The Last Taboo? The “Palestine Exception” in American Theatre

Jan 01, 2018

The Seige

Free speech and censorship are notoriously fraught issues and perhaps never more so when one considers, on the one hand, the apparent free for all of social media and the Trump presidency and, on the other hand, the apparent chilling regime of trigger warnings, book bans, and “anti-political correctness.” Throw in the dead weight of corporate media and you’ve got yourself a whole lot of sound and fury signifying very little but suppressing an awful lot. The vast majority of this noise observes one crucial rule: the status quo of hand-over-fist-profit-making by the 1% must not be seriously challenged.

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Naomi Wallace

’s plays have been produced in the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, the Windham Campbell prize for drama and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature.

Ismail Khalidi

, born in Beirut to Palestinian parents, is a writer and director whose plays include Truth Serum Blues (Pangea World Theater), Tennis in Nablus (Alliance Theatre), Foot (Teatro Amal ), Sabra Falling (Pangea) and the co-adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa (Finborough Theatre). Khalidi co-edited (with Naomi Wallace) Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora (TCG, 2015).