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“How far can you run in five minutes?”
It’s a critical question the actor and writer Khawla Ibraheem asks the audience during her solo show A Knock on the Roof. The play follows Miriam, played by Ibraheem, a young mother training to survive an Israeli bombing in Gaza.
“A quarter of a mile,” someone replies.
Miriam meditates for a beat. “That’s really slow, you know,” she says as the audience laughs.
A Knock on the Roof is a blunt and poignant work, named after the Israeli military’s practice of “roof knocking”, in which residents are notified by a warning bomb that they have just five to 15 minutes to evacuate before a larger missile flattens their homes. The play, which opened Monday at the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) as part of the Under the Radar festival, brims with love, wry humor and grief as it follows Miriam’s obsessive training to leave her home.
In the 85-minute show, Miriam sets a series of five-minute timers and rehearses how she, her son and her elderly mother will flee from their seventh-floor apartment after the “roof knock”: down the stairs, as the elevator will be out of order; past Yasmeen, her know-it-all neighbor on the third floor; over the loose floor tile in the stairwell; and, finally, out the door.
Along with the anxiety of the impending roof knock, the solo show includes other details about Miriam’s life under Israeli occupation, including how she raises her young son while her husband studies abroad. For instance, she spends long stretches of time waiting for the electricity to be restored, which Miriam comments on as she monologues about the other frustrations of her day. The shelled-out buildings in her neighborhood are rendered via eerie projections, juxtaposed with colorful umbrellas and an expansive beach.
These specifics aren’t written voyeuristically. They’re simply facts of Miriam’s life, just like Miriam’s expansive facial routine or her nosy mother or her adorable but stubborn six-year-old son. “We don’t get the story of those people that survived this war [and] their experience,” Ibraheem told the Guardian. “And about the fact that during wartime, you can also do laundry or laugh with your mother and son, or you need to do daily things to survive.”
Miriam, a fictional character, is a culmination of Ibraheem’s research, dozens of conversations with people from Gaza and others who have experienced war, and dashes of Ibraheem’s own life to fill in differences between the two. Miriam “is a fighter. She’s strong. Not only in terms of a war,” said Ibraheem. She is “basically a single mother raising a child in an impossible place alone, and she’s making the best out of it”. Miriam and Ibraheem overlap in significant ways: their proclivity towards sarcasm and their experience with war. “I come from a place where war has recently become a state of mind,” said Ibraheem, who’s Syrian and lives in the Israeli-occupied, annexed Golan Heights.
Though she hasn’t experienced a “roof knock”, which mainly happens in Gaza, Ibraheem felt compelled to write about the subject, as she empathized with people “paying the price of a war [they’re] not a part of”, Ibraheem said, calling Golan Heights’ situation a “soft occupation”. “I never saw a tank in the state of the Golan Heights. I never needed to run from a soldier,” she said. But, farmers in the Golan Heights struggle with the cost of water and maintaining the land, while Israeli settlers enjoy such privileges for free. Residents of Golan Heights cannot enter Syria due to border restrictions, but they can visit Palestine. “This is like a historical coincidence that I’m in touch with the Palestinian people,” Ibraheem said.
Still, Ibraheem and her community have experienced the violence of war. On 27 July 2023, 12 children were killed by a rocket while playing on a football field in Majdal Shams. “When a rocket lands, [it] does not know how it’s killing and why it’s killing,” she said of the tragic event. “We experienced the loss of the war between Israel and Hezbollah, although we are not part of [that] war.”
Ibraheem first conceived of A Knock on the Roof in 2014 after reading an article about people in Gaza packing preparation bags in case of missile strikes. Inspired, she wrote a 10-minute monologue, called “what does it do to you when you know that in five to 15 minutes your house will be gone”, Ibraheem said. In 2021, Ibraheem and the director Oliver Butler further developed the excerpt into a full-length play, using Miriam’s evacuation drills as the through-line. “What I saw was just a really clear engine for a story and the beginnings of a character who might become consumed with preparation,” said Butler of Ibraheem’s early idea. The fact that the play remains relevant more than 10 years later is “terrifying”, said Ibraheem.
Ibraheem and Butler, who called Ibraheem a “theater soulmate”, have remained in close collaboration after first meeting in 2019 at the now defunct Sundance Theatre Lab in Park City, Utah. Ibraheem was developing a comedy called London Jenin in collaboration with the Freedom Theatre, a Palestinian community theater in the Jenin refugee camp. The play focuses on two Palestinians in a UK immigration office practicing their entrance interviews while debating on relocating to London versus remaining in their homeland. Ibraheem’s work, Butler said, often includes themes of “trappedness, freedom and rehearsal”.
In May 2023, Butler, who is from Connecticut and lives in New York, visited Ibraheem in Golan Heights to continue working on A Knock on the Roof. The trip proved a “creative dream” but a “massive education”, Butler said. When he first arrived, seven people in Gaza were killed by an Israeli rocket, putting the entire region “on the verge of war”. Performing a reading of A Knock on the Roof in Ramallah, located in the West Bank, exposed Butler firsthand to checkpoints. An avid hiker, he was walking up a mountain when he came across a menacing sign, which read: “Go no further. Landmines [ahead].” “What feels like such a safe, beautiful place full of family and art also has minefields all around,” he said.
The play almost didn’t happen several times due to safety concerns in the region, said Ibraheem. “Flights are canceled and war is happening,” she said. “Suddenly, the safety of being in a theater stopped being so taken for granted.”
With the show now making its US premiere at NYTW, Ibraheem and Butler say that audiences have generally received the show positively. But some people have complained, claiming that the show is antisemitic because it features a Palestinian protagonist. “Are we saying that the existence of a character who’s Palestinian is dangerous or offensive?” said Butler. “If a character can’t exist on stage like this, then you’re saying that that person should not be allowed to exist.”
Patricia McGregor, the NYTW artistic director, said the theater had caught flak for debuting A Knock on the Roof. “I remember seeing somebody [online] saying: ‘Oh, you’re doing this antisemitic play,’” McGregor said. “And I think that assumption [comes from] doing a play that centers a mother in Gaza, living her life and trying to make sure her child survives, an assumption which is just not true.”
NYTW has a longstanding, although imperfect, relationship with Palestinian artwork and artists. Noor Theatre, which supports Middle Eastern artists, is an NYTW company-in-residence, and in 2012, NYTW put on the group’s Food and Fadwa, a dramedy about a Palestinian family living near Bethlehem.
In December 2024, the playwright Victor I Cazares, a former NYTW artist-in-residence, launched an HIV-medicine strike after the theater did not call for a ceasefire; the protest caused a storm of controversy, with criticism lodged both at NYTW and Cazares. “I think there was an unfortunate avalanche of feelings and assumptions about what political alignment was happening,” said McGregor. “There were differing opinions about what strategies we use to try to get people to pay attention and to change hearts and minds.” Programming artwork like Ibraheem’s, McGregor said, is among the most effective things a theater can do to spark conversations and reach across divides.
For Ibraheem, A Knock on the Roof provides a rare opportunity to capture the intimacy of wartime alongside the everyday emotions: fear, irritation, joy. One of the most magical moments, she said, is when audiences laugh with Miriam and her attempts to juggle it all. “I don’t want people to sit in on the play and be in solidarity with me,” she said. “I want them to sit there and to be with me, and once they laugh, I feel that they are with me.”
