Review of Heather Raffos’s ‘Noura’, performed by Marin Theatre Company in association with Golden Thread Productions.

Noura runs through Sunday, February 9th

Heather Raffo’s ‘Noura’ embraces pertinent themes of immigration and cultural identity and addresses the tumultuous feelings of pain, loss and emotional conflict experienced by those fleeing war, and forced to leap from one culture into another. Witnessing this was a profound, thought provoking experience.

In this nod to Ibsen’s The Doll’s House, the eponymous Noura, a Christian, Iraqi refugee prepares to spend Christmas in her New York apartment, where she’s lived for 8 years after fleeing war torn Mosul. With her, are her Iraqi husband, Tareq, her 11 year old son, Yazen, and two people from Mosul, Rafa’a, a long time male family friend, and Maryam, a young orphaned woman she’s never met, now a Stanford student, whose education she and her husband have sponsored from childhood.

While the men go out, Maryam arrives, and Noura is shocked to learn Maryam is unapologetically pregnant and no longer with the father, who, it appears, she courted with the sole intention of getting pregnant. Noura’s traditional values are challenged, even though as a trained architect, she’s always considered herself Western and liberated. Maryam is disappointed with Noura’s reaction and leaves, despite the fact Noura is eager to connect with someone from her destroyed home city and warmly welcomes her. Maryam’s pregnancy takes Noura to a crossroads, where the expectations of both cultures collide. This forms the central conflict of the play.

I empathized deeply with Noura who has been ‘cooking for weeks’, then loses it when she realizes she’ll be celebrating Christmas with just her tiny family of three. Her son can’t wrap the dolmas right, and she flings them over the floor, worried and frustrated that traditions are dying, and Christmas isn’t going to be how she remembers it in Mosul, busy with a community of neighbors coming in to eat and celebrate together. Noura worries that her son has no connection to her past and she mourns the death of a three thousand year old culture and a country and identity that’s been irreparably destroyed. In coming to America, her husband, a surgeon had to work at a Subway, before he could become board certified, and return to practicing medicine again. It’s a familiar story. Millions of Americans have stories of the old country and the hardship their forebears endured, while assimilating to life in a new and strange land. As the daughter of a war refugee myself, I related to this story on a personal level. With immigration and racism currently a central point of political contention, and with US tension always a constant in the Middle East, this is a resonant story that seeks to inspire empathy in a climate of prevailing indifference and resistance.

Entwined within this universal story, is the story of a Middle Eastern woman struggling with her autonomy, struggling to break free from time worn and very conservative expectations about female sexual honor. In America, Noura’s husband wants to be the provider, and she’s struggling with loneliness, anxiety, and lack of confidence in a culture she doesn’t understand. She’s trying to figure out how to cross from a culture that celebrates community, to one that celebrates individualism, and there are no hard answers, she longs for a ‘land between’. In her spare time, she’s designed a fantasy home for her large extended family, scattered around the world. In reality her sense of dislocation means she hasn’t even got round to buying a sofa. Throughout the play, Noura steals moments alone to smoke in the snow. Her smoking allows her to connect to the person she once was, and the snow runs as a metaphor throughout the play, even coming into the apartment as tensions rise.

Lighting played a key element here, and visually the image of Noura smoking alone in the snow was beautiful, becoming a symbol for her sense of isolation.

Denmo Ibrahim as Noura gives a passionate, heartfelt performance, communicating with the energy of a caged lioness.

Mattico David as Tareq, is quietly stoic as her loving, hardworking but sexually persistent husband.

Adam Rigg’s set is a subtle optical illusion, the basic living room has slanted, slightly converging walls, making the space constricted and unbalanced, adding to the theme of shifting perspective.

Sound was subtle and poignant, making use of traditional female ululating vocals in Arabic, with occasional subdued battle sounds, to evoke the shadow of PTSD and dark bittersweet memories of a home that no longer exists.

Guided into a powerful, cohesive whole by director, Kate Bergstrom, with a strong cast, Noura allows us to profoundly understand the enormous struggles that all refugees face, from a female vantage point. Highly recommended.

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Review by Hannah Yurke.