Avram/Ibrahim Miari’s Play In-Between
CFA’s TheaterLab@855 was transformed into a caleidoscope of scenes from the life of Avram/Ibrahim Miari, the author and performer of a one-person play he calls “In Between” that held an audience of about 80 students and community members spell-bound for 90 minutes. In scenes that evoked many different emotions and left no one indifferent Miari compellingly brought to the stage what it means to live as a Jew and an Arab in Israel today, to find one’s path between deeply divided communities, and to find love and intimacy where mutual suspicion and contempt are the rule. The play unfolded on two levels: at Ben Gurion Airport where the security guard (Miari) interrogated the unlikely traveler (Miari) using a suitcase belonging to Sara, his American Jewish fiancé, and in the narration of encounters between Miari, Sara, and his Muslim family back in Acco/Acca. Trained in Haifa as well as at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts theater program, Miari used techniques honed by Grotowsky, including over-life-sized puppets and just a few stage props, music, dance, and lighting, to mesmerize the audience and make others feel what it means to be seen as “not Jewish enough, not Muslim enough, not Arab enough.”
The show was presented by the Jewish studies faculty initiative The Other Within.
For a pre-show review by Susan Seligson (BU Today) see /today/2012/ibrahim-miari-a-man-in-between/.