"We're at war! And here we are getting ice cream."
The world has always been a confusing and horrifying place. Writers like George Lucas, Rod Sterling, and John Tolkien took to fantasy and sci-fi to explore dark topics such as genocide and rampant oppression in a way that inspired whimsy rather than existentialism. The distance created by the fantastical setting allowed youthful fans to identify with and understand these complicated concepts. In this era of writing, it seems that "political correctness" requires work to be more direct to be considered progressive. This straightforwardness brings themes that were once buried in metaphor to the surface, resulting in greater ease in identification, but have also earned the vitriol of conservative fans. How can we find the happy medium: work that references explicitly a truth about the world but allows the space for inter-ethnic identification?
Enter Antlers, written and directed by Ghina Fawaz.
Antlers tells the tale of a girl named Rania, whose antlers are broken and taken by hunters. She awakens on a magical land known as The Cedar Island on the very day of its liberation from occupation. She encounters the enchanting citizens of the island and hears their stories of
colonization, resilience, love and loss, and dreams. The play stems from stories shared during interviews conducted with individuals in Lebanon. The production was dedicated to their resilience.
The production's lore was so profound, and as an audience member, I was excited to continue discovering the history of The Cedar Island. However, I could never be blissfully ignorant of how the fictional land mirrored our own, and I was invigorated by the similarities. How the antler-bearing citizens expressed the horrors of their occupation taught me about the emotional truths of the citizens of nations that have been occupied and those that are still currently occupied. I was thoroughly impressed by Fawaz's ability to craft an incredibly unique and heartbreakingly familiar lore. I decided to sit down with Fawaz to discuss her process.
D: You've had this story inside of you for a while. Right? What would you say was the seed of this production?
G: So, I think that, as you said, the seed was planted a long time ago, but it didn't come out of the ground until 2020. In Lebanon, the Beirut Explosion took place in 2020. It had nuclear level—it was a very massive explosion in Beirut that killed a lot of people. This was after COVID-19 began, so there was an economic crisis. I remember feeling very hopeless because I was not in Lebanon. I was here. I was haunted by the idea that all these people who carried so many stories—entire lives—were wiped out in seconds. A couple of months after the explosion, I went to Lebanon to visit. It was a healing experience because everyone was living—laughing, singing, dancing, enjoying life. I saw immense resilience. You would think that with all this, the people would be just broken, but there's something very powerful about – Beirut has been demolished more than seven times and rebuilt more than seven times. I had this idea of Phoenix City—a city constantly reborn from the ashes and growing stronger each time. I felt that this was what should label my region, not war. It should be about the people who have survived through everything. Seeing this hurt because I felt Lebanon and a lot of Arab countries are consistently labeled by the war that has been caused to them. I couldn't let that be our legacy.
I had wanted to write these stories for two years but couldn't find the words. I was in such exclusionary spaces. I started free writing when I moved to New York City and started at Columbia. The story of Antlers came from a free write I did about my experience being an Arab-American, Lebanese, Muslim hijabi in this country. And the isolation and hurt I experienced until I learned about my history. It was a story about a girl with antlers who was being hunted. The hunters break the antlers off, and she wakes up in a new place where there are creatures who all have beautiful antlers. They tell her stories, and she goes on a journey with them. In the end, she meets her grandfather, who is a gentle giant. He reaches his hand out for her to step onto and puts her on his shoulder, saying, "Look where you come from." He shows her the history of people with antlers: the history that I was learning then.
After writing this story, I remember thinking, "Wow! This is everything that I wanted to put down on paper. And now it's here." So, I had this story about a girl, but I needed to find the stories that she's told. That motivated me to conduct an ethnographic research project.
D: You describe the loss of life as "stories that are gone" but also lives that are being lived. It reminds me of negative space. Thinking of lives as negative space. Do you have any thoughts about that concept?
G: Legacy is an essential thing to me. When you say "negative space," I think about a visual image. Even when people are no longer here, their life is carried on by the memory of others. This space is no longer occupied by a person's body but now by their words and impact. A person's love for someone. It doesn't just disappear. It transforms. The negative space that I envision is filled with words. Tiny, little words. Infinite words that people leave behind.
D: Kind of like a white paper with white writing
G: Oh, 100%. And I think my goal is to make that writing black. And to say that these people, like the people in Gaza now, have stories. 825+ families have been completely erased from the planet. I think about how their lineage is gone. Their lineage from thousands of years ago has been cut. I want to continue their lineage by telling their stories. And remind people that they lived and where they could've gone. I'm showing that these people lived. And they didn't have to die. It hurts to think that that's controversial.
D: So, how do you go about getting these stories? Is this something you've done before? You said something about an ethnographic project.
G: Yes! I have done an ethnographic project in the past. After 2020, a wonderful mentor (Dr Hilary Cooperman) taught me about ethnographic projects. We did a project together where we interviewed students of color on campus about their experience with microaggressions, and we created this interactive play set in an abandoned museum in a future dystopian place with these fairytale qualities. Because I enjoyed working on that piece, I discovered I loved seeking stories and empowering those voices.
So, I had the structure of a girl going on a journey. I knew the beginning and the end; I just had to figure out how she got there. I was excited to figure out how she goes from someone so hurt to someone so proud.
D: Having the idea to start interviews is not the same as actually interviewing. I'm sweating right now. How did you conduct the interviews, and how did they help the writing process?
G: The interviews inspired a lot of the imagery and lore in Antlers! Whenever I interviewed someone, the first question I would always ask was, "What is your favorite flower?" My goal in asking that was—well…
When people anticipate being interviewed, they assume they will have to tell the most horrible things that have ever happened to them, which was not my intent. I intended to be in a space with someone, listen to their story, and have them be the storyteller. Have them guide me. I had a guide of questions, but if they took it somewhere, I would only follow. I would say that this project was very collaborative. I wanted everyone I interviewed to be a storyteller and a part of the production.
I think my flower question helped them to relax.
Some people had the most beautiful answers and reasonings. They'd go on and open up. From this came a series of questions: "What if all of these villages were named after flowers? What does it mean to have a favorite flower? What does it mean to have flowers growing on her antlers?" All of this kind of symbolism and visual imagery came to the forefront. Then, the villages were created based on the different flowers that were told and stories that matched those flowers.
D: How did you create the villages based on flowers?
G: Okay. For example, I interviewed a lot of children. Many of them had this excited energy, and when I asked them about their flower, they'd always say some kind of wildflowers. I thought that'd be a wonderful village. I created a map and would take all of the transcripts (about 200 pages worth; it was pretty amazing) and map it out. I mapped out the structure that I saw. We go to this village and then to this village. Afterward, I started deciding where each story went. There were a lot of water stories because Lebanon is on the sea, so I decided there had to be a village that communicated the love of water. That's where Sea Petal came in. There were many stories from older people who lived a long time in the occupation. I remember in my grandmother's house, she had these bushes of Jasmine. So, I named that village Jasmine Village.
Then there's the story of Qana, a Lebanon village with international groups of children and women. The UN declared that the town couldn't be attacked, but the IDF murdered over a hundred people there. That story inspired the village of Tulips because I felt tulips are so colorful and beautiful, and to see them destroyed is very evocative.
This mapping process started, and I felt ready to write once I had that map.
D: How did you synthesize all of that information? When I saw Antlers, I didn't know it was written from primary source text because it felt so fresh. How did you go about writing something narratively from all of those interviews?
G: When I went to Lebanon to conduct interviews, I learned incredible things, like the travel on the Day of Liberation! While working with my dramaturg, Begum Inal, I realized my goal was to show resilience and joy. So, I decided to set the piece on the Day of Liberation for this island: a day of joy and of remembrance. I imagined how it would feel to live in an occupied village for so many years and be told that you're free. All of a sudden. And not believing it. Then, going to free the people who have been lost for so long that you weren't sure if they still lived. The story was there.
I began with the story structure: the girl with antlers going on a journey. Then, I knew it would be on the Day of Liberation. So, I looked at the map. And it was a map. I'm a very visual person. Then, I went through the transcripts and picked out the stories I thought fit each village. Then, I made a list of characters and archetypes I wanted to include: a representative of the older generation, of the younger generation, a generous and kind man, a resilient young woman who's an activist. I wanted to have representations of real people who would subvert the stereotypes. I was going to show the truth by telling these people's stories. All the characters are based on real people, and it became about assigning the stories to each character.
I was nervous! I thought, "It shouldn't be happening this quickly!" I would send it to Begum and get great feedback. There were one or two scenes where I was confused and needed to talk through. For example, I didn't know how they'd tell each village they were free. This was very important to me. I didn't want it to be careless or too simple. In one of my interviews, someone emphasized the history of Arabic poetry. It clicked for me that many people who spoke to me mentioned poems. Oh, this poem someone wrote for me. This poem of our country. This poem, this poem, this poem. So, we needed to write a poem and have that be the Declaration of Independence. After talking to my mom, I realized I wanted the poem for the trees. Tell the trees that have lived through it all that they're free. Because the cedar trees in Lebanon have been growing for thousands of years. They've seen the occupation, the liberation, the war. Everything. I started writing the poem and felt very connected to my ancestors.
. One of my main goals, alongside Begum, was making the text feel natural rather than presentational. We worked on the dialogue leading up to moments. And we thought a lot about the story arcs. How do we start a story? How do we end? How do we build up to this moment? And balancing stories, too! It was also a combination of intense moments with moments of resilience and finding joy. The stories flowed through because I spent so much time on structure and mapping.
D: Not many would hear these stories and think of antlers and flying fish. Have you always thought of things with such potent visual imagery?
G: I have a visual arts background! I'm fascinated with the idea of pain as something to be celebrated--as a part of a person's journey. Visual arts felt like the perfect medium to explore this visualization of pain.
I did this project for my AP Art Class. I had created portraits of my friends and their experiences. I wanted to encapsulate their entire journey in a picture. I had all of them ready and done except for one. About two weeks before the deadline, there was a shooting at a high school nearby. Suddenly, I felt like I had to change my project. I gave the portraits to my dad. I covered them with a sheet, and he took them into a gun range and shot at them. The pieces that I'd been working on for the entire year. The point was that the covering prevented him from seeing what he was shooting at and the damage he was doing. In the end, the photos were destroyed. All this work I had put in. Destroyed. All these lives that had been living and full of stories were destroyed in a moment. I've always found that visual arts are a powerful tool.
D: Okay. But why specifically fairytales? This isn't your first time working on a project that used the fairytale aesthetic.
G: I looove it.
D: It seems to be a big part of your artistry. In the scope of this conversation, it's grown. It started as a "Phoenix City," which is more of a metaphor than a fairy tale. Then that grew into your first project: stories that resembled fairytales. Now, we have Antlers, which is a fairy tale.
G: I love telling stories through imaginative material. They make harrowing stories more accessible to people.
It all started with a band called TOMORROW X TOGETHER. They have this video called "Nap of a Star." It's a story about growing pains—growing up feeling different and learning to love yourself. They created this beautiful fairytale world where this boy and his friends had something about them. The boy had antlers. Some friends had wings, and some had spikes growing on their shoulders. Everyone had a unique identifier they were ashamed of because it made them special--identifiable. When I watched that video, I thought, this is the kind of work I want to do. I was able to put myself in it. There's something very pure and genuine about fairytales. It brings people in and then teaches them a moral.
The idea of the antlers was this kind of fantastical identifier that any person in the audience could potentially relate to and think, "I wonder what my antlers are." I do believe that there's a lack of empathy regarding underrepresented voices. This allows people to identify with the state of being identifiable. "I wonder what my antlers are."
D: I keep returning to this phrase, "broadly specific." The broad nature allows anyone to identify, but they're only called to identification if it's specific.
G: 100%. That's why I felt like—because people misunderstand Arab people—I felt like, if they have antlers, maybe you'll relate to them. That's the beauty of putting a story in this fairytale world. Perhaps it can allow you to have that empathy first. And then, you think about what it means for a particular culture.
We live in a world that is so polarized. To enter a space and have the potential to empathize, we must start from a place that is pure and genuine. Like when we were kids!
D: What did you want the audience to walk away with? What did you expect them to walk away with? What do you think they walked away with?
G: To preface this, my goal as a director is to explore intersections between art and healing. I love doing that by empowering underrepresented voices and using imaginative storytelling.
With this production, I wanted to tell a story for the people who have never heard their stories told. To listen to them, to be with people, and to find healing from it. To be represented. I also wanted those who have questions and those who do not have this background to explore their empathy for Arab stories.
My expectation? It was tricky because of the climate we were in. On the fourth day of rehearsal, the violence in Gaza had begun…the same people that I was talking about—these people. I'm sorry. There was a big obstacle when I was writing it. I didn't know if I wanted to write the name of—to name the. I was having a tough time because of how conditioned I was. I've been told to remain silent about my experiences, that I can't say anything because of a, b, or c. That my stories didn't matter as much. I couldn't say anything close to my truth because it would upset people.
I decided to write my fear and hesitation into the play, but I didn't want to label any country or anything because I wanted it to speak for itself. I expected support from people but also a lot of hatred. Everyone I interviewed told me to be safe—to be careful. There are oppressors in this world who will step on you even when you're on the floor, dying. In my environment, I have a lot of incredible support networks, but some people have shown themselves to me. People would argue that I shouldn't speak because this "problem" wasn't happening in Lebanon. And I realized these people wouldn't care about me if I was there. At home. They wouldn't care if I lived or died. They only cared about me because I was here in front of them. I knew there were people like that coming to the show. Mainly because, on campus, there's been a lot of harassment against students—doxing and outward attacks. Predominantly Arab, Palestinian, and Pro-Palestinian students. I was afraid of the hate. BUT I anticipated it, so I was trying to be strong. And I had Begum beside me, so I felt safer.
The result. I was overwhelmed with gratitude. I was incredibly grateful; that's all I can say. Everyone who spoke to me after the show began with, "Thank you." It was extraordinary, heartwarming, and empowering. This is the kind of work I want to do, so the overwhelming gratitude for telling the story teaches something and reminds my audience that art has the capacity for change. That was remarkable for me. An artist dreams of nothing else but receiving feedback like this. Especially for a play that is so personal and vulnerable. It empowered me and reminded me that theatre has no reason if it's not political. It was a magical moment. It will carry me on to my future projects—1000%.
D: You talk about your ideal audience being people with their own "antlers" and people who have never experienced their stories being told. I found Antlers very educational about the logistical reality of occupation. I was wondering if education was ever a goal of yours.
G: It was! 100%. I intended to educate people about a topic that has been going on for so long but is often misunderstood and misrepresented. In my goal of representing these voices, I felt like for those who have questions, I wanted to provide them with answers. Some people talked to me and said they knew nothing about the topic. It takes a lot of empathy and curiosity to recognize your blind spots and seek answers. Especially towards the end of the show, the goal was to show people that this story with puppets you were invested in and whimsical characters with stories you fell in love with all happened. It all happened. It's real. Then, at the end, I showed them the real people it happened to. Because it's history. There's been an erasure of history, and I think art is the one thing that survives. This is my way of saying here is this historical moment, and I hope you can learn from it so that it never has to happen again.
This happened. Liberation came to Lebanon in 2000. But liberation still has not come for Palestine. It has not come for Sudan. It has not come for The Congo. It has not come for Black people in America. It has not come for the Indigenous people in this country. It has not come for so many people. It's not history. It's happening. I think that's why it resonated a lot for people.
D: What do you think is the future of political theater?
G: I mentioned this earlier, but I think there's no reason to be doing theater if it is not political. And the definition of politics needs to be reframed for many people. Unfortunately, my experiences will always be political as a person who is not privileged. Every person of color's life will be inherently political, and so it should not be a bad word. It shouldn't be bad to call this production political. Many people say, "Let's not be political right now." I'm sorry?! This is my life! I do not have the privilege of living outside of politics because politics directly impacts my liberation! It has implications whether people feel comfortable or safe leaving their homes. It dictates every action of our lives. And so, me telling a story about my life shouldn't have to be inherently political, but it is because you've made it so.
Welcome to the world today. You cannot ignore this anymore. I think that's what makes people fearful. It makes them uncomfortable. If your theater isn't political, then what are we doing? What am I doing right now? I think about this a lot. Children are being burned. Being killed. Doctors are staying behind in hospitals they know are going to be bombed to protect their patients. What is my contribution as an artist if not to tell a story that will continue their legacy? That educates people. That heals people. That is political. What is my purpose as an artist? I don't know.
A couple of my actors came to me in rehearsal and said, "Thank you for giving me something to do at the end of the day. I don't know what I would do if I couldn't make theater like this." That was extremely powerful. To go from class to a protest, to then a rehearsal where I could tell these stories. I could say, "This might change one person, but that person will tell people, and the impact will ripple out." Art is a way to bring everyone in. It's beautiful. That's why I love fantasy. Fairy tales and fantasy have all of these metaphors! Like Star Trek. The entirety of Star Trek is grounded in many real stories, but it's palatable for people to think of them as aliens. But then they're surprised that the people these stories are based on claim them. Nowadays, we're going to say from the beginning: this is me and my story.
I think the future of political theater is the future of theater. The two have to be welded together. The goal is that, like a phoenix, as tensions rise and people's agency is removed, it will only strengthen our stories. We will always continue to grow because people of color in America have been incredibly resilient for generations. It's not going to stop us.
In class, we had a project where we had to talk about our future. I told my professor, "If you had asked me a month ago what my future was, it would have been very different." But today, I know what my future is. It's activism. It's protest theater. It's this. It must be this. There's no other way.
For more information about this production of Antlers and the team that made it happen, you can look at the program here!
If you want to learn more about the history of occupation in Arab countries, Begum Inal constructed this link. tree full of resources to educate, inspire, and get involved!