Najla Said performing "Palestine" at the Fourth Street Theater. (Sara Krulwich, The New York Times)

Najla Said's "Palestine," a one-woman Off Broadway show that began previews on Saturday, is a coming-of-age story about Ms. Said's journey to become an Arab-American on her own terms.

The daughter of Edward W. Said, the Columbia University professor who until his death in 2003 was the most prominent advocate in this country for the cause of Palestinian independence, Ms. Said guides the audience though her teenage years as a self-described politically agnostic Upper West Side princess to a vision of herself today, a 35-year-old woman who is deeply moved by the very word "Palestine."

Ms. Said, a writer and actor, insists that she is not an especially political person. "Palestine," which officially opens on Feb. 17 at the Fourth Street Theater in the East Village, offers no remedies for Mideast tensions or blanket assessments of a complex situation. Ms. Said just tells her tale (with generous helpings of humor), which includes attending an elite Manhattan prep school (Trinity), where she blended in with her Jewish friends; becoming anorexic at 15; and visiting the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan and Lebanon with her family, where her priority was often getting in some beach time rather than analyzing the geopolitical situation.

"I worried about being pretty enough, smart enough and fitting in," Ms. Said recalled during a recent interview about "Palestine" and the years before 9/11 cast a dark shadow. "In the way of many immigrant kids," she added, "I just wanted all the questions about identity to go away."

Those questions persisted, of course. And so on a minimalist stage, with shifts in mood and scene accomplished by an original soundtrack of Arabic and Western music, Ms. Said talks about them. Her trips to the Middle East with her family were sometimes a jumble of confusion, she says, with the smell of open sewage in Gaza, the stark separation of the sexes, the food and the language that seemed to have nothing to do with her cushy Upper West Side life.

Her mother, Mariam Cortas, is Lebanese and was brought up Quaker. She and Mr. Said, a professor of English and comparative literature who was born in Jerusalem but left the Middle East as a teenager, bonded over books like "Jane Eyre," not discussions of Orientalism. In the play Ms. Said recalls her Christian father fondly as a "cute old guy," dapper in a three-piece suit, playing tennis, driving a Volvo and smoking a pipe.

Beyond his daughter's gaze, Said was certainly considered a provocative figure. Some supporters of Israel accused him of failing to condemn specific terrorist acts by Palestinian groups. His supporters applauded his advocacy of a Palestinian homeland. Ms. Said's play revisits a 2000 international incident over a widely published photograph of her father at the Lebanese border, about to throw a stone at an abandoned Israeli guardhouse.

Ms. Said casts his action as part of a stone-throwing competition with her older brother, Wadie, with little political significance. Her father at the time called it "a symbolic gesture of joy" that the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon had ended. His detractors urged Columbia to reprimand him or to repudiate his action, but university officials decided that no action was needed.

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