voices and artistic visions of multiple voices and realities. Pangea's art form is influenced by both western and non-western vocabularies and styles in a complex way." ~Executive Director Meena Natarajan

"Pangea begins from the fundamental paradigm of diversity in the world. Our work expresses this reality and our organization advances this possibility consciously. "Our strategic vision is to build strong alliances across a broad spectrum of artistic and human rights organizations in order to create a powerful collective foundation for work on and off-stage that fully merges alternative and marginalized voices into the mainstream." ~Executive Director Meena Natarajan

Since 1995, Pangea has worked to create and present new possibilities and new aesthetic realities for an increasingly diverse audience. Our artistic direction evolves out of relevant shifts in the social, cultural and political pulse of the communities in which we live and work. We bring artists together to confront stereotypes, push the boundaries of their art forms and challenge audiences with diverse perspectives and aesthetic. Each season Pangea produces, commissions and presents artistic, innovative and genre- crossing works, challenging the expectations of our artists and audiences.

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