Theatre for Young People from Gaza: The Plays of Jackie Lubeck and Theatre Day Productions

The first anthology of youth plays from Gaza and the wider Palestinian region, this timely collection ties together nineteen plays produced by Theatre Day Productions, one of the foremost community theatres in the Middle East. Written by playwright Jackie Lubeck, this collection responds to the siege on Gaza and the Israeli military operations from 2009 to 2014, reflecting how Gazan youth deal with trauma, loss and urban destruction.

In the nineteen plays within this anthology, the reader and theatrical producer witnesses experiences of a forgotten youth, besieged by a silent international community and a brutal wall. The plays are arranged into five different thematic series, which include family entanglements, loss and the fundamental goodness and resourcefulness of human beings.

Jackie Lubeck is a multi-national no-national playwright, living the better part of her life in Palestine. She is the co-founder of Theatre Day Productions (TDP), an organization that is both a production house for youth theatre and a training center for drama. Lubeck works throughout the Palestinian Territories but the biggest operation of TDP is in the Gaza Strip where she is both a writer and a designer. Jackie was born and bred in Brooklyn.

Samer Al-Saber is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Stanford University, USA, and faculty member at the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. He teaches courses concerned with identity, race, and ethnicity. A director and writer, his fieldwork intersects with theatre practice.