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Sahar Speaks: Voices of Women from Afghanistan

On the Front Lines Graphic
October 7, 2019
All Day
Wexner Center for the Arts, Film/Video Theater

Commissioned by Palindrome Productions of London and adapted for the stage from stories by Afghan women, these two one-act plays--Parwana: They Bear All the Pain by Alia Bano and Dust Allergy by Nushin Arbabzadah--offer a rare and revealing look into Afghan women’s lives.

Free and open to the public but tickets required.

Immediately following the performances there will be a Chai Khana Social Hour in the Lower Lobby of the Wexner Center for the Arts. Tickets and further information available from the Wexner Center for the Arts

These performances are part of On the Front Lines, a series of events centered on Afghanistan, organized by Lesley Ferris, Art and Humanities Distinguished Professor of Theatre and sponsored by a Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme Creation Grant. Co-sponsored by The Department of History, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, the Middle East Studies Center, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Service and the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Institute at the University Library.

Background:

These commissioned plays are part of a larger project to bring Afghan women’s voices to the public more prominently through storytelling and theatre. The project, On the Front Lines: Performing Afghanistan, is directed by Lesley Ferris, Art and Humanities Distinguished Professor of Theatre at Ohio State University. Palindrome Productions produced several of the plays in London prior to this project. The first three plays, are based on stories written for the Huffington Post by Afghan women journalists who completed training through Sahar Speaks.  Now Ohio State University is home to this project which will engage and build an intellectual community around the issues brought up in the plays.