UMass Magazine Online

Fall 2003

Departments

Around the Pond

Features

Experiencing Jeff Corwin

Drawing on the past

Clean-up at the old Davis Mine

Around the Pond

Inhabiting a border

Christopher O'Carroll




	Playwright, producer and actor Betty Shamieh with actor Peter Fattoche. (photo by Ben Barnhart)

“EVEN BEFORE 9/11, IT WAS very hard to be an outspoken Arab-American,” says playwright, producer and actor Betty Shamieh. Her parents emigrated from the Middle East in the 1960’s. Today, she is the acclaimed author and co-star of Chocolate in Heat – Growing Up Arab in America, the first work by a Palestinian-American playwright to achieve an Off Broadway production in New York City. The outspoken Arab gig has not gotten any easier, she reports.

In October, Shamieh brought Chocolate in Heat to UMass under the aegis of the 10-year-old Asian Arts and Culture Program. The day before her performance on campus, she delivered a short lecture to a Thompson Hall theater class and fielded questions from the students. Asked for an example of the difficulties she personally has faced as an Arab in America, she described a post-9/11 theater festival in New York City. Festival organizers, she said, solicited her play about the sister of a Middle Eastern suicide bomber, but later dropped her from the lineup when threatened with withdrawal of festival funding.

Shamieh describes herself as a “political writer” and an “ethnic writer,” although her work deliberately inhabits a border territory between the realms of purely political and purely personal art. In Chocolate in Heat, a female and male character alternate monologues that deal sometimes with political issues and ethnic identity, but sometimes with more universal human experience. In one monologue, an Arab prince attending an American university talks about his strained relations with other Arab students who oppose his nation’s government, and meditates on the death of his mother, who may have been a victim of political assassination. In other monologues, young women deal with date rape, body image issues and other personal matters with relevance far beyond the Arab-American community. “It’s a play,” Shamieh says, “about human beings who happen to be a certain ethnicity.”

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