Stage Review - Alice in Arabialand (Annex Theatre)
Stage Review - Alice in Arabialand
Presented By: Annex Theatre - Seattle, WA
Show Run: May 30 - June 14, 2025
Date Reviewed: Thursday, June 05, 2025
Run Time: 2 Hours, 10 Minutes (including a 10 minute intermission)
Reviewed By: Anna Tatelman
Why do we tell the stories that we tell? What kinds of stories appeal to us because of our backgrounds, ethnicities, or cultures? And which stories do we ignore or sanitize because their reality makes us uncomfortable? These are the questions that Annex Theatre’s world-premiere production of Alice in Arabialand asks as it invites us to fall into a wonderland of adventures, laughs, and pains both familiar and new.
As you can likely tell from the title, Alice in Arabialand (written by Sameer Arshad) is a loose adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In this retelling, Alice is a graduate student of anthropology. Her desire to connect more with people prompts her to do a thorough research study of queer Arabs – despite the fact that she is neither queer or Arab herself. When her search for queer Arabs in her home of Michigan doesn’t yield much, her friend Hossam – a belly-dance teacher who is actually both queer and Arab – insists that the only way to truly study her target population is to go down the rabbit hole with him into communities of queer folk living in the Middle East.
Fans of the original Lewis Carroll novel will find lots of fun allusions and adapted characters in this play: from the ‘Red Queen’ who is hardly a villain, but rather a queer librarian determined to preserve one of the few safe spaces for her community; to the hookah-smoking ‘Caterpillar’ who lays low not from laziness, but fear of persecution; to the ‘Cheshire Cat’ in the form of a djinn who can both reveal someone’s deepest wish and frustrate them to no end with his riddles. Alice in Arabialand reflects further on the nature of storytelling by prodding the Western desire to consume ‘exotic’ tales about the Middle East, be it Aladdin or One Thousand and One Nights, and presents some of these exoticized familiar elements with a self-aware wink.
But Alice in Arabialand pushes us deep into unfamiliar areas of storytelling, too, by presenting honestly queer Arab communities that aren’t usually seen in Western art. In contrast to both Alice in Wonderland and traditional ‘Arabialand’ tales, this play gives us dimensional characters who exist outside of tidy narratives and are unapologetically themselves. And although we’re offered the premise that Alice is the protagonist, playwright Arshad instead ends up presenting a work that balances its attention between a myriad of characters: from the surprisingly sweet yet heart-rending relationship between Reem, a female Palestinian refugee, and Lisha, a woman of Israeli descent; to Sandro, the young man who becomes something of a ‘sex tourist’ to avoid the percolating grief of a lost loved one.
The moments where the script struggled to reach its full potential were when characters delivered expository speeches or dialogue. While their words were often pertinent and emotionally charged – Reem’s struggle to communicate with her family back home in Palestine, for instance, or the narrator explaining the insidious effects of imperialism – I felt that they would be more effective if presented through the onstage conflicts rather than monologues. That said, unnecessary exposition is not an unusual problem for new plays to have, and this is still a new play deserving of our attention now.
With nine total actors, this is a larger production for a new work, and each one gave a solid performance. Hannah Wang (playing Alice) captures the awkward earnestness of their character’s longing to deepen interpersonal skills through research, and shows us how she grows into realizing that research is just the jumping-off point to relationships. Portraying Hossam is Parsa Kaffash, our cheeky, Caterpillar-esque guide who helps everyone around him both enjoy themselves more and open up emotionally. Coco Justino, as Reem, is an actor who can do a lot both with poetic speeches and no dialogue at all; one of the moments that most affected me was their reaction when they can no longer Skype her Palestinian family back home. The last actor I’ll mention (though they are all worthy of recognition) is Mateo Acuna as Sandro, who manages to be both hilarious as an oft-tipsy tourist and to pull on some heart strings as we learn what’s beneath their devil-may-care façade.
Under Eden Aztlan’s direction, themes related to what kinds of stories we like to tell become further heightened. Characters move up and down the aisles, exit through the lobby rather than going backstage, and even ‘sleep’ in the back rows, making the audience more aware of how we are witnessing (or voyeuring) into this rabbit hole ourselves, whether we are interlopers like Alice or tangentially part of the communities. Interspliced between various scenes are dances (choreographed by Ali Kareem and Lucien Oberleitner) that meld various styles, from popular Bollywood moves to pieces loosely inspired by ballet. The music is a similar fusion of styles, often blending modern pop instrumentals with soft lute sounds (sound design by Erin Lammie). The set consists primarily of paintings depicting familiar Middle Eastern iconography – pyramids, palm trees, hieroglyphics – and includes paintings hung above the audiencetoo (lead scenic designer is Gretchen Ugaldet; associate scenic designers are Siyin Yant and Lucien Oberleitner).
Most American theatre goers are familiar with both Alice in Wonderland and tales from ancient times about the Middle East, so they will appreciate the nods to both throughout this new play. But what’s unfamiliar for most of us is seeing a story about the Middle East that, rather than catering to American audiences, strives to authentically depict its people and communities, with an occasional sly wink toward the ever-watching Western Gaze. Annex Theatre’s world debut of Alice in Arabialand offers a thoughtful, moving show where the production elements meld in a way that allows audiences of all backgrounds to simultaneously question and enjoy the creative, communal process of crafting a narrative onstage.
Due to safety concerns concerning the No Kings Day demonstrations, Annex decided to close Alice in Arabialand early, having its last show on June 13. To follow the theatre and keep up to date on upcoming productions or their other programs, visit https://annextheatre.org/.
Photo credit: Madison McVeigh
