DECEMBER 3, 2022
It’s such a joy to have Egyptian-American playwright Adam Ashraf ElSayigh here at Stanford with us working on a new play development process. More information is below.
Please join TAPS PhD Candidate Marina Johnson and TAPS PhD student Karishma Bhagani on Sunday December 4th from 4-7pm at Denning House for a reading of Adam Ashraf ElSayigh’s Jamestown/Williamsburg. Jamestown/Williamsburg tells the story of the voyages and traumas of two immigrant women, Diyala and Agnes. The former came to Virginia on a student visa in 2019, and the latter was a mail-order bride to Jamestown in 1619, with an elaborate plan to rule the new world. Diyala is in a green card marriage with her husband Ibrahim, seeking a path to American citizenship. Agnes is married to the Lord of the 1619 Virginia Company, who happens to be entwined in a relationship with a Native American man.
As these two women navigate the treacherous landscapes of new immigrants in the same house, 400 years apart, time breaks down and they find themselves having to encounter each other, their mistakes, and similarities, ultimately discovering a shocking fact about how their lineages connect them. The piece is a love triangle turned love quartet that asks what it means to come to an unwelcoming land, and how has the American zeitgeist evolved to think about immigration differently over the past 400 years?
Followed by the reading, Adam Ashraf El-Sayigh and Karishma Bhagani will lead a workshop entitled "Performing One Another", which will detail how to use simple performance techniques to understand leadership and our community members in a deeper, more meaningful way.
