Review: A Knock on the Roof, One Mom’s Plan to Survive War in Gaza

If you had just five minutes to gather your family and most precious belongings and leave before your house was destroyed, what would you grab? Khawla Ibraheem poses that question to the audience in her nail-biting solo play A Knock on the Roof, now appearing at New York Theatre Workshop in a co-production with piece by piece productions in partnership with the Under the Radar festival. Eschewing the 10,000-foot political and historical view so favored by Americans when considering the forever war in the Levant, Ibraheem puts us directly on the ground in Gaza.

The title refers to the Israeli Air Force practice of dropping a low-yield bomb on civilian buildings as a warning to the residents that, within minutes, everything will be destroyed. Israel’s supporters would argue that no other military on earth offers its targets (and the innocent civilians who surround them) such a generous opportunity to escape, and that this is evidence that the IDF is the most humane and scrupulous fighting force on earth.  But for Mariam (Ibraheem) it is a source of ever-mounting dread.

With her husband studying abroad, Mariam is responsible for the wellbeing of both her elderly mother and her six-year-old son. When war breaks out during a sweltering Mediterranean summer, she begins training for the moment Israel knocks on her roof. This involves waking in the middle of the night (so as not to disturb her sleeping family) and lugging a pillowcase (stuffed so that it weighs roughly as much as her son) down seven flights of stairs. Mariam wants to know just how far she can get in five minutes, reasoning that the ruins of an already-demolished apartment building several blocks away is the safest refuge from Israeli bombs.

But, of course, a real six-year-old is rarely as compliant as a sack of books. The heavier he is, the less capacity she has for precious objects like family photos and government documents — which she will need if she’s ever to get her family out of Gaza. Miriam is all too aware that, should the actual knock come, the stairs won’t be clear as they are during her drills, but full of panicked people. And even if she does manage to get out, where will she go when her home is destroyed?

Ibraheem does an excellent job of conveying Mariam’s suffocating life in Gaza. On one of her practice runs, she is confronted with a gun-wielding man who admonishes her to cover her hair. When she returns, her mother accuses her of sneaking off in the night to be with a lover. Oppressed on the ground and menaced from above, Mariam is squeezed from all sides — a pressure that forges a small gem of a performance.

Ibraheem has some rough qualities as a solo performer. The voices and postures she puts on as different characters are not nearly as distinct as they could be. And it’s easy to miss words and phrases in the river rush of her delivery (she is, of course, not performing in her native tongue). But she has an unmistakable talent for connecting with the audience and, under her spell, we feel Mariam’s anxiety in our bones.

Director Oliver Butler has staged a smartly austere production around Ibraheem’s unvarnished yet captivating performance. A single kitchen chair is the only piece of furniture in Frank J Oliva’s scenic design. Lighting designer Oona Curley begins the play with the house lights up and slowly dims them as a way of pulling us into the deep end, an old trick that still works. Rami Nakhleh pipes the muted sounds of Gaza into the theater, underscoring Mariam’s practice runs with pumping techno music like she’s in a particularly perverse game show. Hana S. Kim’s projections offer the illusion of movement during those runs, casting the silhouette of urban devastation on the upstage brick wall. Mariam dashes toward the audience wearing Jeffrey Wallach’s casual costume, something we could see on any American woman shopping at Target.

Detractors might question the plausibility of Ibraheem’s story. Is Mariam, the highly educated daughter of a Christian father and Muslim mother (!), really an accurate representation of the average resident of Gaza? But such quibbles merely seek to distract from the fact that, for over a year real human beings (not all of them hardened terrorists) have lived with the threat of death hanging over them, and their peril is far from over.

An extra cheer goes to NYTW, a company that has been subjected to a particularly perverse form of emotional blackmail, but fearlessly persists with this kind of controversial but vital programming. Artistic director Patricia McGregor and her company clearly understand the theater’s power to make the coldly political intimately personal.