Territories.

Laila Abdalla is an associate professor of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and former professor at McGill University.

Territories is a play as much about art as politics. The play is about a play, a one-woman show concerning a young, well-educated, upper-middle class Jewish Canadian woman, with all the social advantages indicated by such circumstances, who moved to Israel and lost a friend through terrorism. As she presents her story, a rather self-centred, insular, yet “liberal” expression of her individual experience, her monologue is interrupted by a member of the audience, a young Palestinian man, whose grandfather originally owned and was evicted from the house she now regards as her family’s. Time and space blend, as the dialogue between the performers moves from North America to the Middle East, from discussion about “who was there first,” through who has the power “to write the other into the play,” to “how to divide the stage.”

The characters are sometimes actors, trusting each other and building dialogue and interaction, or speaking over each other’s lines and refusing to adapt the play to include the other. And sometimes they are combatants, insulting each other’s “typical” behaviours and coming to blows, or trying to divide the state/stage equitably. Sometimes they are idiosyncratic individuals, other times, archetypes of The West and The Palestinians.

This play is also about “acting,” or perhaps better, “posturing,” as it occurs in politics and drama. The “theatre of war” becomes less metaphoric and more literalized, even as the literal level is itself an allegory; it is as if “the play’s the thing wherein to catch the conscience” of a Western audience as it confronts the emotional, historical, traditional, and intellectual complexities of Zionism.

Territories does not pretend to offer a solution. This is an intelligent play; it is provocative and provides insight into why the conflict of the Middle East has not (yet) been resolved.