McGuire Proscenium Stage / Jan 11 – Feb 16, 2020 Noura by HEATHER RAFFO directed by TAIBI MAGAR PLAY GUIDE Inside THE PLAY Synopsis, Setting and Characters • 4 Responses to Noura • 5 THE PLAYWRIGHT About Heather Raffo •7 In Her Own Words • 8 After the Door Slams: An Interview With Heather Raffo •9 CULTURAL CONTEXT The Long Sweep of History: A Selected Timeline of the Land That Is Now Iraq • 12 What’s What: A Selected Glossary of Terms in Noura • 19 Iraq: Ripped From the Headlines • 22 Chaldean Christians • 24 Meet Cultural Consultant Shaymaa Hasan • 25 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION For Further Reading and Understanding • 27 Guthrie Theater Play Guide Copyright 2020 DRAMATURG Carla Steen GRAPHIC DESIGNER Akemi Graves CONTRIBUTORS Shaymaa Hasan, Daisuke Kawachi, Heather Raffo, Carla Steen Guthrie Theater, 818 South 2nd Street, Minneapolis, MN 55415 EDITOR Johanna Buch ADMINISTRATION 612.225.6000 All rights reserved. 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The Minnesota State Arts Board received additional funds to support this activity from the National Endowment for the Arts. 2 \ GUTHRIE THEATER PHOTO: GAMZE CEYLAN, KAL NAGA, LAYAN ELWAZANI, AARYA BATCHU AND FAJER KAISI IN NOURA (DAN NORMAN) “In letting go of the burden of silence — you open a door. Or maybe you close a door. Either way it’s a place from which you never return.” – Noura to Rafa’a in Noura About This Guide This play guide is designed to fuel up on a play before you see it DIG DEEPER your curiosity and deepen your onstage. Or perhaps you’re a fellow If you are a theater company understanding of a show’s history, theater company doing research and would like more meaning and cultural relevance for an upcoming production. information about this so you can make the most of your We’re glad you found your way production, contact Resident theatergoing experience. You might here, and we encourage you to Dramaturg Carla Steen at be reading this because you fell in dig in and mine the depths of this [email protected]. love with a show you saw at the extraordinary story. Guthrie. Maybe you want to read GUTHRIE THEATER \ 3 THE PLAY PHOTO: GAMZE CEYLAN AND AARYA BATCHU IN NOURA (DAN NORMAN) Synopsis Having fled their native Iraq years ago, Noura, her husband Tareq and their son Yazen live in New York City as newly minted U.S. citizens. Their SETTING New York City. Christmas Eve, passports now carry their Americanized names — Nora, Tim and Alex — 2016. but Noura is uncomfortable with the change. She’s restless on Christmas Eve yet looking forward to a modest gathering of family and friends for Christmas dinner. She finally gets to meet Maryam, an Iraqi orphan she’s CHARACTERS Noura, an architect originally sponsored, who is visiting during a break from her graduate studies at from Mosul, Iraq. Now Stanford. Rounding out the guest list is Noura’s childhood friend Rafa’a. an immigrant living in New York City. When Maryam arrives ahead of schedule to drop off gifts, Noura is dismayed to discover that Maryam is pregnant — and unapologetic. Tareq, her husband, originally Maryam planned the pregnancy and wants the baby because she’s from Baghdad. A former never had a family of her own. Noura is shocked at Maryam’s brazenness surgeon in Iraq. Now an and worries how Tareq will react. On Christmas, Noura must face past emergency room hospitalist in secrets, figure out how, or if, to move forward when she’s caught New York City. between two countries and determine what sacrifice is necessary to Rafa’a, Noura’s childhood make movement possible. neighbor from Mosul and a close family friend. An OB-GYN. Yazen, Noura and Tareq’s very American son. Maryam, a graduate student in physics studying at Stanford. Also originally from Mosul. 4 \ GUTHRIE THEATER THE PLAY Responses to Noura Identity is the hottest topic in American theater these days, just as immigration is the hottest topic in American politics. But Heather Raffo’s “Noura,” a drama about a family of Iraqi Catholics who have fled to America to escape the “medieval madmen” (as one character calls them) who now rule their native land, is nothing like the issue-driven, stridently politicized plays about these subjects with which our stages are currently clogged. While “Noura” is palpably political, it preaches no sermons, PHOTO: FAJER KAISI AND GAMZE CEYLAN IN NOURA (DAN NORMAN) nor will it send you home inspired to do anything in particular. Part 2,” a variation on Ibsen’s 1879 life while simultaneously mourning Instead, Ms. Raffo has given us a tale of the feminist liberation of the loss of the “dying identity” human drama, the searing story of Nora Helmer. Noura is no less with which she admits to being five people who find themselves desperate to free herself from the “obsessed.” Hers is the exile’s fate, caught between the pulverizing dead hand of the past, crushed to be neither one thing nor the grindstones of politics and religion. as she is by “the weight of being other, and part of the dark beauty If it’s propaganda you seek, go erased. Of not belonging anymore. of “Noura” is that it shows us what elsewhere — but should you do so, Anywhere.” But … Ms. Raffo has she stands to lose by setting sail on you’ll miss one of the finest new given us a free-standing, fully the sea of freedom. plays I’ve ever reviewed in independent work of art, one which this space. … acknowledges that there can be Terry Teachout, “‘Noura’: The Weight of no easy answers for Noura, much Being Erased,” The Wall Street Journal, As is hinted by the title, “Noura” is, less her family, as she seeks to December 21, 2018 like Lucas Hnath’s “A Doll’s House, negotiate the thin ice of American GUTHRIE THEATER \ 5 THE PLAY In Heather Raffo’s play “Noura,” a family of Iraqi refugees in New York struggle with displacement, loss, post-traumatic stress and decades-old secrets on a snowy Christmas Eve. The Brooklyn playwright based her 90-minute drama … on the classic Norwegian drama “A Doll’s House.” Yet while the lead characters and several plot elements were clearly inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play, the inspiration proves an uneven fit. In “A Doll’s House,” the lead character Nora is unfairly caged by the strict societal mores expected PHOTO: AKSHAY KRISHNA AND GAMZE CEYLAN IN NOURA (DAN NORMAN) of 19th-century women. But the title character in “Noura” is trapped The name is no accident. “Noura” The story is barely Ibsen, though in the prison of her own mind. … is in part a response to “A Doll’s you recognize Ibsen’s Nora as House,” the Ibsen classic in which Raffo’s title character sneaks a Raffo, whose father grew up in Nora Helmer shocked the world cigarette. For Nora, the stolen Iraq, worked for three years with by leaving her husband — and pleasure was macaroons, but Arab-American women in New her children — in a flight of self- Noura’s husband, Tareq, isn’t nearly York to develop the 2018 play. That discovery. Still, this is no homage or the forbidding puppet master of lends great detail and color to the sequel. Ms. Raffo isn’t as interested the Ibsen drama. … memories, job challenges, traditions in the plot that led Nora to slam the and daily lives of the five fictional famous door on Torvald as in what The easygoing dialogue provides characters in “Noura,” who are she lost in the process. No wonder a nice window into middle-class Christian and Muslim immigrants Noura is obsessed with doors, both immigrant lives too seldom seen from Mosul and Baghdad. as an architect and a refugee: on U.S. stages. Noura’s Iraqi roots After allowing you exit they shut are deep, so she and Tareq have Pam Kragen, “‘Noura’ has tough act of you out. … sponsored Maryam, a college-age balancing past, present,” The San Diego woman fleeing the Islamic State. … Union-Tribune, September 29, 2019 This is a loving, productive family, adjusting well to snow and subways The finish is torrential, and the (both the transportation and the portrait of a woman torn between sandwich shop). Whether called cultures and family members is Tareq or Tim, Noura’s husband nearly searing. … But “Noura,” too, is no Torvald; he has a modern has tragic dimension, and even disposition and seems comfortable with its New York City setting, its catering to his wife. Alex, despite evocation of a shattered Iraq his jones for Minecraft, is not is haunting. so Americanized as to sass his parents too harshly or renounce the Nelson Pressley, “‘Noura’ is the best premiere pleasures of cuddling. of the Women’s Voices Theater Festival,” The Washington Post, February 14, 2018 Jesse Green, “In ‘Noura,’ an Iraqi Refugee Leaves More Than Home Behind,” The New York Times, December 10, 2018 6 \ GUTHRIE THEATER THE PLAYWRIGHT belonging for veterans and their families as well as Iraqis.