‘Noura’ features an actor at the height of her powers
Noura and her family have lived in the U.S. for eight years, but their New York home still looks temporary, as if they’d just moved in.
Books and photos clump on the floor, as little heirloom islands. The only furniture is a kitchen table. And there’s a Christmas tree. Maybe Noura feels that as refugees from Mosul, Iraq, they might have to pack up and flee again. Or maybe she wonders, “What kind of home could this be, anyway?” They’re a world away from where they’re from, or what little is left of it, ever since the Christian community came under heavy attack in the wake of the U.S. invasion.
In “Noura,” whose Bay Area premiere opened Tuesday, Jan. 14, at Marin Theatre Company, in association with Golden Thread Productions, Noura can’t imagine ever again hosting her whole neighborhood for Christmas, as her father did in the old days, and Adam Rigg’s smart set design makes physical the isolation and loneliness that Noura (Denmo Ibrahim) and her husband, Tareq (Mattico David), each feel. Rigg exaggerates the
Denmo Ibrahim as Noura, now at Marin Theatre Company.
way the parallel lines of her floors, walls and ceiling vanish toward a single point, making her apartment look like a severe cinder block cell, or like a giant blunt instrument. Here, atomization doesn’t just wall off and defend; it menaces.
In Heather Raffo’s shattering drama, directed with uncommon sensitivity and discernment by Kate Bergstrom, walls come tumbling down with the arrival of Maryam (Maya Nazzal). While Noura, Tareq and their son, Yazen (Valentino Bertolucci Herrera), have all finally just received their American passports — they’re now officially Nora, Tim and Alex — Maryam is a much more recent refugee from Mosul.
An orphan, she was raised in a convent by Noura’s aunt, and as an act of charity, Noura and Tareq are helping to cover her expenses as she studies at Stanford. Now, meeting Noura in person for the first time, Maryam brings an unsettling surprise. She’s pregnant but unmarried, and she doesn’t apologize for herself, which dredges up all kinds of secrets and shames for Noura and Tareq, as well as for their close friend, Rafa’a (Abraham Makany).
Ibrahim has long been a tower of strength in the Bay Area theater scene, but “Noura” showcases her powers at still loftier heights.
Many great actors can carry a whole scene on their own; Ibrahim can hold up a whole table of people with just her eyes, which might train upward in exasperation, fear, bewilderment and prayer all at once. In moments of silence, her gaze is so communicative that you might have to remind yourself she didn’t just say, “What was that?” or “Maybe he’s right.”
She’s particularly well matched by David and Makany — David with his ability to keep heaping affection and disgust into an explosive ball of confusion, Makany with his quiet focus, his understated tenacity, the leagues of grief he only hints at, by drawing an outline around the absences in Rafa’a’s life.
Each time you think you know what the crux of “Noura” is, Raffo keeps breaking the play open wider and wider, drilling, out of one prickly visit, to the heart of how her characters walk through the world and are stunted by it. Revelations of secrets pile up, and characters speak as if they expect their lines to resound off cliffs, across oceans: “It’s the weight of being erased”; “Forgive her inability to see how much you need to love her.”
In lesser hands, such moments might look cheesy or overwrought, but Bergstrom more than justifies them. Noura’s family needs to talk that way because the whole world keeps being at stake, in a new way, with each beat.
In the past couple of weeks, our world has felt newly at stake, especially in the part of the globe where Noura and her family are from. Raffo’s play is the tale of survivors, and the tentative, repressed lives they’ve eked out suggest a constant backdrop of death and destruction and loss.
Surviving isn’t living, “Noura” points out, and it’s certainly not the same as loving. Surviving is holding in abeyance until you can live and love again, and you can still be in survival mode long after an invasion, long after fleeing.