- Courtesy International Voices Project
- Egyptian playwright Ahmed Serag
I learned a lesson from last year’s installment of the International Voices Project, even though I didn’t attend. The IVP produces an annual festival of staged readings that highlights works by playwrights from outside the English-speaking world—Germany to Japan, Egypt to Catalonia. The roster for 2013 included Noise in the Waters by Italy’s Marco Martinelli and Hamlet Is Dead. No Gravity. by Ewald Palmetshofer of Austria. Not a year later Martinelli’s own Teatro delle Albe arrived from Ravenna with a full staging of Noise, while Chicago’s Red Tape Theatre presented the U.S. premiere of Hamlet Is Dead.
The IVP’s first Ugandan entry is Judith Lucy Adong’s Just Me, You and the Silence (Mon 4/14), about an ambitious politician who has to choose between his career and the person he “cherishes most in the world.” Sweden’s Jonas Hassen Khemiri had a script called Invasion! read at the 2012 festival; in further confirmation of my lesson, it went on to a full local production. This time Khemiri gives us a look at I Call My Brothers (Tue 4/15), inspired by a Stockholm suicide bombing.
