CurtainUp
The Internet Theater Magazine of Reviews, Features, Annotated Listings


A CurtainUp Review
Noura

I came here with nothing. The charities dressed me, like a child, chose my furniture, my apartment. And I had to be grateful and forget.
— Noura, explaining to her friend Rafa'a that she's now trying to hold one small piece of her past together. As she puts it "If I let go it dies with me." However, as Rafa'a insists "There is no going back, Noura. You can live amongst Arabs, or Christians, or Iraqis anywhere in the world but it will never be the community it was, not again."
noura
Heather Raffo as the title character and Nabil Elouahabi as Tareq (Photo: Joan Marcus).
The American family drama is getting quite a workout at Playwrights Horizons these days. Unlike the theater's most famous dysfunctional clans — Arthur Miller's Lomans, Eugene O'Neill's Tyrones or Tracy Letts's Westons— actor-playwright Heather Raffo has built her drama around a Christian Iraqi family of newly naturalized citizens.

It took those Pulitzer prize winning playwrights' families 2 1/2 to 3 1/3 hours to let their past and present problems unfold. Raffo too has plenty of tensions to unpack. Perhaps too many since unpacking is done in just 90 minutes and 14 scenes, some lasting just a minute or so.

That brevity's problems notwithstanding, Noura has the aura of a contemporary epic since the refugee family at its center is from an especially troubled part of the world. Moreover, Raffo has pegged her very modern tale to Ibsen's A Doll's House. Unlike Lucas Hnath's completely re-imagined A Doll's House, Part 2 , the kinship between the attitudes and concerns of Ibsen's and Raffo's characters is very loose. Yet the linkage is obvious from the beginning when we learn that Noura/Nora's husband Tareq/Tim (Nabil Elouahabias) renamed her as well as himself over her objections.

Of course, refugees who's come to these shores long before Noura and Tareq have differed about whether to Americanize their names or stick with the ones on their birth certificates. And this is as much a story about a woman struggling to hold on to the way of life of her birthplace, as the push-pull of the ibsenesque conflict between self-empowerment and the demands of traditional roles,

Director Joanna Settle, who also guided Raffo as the star of her solo play Nine Parts Of Desire, has this time done it for her, this time as the star of a 5-character play. Settle and her designers' grand but essentially simple production supports Raffo's ambitious mini-epic.

Raffo and the four other actors deftly navigate the complexities that shape how they see their lives in America and relationships with each other. However, with so many issues to unspool in such a short time, their interactions at times short change emotionally engaging dramatics for debate-like discussions.

The script's back and forth jumping structure and symbolically apt abstract setting, demands close attention. That said, this is essentially a simple kitchen sink drama. At its center, we have an educated professional woman (an impassioned performance by Raffo) whose nostalgic memories of her home town have made her determined to hold on to its traditions even as her husband Tareq(a forcefully portrayed by Nabil Elouahabias) is determined to be assimilated into their new lives in New York City. He's not bitter about the eight years of menial jobs it took for him pass the test to again prosper as a medical professional, even though never again as a surgeon.

Noura, on the other hand, who supported by working as a math tutor, has used her training as an architect to create the fantasy plans for a a dream home they would share as they once did with other family members like Tareq's five sisters who also emigrated, but not to America. It's that fantasy home that Andrew Lieberman's set of a large room with its curved see-through exterior wall represents.

Noura insists that their annual Christmas celebration follow their church's observing by attending Christmas mass services and fasting before teasting. Her and Tareq's only child Yalen, renamed Alex (a delightful Liam Campora, the only new cast member of the play's world premiere in DC), is more interested in his play station than participating in the church's pageant. To him that play station is an enjoyable fantasy game, to his mother it's a reminder of the violent situation that had her carrying a gun to work before the family's escape from the Islamic persecution of Christians. Despite mother and son's differences the scenes between them add genuine warmth and charm to the play.

While Tareq and Noura both love their son, they both have always yearned for a daughter. To him, their becoming citizens and doing well financially makes now the time to cement their new life with an American daughter. For Noura the way to fulfill that dream is quite different and introduces the familiar device of an invited stranger to bring the simmering marital tensions to a boil.

The stranger in this case is Maryam (Dahlia Azama), an orphan brought up by nuns in Mosul but now on scholarship at Stanford with her expenses covered by Noura and Tareq's sponsorship. But while Noura dreams of Maryam becoming like a daughter to her, the very independent young woman has her own ideas about her future— including a surprise that not only changes her relationship with Noura and Tareq but catapults the play into a tumultuous confrontation.

Also present at the Christmas feast and a regular presence in Noura, Tareq and Yazen's life is Raf'a (a finely nuanced Matthew David), a Muslim friend from the days when Christians and Muslims enjoyed close, familial relationships. While he left Mosul for New York in time to take enough money with him to establish himself as an obstetrician, his past has kept him single and includes another surprise element for that explosive finale. I won't give away details, except to say that it does go into the Ibsen paralleling overdrive with touches of the old women's fiction sin-suffer-repent plot formula.

The chance to become acquainted with people most of us know little about, the strong performances and intriguing stagecraft make this play's payoff greater than its shortcomings. Sad to say, the current protectionist administration has soured friendships between people with different social and religious identities and made this a more divided than united society.






Search CurtainUp in the box below Back to Curtainup Main Page

PRODUCTION NOTES
Noura by Heather Raffo
Directed by Joanna Settle
Cast:Heather Raffo as Noura, Dahlia Azama as Maryam, Liam Campora as Yazen/Alex, Matthew David as Rafa'a and Nabil Elouahabias Tareq/Tim.
Sets: Andrew Lieberman
Costumes: Tilly Grimes
Lighting:Masha Tsimring
Sound: Obadiah Eaves
Stage Manager: Laura Smith
Running Time: 90 minutes, no intermission
Playwrights Horizons Main Stage 416 W 42nd St.
From 11/27/18;Opening 12/10/18; closing 12/30/18.
Reviewed by Elyse Sommer at 12/05/18 press preview


REVIEW FEEDBACK
Highlight one of the responses below and click "copy" or"CTRL+C"
  • I agree with the review of Noura
  • I disagree with the review of Noura
  • The review made me eager to see Noura
Click on the address link E-mail: esommer@curtainup.com
Paste the highlighted text into the subject line (CTRL+ V):

Feel free to add detailed comments in the body of the email. . .also the names and emails of any friends to whom you'd like us to forward a copy of this review.

For a feed to reviews and features as they are posted at http://curtainupnewlinks.blogspot.com to your reader
Curtainup at Facebook . . . Curtainup at Twitter

©Copyright 2018, Elyse Sommer.
Information from this site may not be reproduced in print or online without specific permission from esommer@curtainup.com