Commissions
"The Four Hijabs" is an animated short film that explores the multiple meanings of four hijabs mentioned in 16 Qur'anic verses and interprets them through Arab Muslim feminist lenses.
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Inspired by the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy in New York City, Mosque Alert tells the story of three fictional families living in Naperville, Illinois, whose lives are interrupted by a proposed Islamic Center on the site of a beloved local landmark. Mosque Alert explores the intersections of zoning and Islamophobia with humor, family drama, and refreshingly blunt honesty.
Read More"Meet Mosque Alert" is a compilation of content created in Steps 1 through 4 of Jamil Khoury's 9-Step new play development and civic engagement process. Mosque Alert tells the story of two suburban American families living in Naperville, IL—one Christian, the other Muslim—who find their lives torn apart by a proposal to build a new mosque in their community.
Read MoreA thought-provoking and often-humorous reflection on the theoretical and practical differences between two powerful social ideas: multiculturalism and polyculturalism.
Read MoreSacred Stages: A Church, A Theatre, and A Story (28min, 37sec), tells the unique and inspiring story of the relationship between the First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple—Chicago's oldest Christian congregation—and Silk Road Rising, a theatre company founded in response to 9/11 and dedicated to showcasing playwrights of Asian and Middle Eastern backgrounds. A shared commitment to storytelling, racial and economic justice, and LGBT inclusion characterizes this profound partnership between a religious community and a secular theatre.
Read MoreIn 1880s Damascus, two rival clerics are mired in a feud that tears the city apart. Political ambition, religious fundamentalism, and sexual hypocrisy fan the theatrical flames in this blistering critique of patriarchy and power in the Arab world.
Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous (1941–1997) has been called both the Bertolt Brecht and the Wole Soyinka of the Arab theatre. His plays are to the Arab world what Vaclav Havel’s plays were to the Iron Curtain.
Read MoreIn a depressed Cleveland neighborhood amidst a fierce winter storm, an Indian American brother and sister, long estranged, are reunited by the sudden death of their father. Enter their late father’s African American confidante and gambling bookie, and a slew of family secrets get unearthed. The Lake Effect sets in motion a complicated web of relationships and conflicts that challenge our perceptions of race, gender, and success.
Read MoreSpanning from the Ottoman Empire to New York City, and across three generations of an Armenian and Dominican family, Adriana Sevahn Nichols' Night Over Erzinga explores how a man can lose everything but his heart, and how a grandmother can reach through time, unearth an untold story, and bring her children “home.” From collective tragedy to personal triumph, ancestors reunite with the living in a breathtakingly beautiful journey toward making peace with the past and reclaiming one’s heritage.
Read More"The Balancing Arab" tells the story of Heidi (played by Leslie Frame), an Irish American personal fitness trainer, and Hanan (played by Amira Sabbagh), her once morbidly obese Arab American client. Set in a downtown Chicago gym amidst a strenuous training session, the mood turns tense as the two women recount an event at the Arab American Cultural Center a few nights earlier, an event at which the evening’s political discourse got filtered through decidedly different lenses.
Read MoreIt’s Abbott and Costello meet the Arab Spring in Yussef El Guindi’s political farce. An Egyptian revolutionary, an American collector of antiquities, and a reanimated mummy—just three of the characters in this sexy, slapstick romp where ideological opposites attract and the “new” Middle East is never too far from the same old same old.
Read MoreSilk Road Rising's "Not Quite White: Arabs, Slavs, and the Contours of Contested Whiteness" (24 min, 8 sec), directed by Jamil Khoury and Stephen Combs, is a documentary film that explores the complicated relationship of Arab and Slavic immigrants to American notions of whiteness.
Read More"both/and" breaks the shackles of "either/or" in this semi-autobiographical short video play by Jamil Khoury. In "both/and," the characters of Jamil, Arab Man, and Gay Man explore and explode the constructed borders between American and Arab, Arab American and gay, for profit and not for profit, and assorted other disputed territories.
Read MoreTheatre meets science when a diverse group of playwrights each agree to take a genealogical DNA test and revisit their assumptions about identity, politics, and the perennial "who am I" question. Self, family, community, and ethnicity are all up for grabs.
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