
Khawla Ibraheem in A Knock on the Roof. Photo: Joan Marcus
When writer/performer Khawla Ibraheem takes the stage, a slight figure in jeans and a bright top waving cheerily at the audience and addressing us conversationally, the house lights still up, she starts by telling us it was an ordinary day–ordinary within the given circumstances of her character Mariam’s life as a resident of Gaza, and as a young mother desperate for a moment’s peace from the frenetic energy of her six-year-old son. She’s trying to be a “cool mom,” letting her son go out with his friends, buying them all cotton candy even though that’s money she shouldn’t be spending. But it turns out to be the last ordinary day: the day before a war begins. (The script specifically references July, and that combined with some other details about books Mariam has read would point to the 2014 Gaza War, though the historical specifics are hardly the point.)
For her, even ordinary days are full of what we might consider extraordinary challenges, but for her they’re not even worth getting worked up about: The electricity is intermittent at best, which means so’s the water because you need an electric pump to get it to the seventh floor, where Mariam and her family live. The beach is close but the water’s filthy because sewage treatment plants also don’t work with intermittent power. The constant, grinding uncertainties and delays of life in occupied Gaza require an endless capacity for uncertainty and lack of control:
You wait for the electricity, you wait for the running water, you wait for the travel permit, you wait for the checkpoint to open, you wait for the return of your loved ones, you wait for the medical permit, you wait for the next war, you wait to love those who will survive, or to mourn those who will leave, you wait to move on, you wait to save memories, you wait to choose the photos of those you will lose to hang them on your walls, you wait to see if you will have walls to hang photos on, or if your walls will be destroyed and rebuilt for some reconstruction project. You wait to know if you will be in a rehabilitation facility or a frame on a wall that might survive the next war.
She also lives with the ordinary dissatisfactions and small joys of a woman whose life has been pushed in a different direction than she desired. One of the piece’s strengths is how Ibraheem as both performer and writer balances the tension and terror of the current moment with the frustrations and details of Mariam’s life outside of this crisis: She’s got a husband and a kid and a home she never planned for and never really wanted; she can’t help but resent that her husband has been able to leave the country to pursue a graduate degree when that’s all she wanted for herself. She’s got a mother who drives her crazy and chastises her when she curses. She reads Murakami and chick lit and trendy self-help books. She’s finally found a skincare regimen that works. And in these humdrum interstices, as well as in moments when she chitchats lightly with the audience or narrates her day with a knowing eye roll, her life seems, well, ordinary.
But all of that day-to-day stuff now has to fit itself around wartime. It’s not like being under siege is new or surprising for her–it’s something that has to be accounted for in every plan, and war has already deeply shifted her life, as a previous war prevented her from heading to Europe to pursue that graduate degree in mathematics. It’s not even the first go-round for her son, Nour. But this time her husband, Omar, is studying abroad, and has been waiting for a checkpoint permit to come home for months. Which means this time Mariam is a single parent at the frayed end of her patience even before the bombs start falling. This time her widowed mother moves in with her and Nour. And this time the anxiety builds and builds until it’s like another person living in the apartment with them, as Mariam waits for one more, truly terrible thing: the titular knock on the roof.
The phrase conjures something a little fanciful: a flying creature descending from above to tap on the roof; a little hint of Santa Claus. But the reality is the farthest thing from whimsy. When the Israeli army is about to flatten a Gaza building, they give a “courtesy knock” first: a small bomb on the roof, giving the residents five to fifteen minutes to evacuate. That knock gives Ibraheem’s solo play both its title and its architecture: imagining that knock becomes the center of Mariam’s existence, and her obsessive, inescapable need to prep for that moment is like a black hole, with such powerful gravitational pull she can’t pull free. But how much can you really prepare for even the most predictable catastrophe, the most expected act of violence?
All the disaster-preparedness and active-shooter training and packing of go-bags in the world only gets you so far when faced with the unpredictable, terrifying variables of reality. Mariam is trying in this moment to consider and mathematically analyze all the variables, to give herself and her family the solidest chance of escaping. Frustrated by how little she can even imagine saving, Mariam starts smuggling treasured possessions out of the house, stashing them in the wreckage of an already bombed building—what safer place can there be than the place where the worst has already happened?
Still, no matter what she does, she can’t trust that she’s gotten it right, that she’s trying hard enough or thinking through enough what-ifs. She drills with Nour, with her mother. Soon she’s up at three a.m., filling a pillowcase with books to approximate the weight of her half-asleep child and running sprint drills to practice how to escape from a seventh-floor apartment carrying Nour and their go bags, without being able to use the elevator and with a stairwell full of other evacuees. How far and how fast can she possibly run? How far can her mother? It’s not good enough; it’s never going to be, but the particular way in which it isn’t still manages to surprise.
The piece remains in the realm of storytelling for a long time—house lights up, a bare stage with a chair, audience surrounding the performer on three sides, a casually dressed woman addressing us directly. Ibraheem alters her voice to portray Omar, Nour, Mariam’s mother, but it’s a gesture for the sake of clarity, not embodying other characters. But slowly, as the tone gets darker, director Oliver Butler and the design team start to raise the theatricality: Stark beams and columns of shade in Oona Curley’s lighting, sometimes with a thread of dust sifting down in the light. Looming shadows against the bare brick upstage wall of Frank J. Oliva’s set. Shadows that start to take forms separate from Mariam (projections are by Hana S. Kim) in menacing ways. It’s all building to that inevitable moment when the knock will come, when the running will begin. And yet that moment, despite a sickening plot twist, thuddingly effective and faintly manipulative all at once, is not what struck me most deeply in A Knock on the Roof. Rather, it’s the monologue about waiting that I quoted earlier: “Here in Gaza, nothing is yours. You are absolutely looted. The sieged land besieging you. Time feels endless but none of it belongs to you.” It’s the sense of the life Mariam could have–should have–had.