INTERVIEW: Noor Theatre celebrates Middle Eastern artists
Photo: Noor Theatre and New York Theatre Workshop’s production of Food and Fadwa, written by Lameece Isaaq and Jacob Kader, originally ran in 2012. Photo courtesy of Noor Theatre / Provided by official site.
The New York Theatre Workshop has recently added several theatrical companies to their company-in-residence initiative, and perhaps the model for these future collaborations is Noor Theatre, an acclaimed theater company that celebrates artists of Middle Eastern descent. Noor and NYTW have been working together for more than a decade, and in that timespan, there have been many accomplishments and activist causes along the way.
Lameece Issaq is the founding artistic director of Noor Theatre, which, according to its official site, supports world premiere productions, commissions, partnerships, a reading forum and a 48-hour play festival. In other words, they stay busy with artistic creation. One of their recent highlights was the off-Broadway production of First Down, written by SEVAN and directed by Johanna McKeon. The play centers on an NFL player as he wrestles with the decision to come out as an Arab-Muslim during the Super Bowl, according to press notes.
Isaaq has been at the nexus of this artistic creation for the past dozen years. She is an actor, writer and producer, and she has worked with the Public Theater, in addition to other companies. She helped Noor achieve an Obie Award, and she is the writer of the acclaimed play Food and Fadwa, penned with Jacob Kader. This play serves as a nice example of Noor and NYTW’s collaboration; the two companies co-produced the show during the 2011-2012 season, with Shana Gold directing.
Before Noor, there was the Nibras Theatre Collective, a company focused on producing work from Arab American artists. Isaaq was friends with many people in Nibras, and she and Kader actually wrote the first act of Food and Fadwa for a Nibras event that offered opportunities to playwrights writing shows about Palestine. That opportunity was also associated with NYTW.
“And that’s how I got connected to the workshop, so Linda Chapman, who was at the time the associate artistic director, saw the reading,” Isaaq said in a recent phone interview. “And she was excited about the play, so Jake and I started to develop the play further. And we submitted this play to be in one of their summer residencies.”
Eventually, Nibras disbanded, with the artists heading in different directions, Isaaq said. She spent the next few years developing Food and Fadwa at NYTW, and there was a conversation about starting a new theater company that could launch with Isaaq and Kader’s play.
“It would be good to have a theater company that worked on Arab voices,” Isaaq remembers as the pitch. “I thought, well, why don’t we expand that a little so it’s Middle Eastern, so it’s not just the Arab countries. It’s Iran, and maybe we go as far into Europe as Turkey, and we look at Armenians. We had a huge community of artists, so that’s where it all coalesced. We were developing the play. We started the theater company. I started it with two other women who were co-founders, Nancy Vitale and Maha Chehlaoui. Maha was one of the founders of Nibras, too, so that’s kind of how it came together.”
During the Food and Fadwa process, Noor Theatre became official, attaining the coveted 501c3 nonprofit status and the ability to apply for grants. This was an important achievement for Isaaq and the company.
“When you are a BIPOC company and particularly Middle Eastern artists, it’s natural that you’re in the role of activist as well, like so many artists are,” Isaaq said. “When we first started with Noor, we wanted to create a home for these people who are writing and directing or who want to now write and direct and act. Yes, they were doing different things and being produced at different theaters and going into TV and film, but we really did see a need.”
Noor has helped artists with commissions, festivals and readings, and their work has been showcased in New York, Minnesota and Michigan. In addition to being producers of theater, they are also promoters of opportunities for Middle Eastern artists in the theatrical landscape.
“I think the other part of this is when we see something that is off in the theater community, or we see that we’re being misrepresented, or that the opportunity isn’t there for us, Noor has stepped forward and written letters and had open forums with the theater community,” the artistic director said. “There was a play being done at Playwrights Horizons that we were taking issue with because it was a play about two Muslim families written by a white playwright and directed by a white director, and a lot of our friends were in it who are Middle Eastern. But we started having this question: If there are Middle Eastern people on stage or BIPOC people on stage, who are the lead artists? And can we put Middle Eastern voices in a position of power? So we ended up writing this letter to the theater community, and I think it opened up the opportunity for further investigation into this, and giving our writers and actors and directors more of an opportunity.”
Isaaq said there will be more productions and more activism as Noor Theatre continues alongside NYTW and the other companies-in-residence. She believes that the conversations are not only going to come from Noor, but from other BIPOC artists as well.
“So there’s always more work to be done,” she said. “I feel very proud not only of the artistic accomplishments of the company, but also the activism that we’ve been a part of with the community.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Noor Theatre, featuring founding artistic director Lameece Isaaq, is a longstanding company-in-residence with the New York Theatre Workshop. Click here for more information.
