ReOrient 2026 brings Palestine, Iran to the stage
The ensemble for ReOrient 2026 includes (from left) Charisse Loriaux, Ramtin Vaziri, Hind Jadallah-Karraa and Ameen Safi. Photo by Jared Randolph
In a theater world that seems to be diminishing, we have to celebrate and support rich abundance where we find it. San Francisco’s Golden Thread Productions is the country’s first company (founded in 1996) centered on the writers and stories of the Middle East. One of the company’s signature programs is its annual ReOrient Festival of Short Plays, and this year’s program of five plays homes in on stories from Palestine and Iran.
Amid ongoing war and genocide in these countries, there is no shortage of news and horror and heartbreak and outrage. But there is nothing like art – the work of writers, actors, designers, directors, dramaturgs – to personalize the momentous, to focus attention on unique lives and struggles and make them feel like our own.
Any collection of short works, whether plays or stories, is bound to be a mixed bag, and that’s one of the joys of the short form.
The ReOrient 2026 ensemble surrounds Ameen Safi who plays Thaer, a young Palestinian boy on a boat in the Aegean Sea whose worries hinge on survival and something even more surprisingly personal, in Ahmed Masoud's Camouflage. Photo by Jared Randolph
There are fantastical flights, like Sepehr Jafari’s Homing Pigeons & Co., which toggles between a protester (Leda Rasooli) under arrest in Tehran, her friend (Setareh Greenwood) at home in San Francisco and their shared-custody goldfish, Phoebe. And there are historical documents, like Hannah Khalil’s Blood Fruit, about a quiet but powerful 1984 revolt in Dublin, when a grocery store clerk (Charisse Loriaux) refused to handle produce imported from apartheid South Africa.
Both of these pieces are direct and politically powerful.
Hassan Abdulrazzak’s Dare Not Speak also traffics effectively in the supernatural, and it’s one of several plays here that take a meta route, telling stories about telling stories or making art about making art. In this one, a playwright (Hind Jadallah-Karraa) with a powerful tale to tell – based on the true story of young Hind Rajab and her family fleeing Israeli forces in Gaza in 2024 – pitches a San Francisco theater producer (Loriaux) who flinches at what her board and funders might do at the mere mention of Palestine.
The centerpiece of this year’s festival is the multi-part Camouflage by Ahmed Masoud. Its four scenes are spread across the evening’s two-plus hours, and they are extraordinarily rich in emotion and humor. Scene 1, “Thaer,” opens the evening with a combination coming-of-age tale as a 12-year-old Palestinian refugee in Syria, Thaer (Ameen Safi), who flees to safety when his home is bombed. His journey is fraught and extensive but laced with the kind of insights only a tween boy can bring.
Leda Rasooli (right) plays Halan in Tehran and Setareh Greenwood plays Tina in San Francisco as the two friends juggle overthrowing a dictatorship and sharing custody of a pet fish in Sepehr Jafari's Homing Pigeons & Co. Photo by Jared Randolph
Scene 2, “Nibal,” is the best of the four (which is saying something because they are all, in their way, fantastic). Nibal (Jadallah-Karraa) is a teenager living with her father in Ramallah on the West Bank. She cares about boys and lying out by her pool. But what at first looks like the makings of a rom-com – a dissident on the run (Ramtin Vaziri as Wissam) seeks shelter and then becomes a pool boy/gardener/crush magnet – soon gives way to harsh, life-altering reality.
The festival’s second half opens with Scene 3, “Zeid,” the comic highlight of this collection thanks mainly to an irresistible performance by Thameen Mansour as the title character, a Gaza taxi driver with some very distinct thoughts about using Tinder in his city. There’s a lot more than comedy here, of course, and the poignancy is only heightened by our growing affection for this industrious young man.
The festival’s final two pieces make for a powerful double whammy. In the last Camouflage scene, “Sami,” Masoud takes us into the world of a charismatic Palestinian actor (Vaziri) working – or trying to work – in Israel, and asks how much of his beliefs he’s willing to sacrifice for a job. That’s followed by Banafsheh Hassani’s shattering Regarding Antigone, in which an actor (Dina Zarif) uses Sophocles as a bloody platform to explore the lives of Iranian women: mothers whose sons were “disappeared,” protesters who were murdered, teenagers caught in the twin terrors of adolescence and state violence, journalists whose work landed them in prison, a competitive rock climber punished for not wearing a hijab. How do you fight tyranny when everything is against you and you know your fight will likely end in tragedy? If you’re Antigone or one of her spiritual descendants, you do it anyway.
Artists continue to use art as a connector – across time, history, cultures, languages and religions – and as a way to see into lives other than our own. It’s activism at its most beautiful. And its most powerful.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Golden Thread’s ReOrient Festival of Short Plays 2026 continues through Nov. 1 at Potrero Stage, 1695 18th St., San Francisco. Running time: 2 hours and 15 minutes (including intermission). Tickets start at $30. Visit goldenthread.org for information.
