To interview Hanna Eady contact the IMEU at 718-514-9662 or info@imeu.net

Palestinian-American playwright Hanna Eady.

Hanna Eady is founder of the New Image Theater Company in Seattle and has been writing, performing, and directing plays since he was 14 years old. Born in 1956 in the Palestinian village of Buqa'ya, in the Upper Galilee, he became interested in theater as a child because there was little else that provided entertainment. "We didn't even have electricity or running water. So we would look for books with stories in them that we could perform."

He continued to pursue his passion for theater as an adult, where he encountered some harsh realities as a Palestinian citizen of Israel. "They censored our scripts and our shows very heavily." When he was appointed artistic director of a government-funded theater, Eady staged a play entitled Rihaneh. "It was a metaphor for Palestine, and talked about our lost homes, but you couldn't even say 'Palestine' then. Every night, I would sneak in parts of the dialogue that the government censor had stricken from the script. Finally, they fired me."

Disillusioned, Eady decided to pursue his studies in the United States. He earned a second Bachelor's degree in theater at the University of Wisconsin, and then a Master degree at the University of Washington in Seattle. He founded the New Image Theater Company, and wrote and produced plays that continued to explore themes of identity, oppression, and exile. In 1993 he began work on a play about Suhmata, one of the Palestinian villages Israel destroyed in 1948. Suhmata's inhabitants fled in fear. Later, the Israeli government destroyed the remaining homes and planted non-native pine trees on the site to hide the village.

Eady took video equipment back to the Galilee and interviewed internally displaced Palestinian refugees. What he learned would have a profound impact on his life and his own identity as a Palestinian.

"Living in Israel, they don't tell you these things. You don't learn your own history. The grandparents never really told their story; they just kept it in their memory like a secret."

Co-written with fellow Seattle playwright Ed Mast, Suhmata tells the story of Abu Soheil, an elderly Palestinian man who uncovers the ruins of his home in his destroyed village. The play debuted in 1996 in Seattle, and has been performed throughout the United States and in Europe. Eady says the most poignant performance, however, occurred on the actual site of Suhmata, "with the village's original residents seated in the front row, and in the background five Jewish settlements which were built on Suhmata's land."

More on Suhmata.