A distinctive theme in Wajdi Mouawad’s work is that major history and individual lives are closely linked. He shows us how people from diametrically opposed cultures still try to live together. In a story where the intimacy of domestic life is shattered by the world’s violence, no single reality can overpower another. That is what happens in this play.
When German Jew Eitan and Arab-American Wahida meet in a library in New York, they fall in love instantly. But is this love destined to succeed? Eitan’s family carries with it the memory of the Holocaust. That is why Eitan’s father cannot accept his son’s choice.
Things get worse when Eitan is seriously injured in a bomb attack carried out by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem, Israel.
The family gathers around his hospital bed, revealing an old secret that had never been told, which will shatter all assumptions and certainties about identity and enmity.
