Aftermath

See it. It's playing through October 18th at the NY Theater Workshop, on East 4th Street and 2nd Avenue. Tickets are inexpensive.

Nick and I were blown away. It was eye-opening, moving and intense. The premise couldn't be simpler: it's based on a series of interviews with six Iraqi refugees now living in Jordan. Those six, plus the translator, tell their stories. The six represent a range of different kind of people in different kind of situations: a pharmacist, a married couple who are both cooks, an imam, a theater director and his artist wife, a dermatologist, a Christian housewife. The words are lifted directly from the actual interviews, and the performances are astonishing. For us at least, it gave us a real understanding of what's happened there from our invasion to occupation to ongoing presence -- an understanding that we haven't gotten from what we've read or heard.

We were silent in the cab on the way home. It wasn't anything like the quiet when two people find they have nothing to say, or the tense silence that follows an argument. It was a contemplative silence for us both, where we were just taking in what we'd just seen.

Do you know the feeling when you leave a movie or a play and think "everyone needs to see this?" That's how we felt.

I'll have other updates, but this play deserved its own post. And it wants to and needs to be seen.