FOMITE

Two plays that bring together Palestinians and Jews in what once was called Palestine and is now called Israel. 

In The Mulberry Tree, friends and neighbors in a mixed village of Jews and Palestinians struggle to maintain friendships and lives during the year 1948, as the place called Palestine is removed from the map of the world.

The Return begins when two people meet in an auto-repair shop. One is Palestinian, one is Israeli Jewish. They may or may not have known each other in the past. By the end, both of their lives will be changed forever by the realities of present-day Israel. 

The Return was one of the first plays to be performed by a Palestinian company in Hebrew for a mixed audience of Israeli Jews and Palestinians inside Israel. The Mulberry Tree is scheduled for a world premiere in New York City in 2024.

“The Return is a taut, politically charged two-hander . . . underscores the ways that simple one-on-one human relationships are often the principal casualties of unending conflict, while raising wider questions about what such conflicts can do to a nation’s soul.”

— The Boston Globe

About the Authors

Hanna Eady and Edward Mast have been writing plays together since they met in Seattle in 1995.  Hanna Eady grew up as a Palestinian in Northern Israel and had come to Seattle years earlier for graduate school in directing.  Edward Mast was returning home from his first of many trips to the Occupied Palestinian Territories.  Their first collaboration was Sahmatah, a play drawn from testimonies by residents of one of the Palestinian villages destroyed during the founding of Israel in 1948.  Sahmatah premiered in 1996 in Seattle, and then premiered in Arabic in 1998 on the original site of the village itself inside what is now Israel.  Other plays they have written together include Loved Ones: Families of the Incarcerated, Letters from Palestine in the Time of the Virus, and The Love Tunnel: A Comedy of Occupation.