This play about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict wasn't supposed to be about politics. It failed.
The personal and political collide in Rimah Jabr and Natasha Greenblatt's 'Two Birds One Stone'
The friendship between theatre makers Rimah Jabr and Natasha Greenblatt is resoundingly strong, and it also calls out some of the issues at stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — namely, that the women come from the two polarizing sides of the argument.
Jabr is Palestinian, from the West Bank — she moved to Canada in 2015 — and Greenblatt is Jewish. When Greenblatt traveled to Israel, she was struck by the dispute and came back thinking, "I want to talk about that — I don't feel comfortable with how that is."
The result of that friendship between the two is Two Birds One Stone, about to go into its second run at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre. Jabr and Greenblatt created the play collaboratively over eight months. In this video, you meet the pair and see how friendship and politics got inextricably entwined in the writing of Two Birds One Stone.
Watch the video:
The first rule they set for the project was that they weren't going to get political. But as they explain, they found themselves unable to stay away from the topic.
The two creators star in the play and each take on multiple roles. Inspired by both fictional and real events, the narrative revolves around Greenblatt and Jabr each trying to find a family landmark in the same town. In the case of Greenblatt, it's a house, bought by her great-grandfather in 1948 after he lost most of his family to the Holocaust. She goes to Israel to find the building. Meanwhile, Jabr wants to leave her home, family and responsibilities in the West Bank — but her grandmother urges her to find the familial house in Israel, lost in 1948. So the two protagonists are pulled together by the forces of their family histories, memories and the desire for self-discovery.
Two Birds One Stone, written by Greenblatt and Jabr and directed by Guillermo Verdecchia, is at the Tarragon Theatre WorkSpace in Toronto, June 21-30.
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