It’s always a little disheartening when an actor in a self-written solo memoir-style play opens by prancing onstage as a 5-year-old. You know you’re likely to get her whole life picture, in neat chronological order, all capsuled into about 90 minutes. Predictable.
Very few actors can carry off playing a child in any case, unless they actually are one.
Luckily, although she’s a little too cloyingly cute as a kid in a princess outfit, Palestinian-Israeli writer-actor Hend Ayoub is such a good performer, especially once she’s past the 5-year-old phase, and has such a distinctive life story to tell, that the world premiere of “Home? (A Palestinian Woman’s Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness),” presented in San Francisco by San Francisco Playhouse and Z Space, has plenty to keep us engaged and sympathetic.
Born and raised in Haifa, as were her ancestors (they did not flee nor were chased out in 1948 as many did/were), Ayoub learned soon enough—especially during the Second Intifada—that Arabs and Jews are separate peoples, and that she and her family are second-class citizens in their ancestral homeland. (In an overly didactic section, Ayoub summarizes the history of the founding of Israel on Palestinian land going back to 1896.)
But her beloved mother encouraged her to be a liberated woman, to forego engineering school in favor of her actorly dreams. Ayub ended up as a New York-based theater and TV actor.
As she narrates her life from age 5 to her struggle to find theater jobs in New York (and to write this solo show), you realize how prescient her mother was. Ayoub inhabits a vast assortment of characters, from her cigarette-smoking mom to a deep-voiced Israeli-Jewish ticket-taker at the airport to her snippy older sister, elderly and stooped grandmother and much more.
That’s what brings the play to life. Guided by the excellent director Carey Perloff for San Francisco Playhouse’s new-plays Sandbox Series, Ayoub is precise, specific, detailed. Her characters have different physical attributes, voices and vocal patterns, their accents range from authentic American English to Hebrew to Arabic, they’re infused with inherent life. Some of the lines are in Hebrew and Arabic, too.
Her struggles to succeed feel honest if not particularly fresh or surprising. A Palestinian friend accuses her of abandoning her people, selling out by moving to America and seeking an acting career. “I’m not an activist,” Ayoub says.
In a particularly affecting scene, she mourns the loss of her mother.
This is a straightforward, unfussy play, its material well suited to an unadorned production; there’s little décor to speak of, and some video projections by Spenser Matubang to jazz it up a bit.
At the end it’s clear that Ayoub’s mother was right: choosing to act was perfect for her daughter, whose life story, told without theatrical gimmicks, is funny at times and for the most part quietly affecting.
“Home” continues through Aug. 16 at Z Below, 470 Florida St., San Francisco. Tickets are $46 at sfplayhouse.org.
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