Too Much of a Good Thing?

When I first saw Daniel Beaty’s Emergency at ArtsEmerson, I didn’t really know what I thought about it.  I found some parts of it difficult to sit through, but didn’t want to jump to any vast conclusions about why I felt that way.  I went searching for responses to the production and I kept finding glowing reviews and really second-guessed why I felt so off-put by the production.  It reminded me of the scene from Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915 where the actors are trying to figure out who will play the black grandmother and it ends up being one of the male white actors.  Characters became extremely uncomfortable with the impersonation, but they still continued on with it.  The situation is vastly different from that of Emergency, but it brings me back to the notion of impersonation and the stereotypes that strike discomfort because their validity cannot be denied. All of the characters were vastly different from each other, and the preciseness and depth of them all gave even more strength to stereotypes associated with it, whether they were true or not.  It reminded me of We Are Proud…because when I first felt uncomfortable reading that part about the grandmother, I thought the main reason why I was feeling so uneasy was the fact that it was, a white man portraying a black female.  Not saying that I think we should construct barriers around us as artists to what and whom we can or cannot create because of our ethnicity, heritage, religion and any other of the thousands of differences that exist in humanity.  But I was so uncomfortable when Beaty first started portraying different characters so sharply, but I could so clearly recognize all of them, and it brought up a tinge of guilt for me.  I felt like I shouldn’t be watching and I wondered if it was embedded in the recent discrepancies that were brought up by “We Are Proud…” that unconsciously had more of an impact of me than I gave it credit for.

I also don’t know how I felt about the actual structure of the piece.  I thought there were so many forms that were being incorporated with the piece that I never felt I could hold on to the story.  There was music, over 25 characters, the presence of the super-natural, and slam poetry.  There were times when the slam poetry, which stood so strongly by itself after researching his performances, verged on becoming pedantic when paired with the multiple different forms of storytelling.  I was always waiting for the “lesson”, waiting to hear what I needed to be taught and couldn’t fully catch the flow of the entire piece.  I thought that each form of storytelling was incredibly strong though; his voice was so full and resonate, his poetry sharp and fierce, and his characters shockingly transformative.  The plot was relatively very simple,  and I think if I was anymore complex it would have gotten completely lost in all of the other vibrant aspects of the piece.

I recently did a dramaturgical dossier on Eric Bogosian’s SubUrbia and he talks a lot about his use of laughter in his pieces, especially those that deal with material that could be considered more controversial.  Looking back on Emergency I remembered the moments where I found myself laughing at something that was actually at the heart of it, bereft of any comedy whatsoever.  I started second-guessing every moment that I laughed out loud while watching the performance, even though I don’t think that Bogosian’s use of humor and Beaty’s use are the same whatsoever, I couldn’t help but ponder about it now.  And if it was a tool that he was trying to use in breaking down barriers, what did I learn from it?  What did I take from it?  I remember my favorite moment was absent of any humor, but was full of this surreal sense of hope and understanding.  It happened towards the end of the play when Clarissa’s grandmother told the story about the village in west Africa,

 

I been here with my grandbaby Clarissa all day, since this morning when this slave ship first arised and there’s this one particular story that keeps comin’ to my mind about a village in west Africa with very little conflict and even less crime. You know why? When a person in this village commits a crime—steals or lies, harms his neighbor—the entire village forms a circle around this single man and reminds him of the good deeds he’s done in the past. The entire village reminds this single fallen man of the moments when he was most beautiful. America is one big messy village and we goin’ have to love each other back to wholeness.

 

This was the most influential moment of the entire piece for me.  I was blown away by the compassion in this story and it refocused my understanding of the play in its entirety.  I turned the scope of the story out to all of us, and how we all have to work on loving each other, forgiving each other and especially remembering our pasts.  Then everything in the piece made sense to me, all of the character’s struggles, all of the slam poetry, all of the youth’s questions and the reason why the slave ship was summoned to the surface of not only the sea, but to the surface of our hearts.

 

 

 

 

 

The Stories That Need To Be Heard

An Iliad at ArtsEmerson was one of the most captivating pieces of theatre I have probably ever experienced in my ENTIRE LIFE.  I knew absolutely nothing about the production before I went to see it, and I’m so grateful now that I went in with no pre-conceived expectations or ideas.  The first image of the show was stunning, just one man in a long trench coat and hat sitting on his suitcase with one light beaming down on him as he began to sing.  As it began to go on, I noticed that I was getting more nervous that it was going to be a one man show, and then Denis O’Hare, what a phenomenal artist, was joined on stage by a true muse, the Bassist Brian Ellingsen.  My heart swum.  Pairing such a dynamic instrument with such a dynamic actor was an impeccable choice and only made the story more mesmerizing.

Having just recently read Ken Urban’s Sense of an Ending, Sarah Kane’s Blasted, Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest, and Biljana Srbljanovic’s Family Stories Belgrade,  the subject of war and genocide had already been swimming around in my head for a few weeks.  It’s difficult content no matter how you’re dealing with it,  but the impact that this story had on me was significantly different than any of the others I had read.  Of course it’s different because I didn’t have the chance to see any of these pieces brought to life like An Iliad, but this play truly moved me and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks.  Unlike Daniel Beaty’s Emergency, where I left the space thinking about the talent of the actor and his versatility, O’Hare breached the realm of criticism in my eyes by giving such a poignant and powerful gift.

Capturing the essence of war, an idea that is usually associated with bodies and bodies of mostly men even to this day, with one body was in my eyes one of the most empathetic ways to approach a story of war and the colossal impact it has on every side.  Along with this,  the idea of humanity on both sides of a war and every war.  That the idea of good against bad, of right against wrong, is actually humans against humans, fathers against fathers, sisters against sisters, and lovers against lovers.  I constantly found myself being pulled to each side of the war, becoming a cheerleader for Achilles, and then for Hector and then back to Achilles, but then back to Hector in what became an endless cycle of despair and confusion.  In stripping away the separation of the body between each character, the idea of human unity and similarity was allowed to take over the room.  And by using figures that were far away from us in time and literature, developed enough distance from them in order for the audience to see a bit more clearly past any prejudices.  These hundreds of men became one man, an idea that I think is so crucial in our understanding of the war, and especially a kind of dismissal of it as well.

The way the stage is set prepares you for what would appear to be a simple show, a show that would activate the imagination more, rather than just feeding it spectacle.  I could relax for a minute, assuming I had already won in my comprehension of the vocabulary in the world of this play.  But then it would break,  a bassist would be added, the voice of Athena would resound only once throughout the auditorium, a state of psychotic pleasure would reverb into the rafters and a light whistle would echo gently through the room.  A sense of wonder and mystique was so sophisticatedly peppered onto the epic tale and brought the stories to life in a way that I will never be able to forget.

The beginning, middle, and end of the piece were all earth shattering.  O’Hare began his epic story by telling us that he every time he starts to tell this story, he hopes that it’s the last time he has to tell it.  O’Hare is also accompanied by a brown, dusty jug of whisky that slowly disappears throughout the show as the story becomes more difficult to tell.  Then the moment happened, the moment where you think it’s just another analogy to something of our contemporary time, that becomes this heart breaking list of all of the major genocides and war in the history of our world.  I was in complete awe;  it was devastating.  But he continues, he continues with the story until he physical can’t anymore and he sits back down on his suitcase as silent tears roll down his cheek.  He gently flicked his tears away, a moment that took my breath away, slowly gathered himself and told us how he didn’t need to tell us the rest of what we already knew.  It was completely chilling.  I’m still processing the entire experience weeks later and I don’t think I’ll be able to completely wrap my head around it all.  Thank you to everyone that was involved with this piece of theatre, it renewed my faith in the power of art and storytelling, and completely took my breath away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Always Remembered, Never Forgot

I don’t know why I was drawn to this piece, maybe my secret fascination with the state is to blame, but I recently watched Diana Szeinblum’s Alaska on www.ontheboards.org.  The piece started off with a man sitting onstage with a sign around his neck that wrote,“estoy desperado” (I am desperate) with a woman next to him throwing her arms above her head and back down past her legs, repeating it over and over again, checking in with him periodically.  Then the two other dancers, or improvisers came into play, throwing themselves around with specificity and an intensity that actually sparked my fear for the wellness of the actor’s body.  Watching through the entire piece, I couldn’t and didn’t really try to track any kind of logical linear “story” or “path” for the piece, but their life in movement was so captivating I didn’t find this lack of understanding too detrimental.

After watching Alaska I listened to the interview with Szeinblum who talks about the content of the piece and what the title meant.  She talks about the place where the entire performance stems from,  “…a place where there’s memory and everything that you could never say in strong moments…what your body cannot say when something important happens stays in this place, and this place is Alaska.”  Many things clicked into place after listening to the interview, especially the use of repetition in the piece. The idea that the things we couldn’t say, our regrets, our memories haunt us like looming ghosts in the corner of the room and play over and over in our mind until we can find some kind of relief or catharsis from them.  Szeinblum also discusses how she began the rehearsal process by asking each performer to start with a moment in their own lives where they couldn’t say something and say it through their body.  This invitation to the body expresses so many aspects of our lives that cannot be put into words, the parts of existence that can only be communicated through the body.

This reminded me a lot of the moments in voice and speech or physical acting where we had to create repeatable gestures that were full and specific and that stemmed from a significant personal thought or idea.  Remembering those exercises halfway through the piece brought the entire realm of the world much more down to earth.  It’s interesting how my first response was annoyance when I realized there wasn’t going to be any verbal text.  It mad me realize how limiting language can be at times, and how expressive, heart breaking and infinite the body can be if we let it.

The idea of the mind, and how it can be our most poignant and debilitating enemy, truly came into fruition when the dancers kept creating spaces with their own arms, and each others arms at times, that they had to push through.  The use of breath was also astonishing and I felt as if ribs would break at multiple times during the show.  But it made me think about how breath usually takes up the space where speech is absent.  The moments of speechlessness that usually require more effort in obtaining air, or when all of our breath is sucked out of us.

The role of gender also played more a role for me than I think the piece had originally intended for.  I remember getting so aggravated when one of the men took off one of the woman’s bra and she was left lying on-stage in only her underwear.  I remember screaming at the screen, yelling about he should have to take his shirt off, he should be exposed, I couldn’t help but feel bad for her.  Realizing that exposing her vulnerability in this moment was probably the point of her starkness, but there were still small puffs of smoke steaming out of my ears.  Later, the same woman takes off another man’s shirt, and I realized after-the-fact that I wasn’t even phased by this moment, which made me second-guess my own views on gender and what it means to be “exposed”, to be “vulnerable”.  One of my favorite moments of the piece was when one of the men came down to the front of the stage, sat down, looked at everyone while trying to catch his breath, and then invited the audience with a thick accent to ask him personal questions.  And they asked, and he answered.  And then got right back up into the space to continue the piece.  What a different kind of vulnerability that was equally as jarring as the nudity in the beginning.

The piece was magical and transformative as they flew through the air, climbed all over and under each other, moved one another like puppets, had to duck out of the way of a falling tables, and even just sit on stage as they watched each other.  The music only made the piece even more captivating, as they movements lined up perfectly with the sounds at different points throughout the piece.  It was as if the music and movement existed in different realms but would constantly be dipping into the same limbo of time and space to create movements of clarity and transcendence.  I highly recommend this piece, because no matter if absolutely nothing “makes sense”, it is an incredibly moving and captivating experience.

 

 

Ambition and laziness

I’ve been reading a lot of Mac Rogers’ words in the past few weeks, because my final was a dramaturgical exploration of his very excellent play Viral. I came across this article of his that really had no place in my blog or essays but is truly excellent. He’s a guest blogger on Larry Pontius’ blog (well, he was… this was last year) and in the article he discusses the “fundamental contradiction” within him: “I am a lazy, ambitious man.”

He continues to extrapolate that about 70% of him loves the lazy, low-key, low-pressure life and would happily watch Netflix for the forseeable future with his lovely wife. But, as he puts it,

The problem is the other 30%. The other 30% is an extremely ambitious theater artist. Like, it’s sickening how ambitious I am. It’s to the point where I’m not willing to put most of it down in this blog. The plays I have in my head that I want to get to at some point contain sequences of such ludicrous excess they would make TREE OF LIFE look like FOLLOW THAT BIRD.

He continues to explain that the battle between Ambitious 30 and Lazy 70 is waged throughout the majority of his professional processes.

I often feel a similar tug in my angsty little soul, but I think I’d make an addition—for me, I’d say the breakdown is 30% ambitious, 45% lazy and 25% unpracticed. We can also call “unpracticed” “undisciplined” but I like “unpracticed.” Got a nice, non-judgmental ring to it.

I’m graduating from college in eight days. Eight days from today I will be taking my diploma (fingers crossed) from the dean of my college and basically running around for the rest of the day screaming “WOO! SCHOOL’S OUT FOREVER!!!!” I love being a student but I never experienced senioritis until this year.

Thank God for Ambitious 30, keeping me on track to get my thesis produced, and for shame, the other ingredient in the Mac-Rogers-gets-shit-done cocktail. (As in, I did not drop out of school and move to Italy early because of shame. For shame!)

But really, where I’m interested in turning my attention in the next years of my life is in the other 70% of myself. My ambition isn’t going anywhere if this year is any indication.

The million dollar question is this: how do we, as theatre artists, continue to build a discipline that we can rely on when we get out into the big world?

When there is no Lydia Diamond to tell you that you just have to suck it up and finish the play, how does the play get done?

When there is no last-week-of-the-quarter, no set date for the premier of the next show, even no show in sight, how do you stay inspired to be self-disciplined?

Some people are born disciplined. (Not this girl.) Some achieve discipline. And some have discipline thrust upon them.

The next big question for me is this: What is discipline outside of education? This question may be ridiculous or ignorant but it’s a conversation I’m really interested in having. How do I construct a discipline for myself, and how do I practice it, so that I don’t let my lazy majority take over?

Thoughts are welcome. Time will tell. Right now, it is too great a knot for me t’untie.

Alaska Transcends Titles

Diana Szeinblum’s Alaska did not strike me as a dance piece—through the entirety of it, I was watching it as a physical theater piece. Only once I started to research and read reviews did I understand that it was considered contemporary dance. This is such a beautiful revelation for me, because the art of performance is coming together in a really exciting way in my mind. Alaska conveys how our inner life manifests in our outer life, how we see each other and what we do to each other, and demonstrates the vast expressiveness and potential of the human body. Alaska says so much without uttering a word. It is truly a wonder to watch. The production’s use of music, the actor/dancer’s physical deftness, and the message of humanity come together to create a fully-sensual experience.

Before having taken this class, this is the type of piece I would have had no patience for. Instead, what I saw was an expression of the everyday and the extraordinary; a deep exploration into life and the interactions between individuals as well as between the inner self and the outer self. The conflicts and harmonies, the frustrations and triumphs were all expressed perfectly clearly without text. What struck me particularly was the role of women in the piece. Immediately, both women took on distinct personalities and troupes in society. One, the thoughtful, deep, and distressed, the other, the wild, fun, and desirable. How each was interacted with, physically and spiritually made how we put women into types and boxes very clear. The theatrical meaning of the piece, what it was trying to convey, was made very clear by the precision with which the action was executed.

To me, this piece exemplified what physical theater should be. The dexterity, ease, and control with which the actor/dancers moved was magnificent. One of my first thoughts upon turning the piece on was, ‘how nice to see a normal-looking person doing theater.’ And that’s what they did: they took what they can do, which is extraordinary, and made it look like me or you doing it. The expressiveness with which their bodies moved, and the importance of repetition made for a beautiful, saddening, exhilarating story. My understanding of what physical theater is—even as a sometime student of it—was not clear until I watched this piece. Now I have many questions about the difference (if there is one) between contemporary dance and physical theater performance.

The other elements of the piece, particularly the “set” and the music, were large contributing factors to the success of the experience in my mind. The fact that the music was tailored for and with the movement of the piece made it something of a novel experience to me, at least in terms of dance. Rather than choreographing around an existing piece of music, the entire production moved in unison, like a river flowing around rocks and through narrows. The mood of the piece was not dictated by the music, but rather the changes were reflected by and off of one another. The square, white, parquet-like playing space both illuminated the performers, and allowed us to hear the necessary sounds of the occasional foot-to-floor, or liquid body collapsing to the ground.

Overall, I saw Alaska as a revolutionary experience—a true piece of performance art, where the lines between theater and dance wound around and through each other and the power of the human spirit and it’s container, the body, were the focus of the piece.

Clybourne Park Response

The SpeakEasy stage’s production of Clybourne Park (straight off Broadway) fired up a lot of questions in my mind about theater not only in Boston, but contemporary drama in general. The production itself was truly commendable. The acting was superb, the scenic and lighting elements served the play perfectly, and overall, the piece was conveyed simply and effectively. My questions about the effectiveness of Norris’ piece, however, where not mollified by the effectiveness with which it was conveyed. While questions about racial relations of the past and present were circled around and pointed to, the discussion felt lackluster. Finally, the way the piece was received here, in Boston, as well as in New York has raised a lot of questions in my mind about what we consider great theater, and how that is affected by what we consider theater that leaves us unchanged.

The acting in this production was extremely solid (and I don’t just say that because my and our personal connection to the actors). Paula Plum, in particular, really shone during the second act as a no-nonsense, self-concerned, middle-class suburbite. The equally-impressive Philania Mia played equally convincing, yet polar-opposite wives to Michael Kaye’s characters in both acts. Her demure, deaf, and often bewildered Betsey in act one completely disappeared into her brash, hard-hitting Lindsey in act two. The lighting was particularly strong in this production as well. Though the set was interesting, (and watching the changeover between act one and act two entertaining) it felt too large of a space for such an intimate play. The ceiling to the house was nonexistent  and the cavernous wood living room seemed somehow inappropriate to the conversation taking place within it. Though most elements of the production were solid, what I missed was direction. There did not seem to be a clear sense of the direction of the play. I saw actors onstage making movements and having conversations, but I missed something else—another level of message and understanding for which the director is responsible. Perhaps the play, after taking this class, was just a bit too conventional for my taste, but these are the things I saw.

Bruce Norris’ play was written, of course, in response to A Raisin in the Sun. The first act takes place in 1959 and concerns the white family who owns the house which, in Raisin, is to be the Youngers’. Act two takes place fifty years later, in 2009, and concerns the same house, but now the neighbors have congregated to discuss housing regulations with the white couple that now owns the house. Act one is fine, and stands on its own as the story of a couple grieving their son, a veteran who committed suicide in the house some years earlier. The second act was entertaining to watch—quippy and somewhat honest about how we fumble around each other in the conversation about race, and how we do not really know yet how to effectively communicate our feelings on the subject—but ultimately, extremely unsatisfying. Norris doesn’t really say anything about race. It’s just a depiction of how weird things can get when we talk about race. No questions are really raised, it’s basically just like watching a conversation turn very uncomfortable and not really knowing what to do or say about it. Are the jokes funny? Yes. Is the discomfort relatable? Absolutely. But after having read plays like The Death of the Last Black Man and We Are Proud to Present…, Clybourne Park falls short at its job: to provoke thought, discomfort, discussion, and reflection. It is very surprising and slightly disheartening to me that this play received as many accolades as it did, not because it isn’t a fine piece of writing, but because of how easy it lets us off the hook. Do we only raise our glasses to things that reaffirm where we are? Are we really this satisfied with ourselves that a play that is relatively easy to swallow is the one that deserves the highest merits?

Watching the audience file into the theater was one of the most notable parts of my experience seeing the show. I arrived early and was one of the first people sitting down. As I waited for the show to begin, I started looking around me at the people I would be sharing this night with: almost entirely white, middle-aged, and affluent. And if a person was not one of those things, they were at least two out of three. It was very disheartening for a moment, but then I realized: this is who this play is for. This play was not written for people looking to be challenged and moved by a theatrical experience; it was written for people looking to go out for dinner and a show. I learned that night that every piece of theater I see interacts deeply with where it’s being done and by whom. Not all theater is for everyone, and that is no fault of the company or the production or the writer, or anyone involved, but I would certainly like to seek out more challenging venues and pieces than I experienced that night.

The Play: A Critical Response

The Play is part of DigitalTheatre’s Gulf Stage project. Gulf Stage is “a unique digital project that transcends geographical barriers through artistic innovation” (http://www.digitaltheatre.com/collections/gulfstage). The process of development was to set up a competition for six countries in the Middle East to produce and perform a play for film which would then be streamed via the internet all over the world. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates all participated in the competition. Talal Mahmoud’s The Play won the competition in the United Arab Emirates and now streams free on DigitalTheatre.

The storyline follows a female makeup artist and male actor’s conversation as she prepares him for an opening night performance. It deals with two central issues that the UAE grapples with: the role of women in the work force and the role of the arts in political and social culture.

The Play uses a strange kind of pseudo-realism that feels far from anything I’ve seen before. The blocking feels forced at times and the acting seems, at times, cartoonish and unconnected. I couldn’t really get inside the characters or understand what was propelling the continuation of this conversation. All these responses, while they may be valid, reflect that I began viewing this play from an American lens. Where I meet the play is, I have grown to realize, very different from where the play meets its audience. This was highlighted when, after the makeup artist reveals in a monologue that she is a struggling divorcee, the audience erupted into spontaneous applause.

Women’s rights have been an issue of ongoing concern in the progressive United Arab Emirates. According to a study published by the UAE in 2007, women “are today at the forefront of the workforce in the UAE in both the government sector as well as a growing number in the private sector” (http://www.upr-info.org/IMG/pdf/UPR_UAE_ANNEX3_E.pdf). This report, titled “Women in the United Arab Emirates: A Portrait of Progress,” outlines how the UAE has consistently progressed to consider women not just as the “backbone of family life” in the country, but as equal participants in the workforce. Issues of women’s rights are not, of course, simply confined to how many women are employed; the UAE states in its report that 90% of women in the UAE were literate according to the 2007 account. The country is far from the end of their journey to achieve equality between the genders; any sex outside of marriage in the UAE is a punishable crime, and a statistically significant percentage of women do not feel safe to report sexual assault because legal action could be taken against them. This is the backdrop that the audience of The Play is familiar with, and the resonance of a character who is a divorcee, and the physicial presence of the actress embodying that character, would certainly not be lost on an audience.

Digital theatre is an interesting medium, and a particularly intriguing way to encounter this text. My comprehension of the text relied on English subtitles that were sub-par, and so I had to deduce a fair amount of the action of the play for myself and reevaluate what the translator could have meant. The lighting design of The Play was minimalistic but overall very dark, particularly because I don’t think it was ever intended to light across mediums. This resulted in a necessitated engagement with the piece to see if I still understood what was happening and where we were in the space. At one point, there was a blackout as part of the action, and the actors began to light one another using only flashlights. It was perhaps the most well-lit moment of the show, from a digital viewer’s perspective.

The Play made use of a delineation between different areas of the stage to help shape the arc of the story. The story begins with the two characters very close together, huddled around the makeup chair, and progressively the characters alternate between closeness and distance, but rarely touch. The use of touch in the play was very effective. The two characters were often in one another’s faces but apart from applying makeup to the male actor’s face, the two characters never touched until a climactic moment where the actor grabs the makeup artist out of anger. Shocked, she cries out, “You touched me!”

I’m still not sure that I can fully understand the complexity of issues that the play was exploring, but I know that matters of class and a role dictated by society are very strong themes in the play, ones that resonated with the audience on the night of the recording. I can infer from this play that both the makeup artist, a divorcee, and the actor, who is secretly the theater’s tea boy, are both marginalized members of society. Clearly, it is presumed in the UAE that divorced women are second-class citizens and that there is something wrong with them. The makeup artist insists, in The Play, that “there’s nothing wrong with us,” which is the moment where the audience applauded. The tea boy also expressed that he had nothing but love for the theater and had poured fifteen years of his life into loving it as fully as he could with no return. For the actor, the theatre seemed to symbolize the UAE itself, and his dream to ascend his class.

The most illuminating thing for me to note was how receptive the audience was to these characters. You could almost feel the palpable attention that would result in eruptive applause interspersed throughout the course of the play. As a foreigner to this culture, the audience response told me which moments, which issues resonated with them. In fact, the audience was very vocal about that. Above all, the connection between the two characters and their respective coming to terms with these stories was what the audience craved.

The Play highlights stories that need to be told in the United Arab Emirates. Perhaps the big takeaway of the story is question of what role the arts play in our everyday lives. For these characters, the arts are everything, providing both livelihood and creative expression. One character wants simply to finish her work, the other is desperate to be heard by another human being. While the presentation of this story is somewhat strange to my American eyes (sitting in my living room watching it on a computer screen), the universality of these issues nonetheless shines true. This is an important story to tell, not only for the UAE but for those foreigners for whom this provides a glimpse into the unknown.