The last ten years have seen growing attention in the United States to both Arab and Arab-American drama. The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center alone has published six anthologies of plays in this period of time by authors from the Middle East and North Africa region, most recently Four Arab Hamlet Plays edited by Marvin Carlson and Margaret Litvin (New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 2015). The year 2016 also saw the publication of Tahrir Tales: Plays from the Egyptian Revolution, edited and translated by Mohammed Albakry and Rebekah Maggor (New York: Seagull Books). This flurry of translation follows just a handful of anthologies of Arab plays in earlier decades, such as Arabic Writing Today: Drama edited by Mahmoud Manzalaoui (Cairo: American Research Center in Egypt, 1977) and Modern Arabic Drama: An Anthology edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Roger Allen (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1995). This new interest in Arab theater parallels a new interest in Arab-American theater. Michael Malek Najar's Four Arab American Plays (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2013) expands upon the contributions of Holly Hill and Dina Amin's Salaam. Peace: An Anthology of Middle Eastern-American Drama (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2009).

The attention to Arab theater is long overdue, given the rich theatrical traditions throughout the Levant and North Africa. There is not nearly so long a tradition of Arab-American drama (the early contributions of Ameen Rihani, Kahil Gibran, and Mikhail Naimy notwithstanding). However in recent years Arab American theater has flourished, with the success of playwrights such as Yusuf El-Guindi and Heather Raffo in off-Broadway and regional theaters, and the rise of theater companies and presenting houses—such as Noor, Silk Road Rising, and Golden Thread—devoted to developing Middle Eastern voices in the theater. As the so-called War on Terror has lead to reductive understandings of Arabs, drama translators and Arab theater practitioners have responded with highly nuanced work.

Arab and Arab-American playwrights face very different social and political realities but there are a number of shared concerns that justify reading across the boundaries of language and nation. This is especially true in the case of Palestine; whether born in or outside of the occupied territories, Palestinian playwrights are understandably attentive to the national dissolution and forced migration in the years surrounding 1948, the indignities suffered by Palestinians in the occupied territories, and past and present strategies of resisting European and later Israeli occupation. These themes dominate Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora, which presents the work of playwrights of Palestinian descent, whether born in the territories, Arab countries, or the West.

Of the six plays anthologized, only one premiered in the occupied territories. This fact reflects the focus on devised work, adaptation, and forum theater projects currently popular among Palestinian theater companies. (Forum theater involves acting scenarios generated from research in a specific community and empowering audience members to stop and redirect the action performed.) In part this emphasis on ensemble-created work is the legacy of Israeli censorship policies and the current funding priorities of nongovernmental organizations; however, it is also arguably the response of Palestinian theater makers to what they perceive as the needs of their community. Regardless of the cause, this tradition does pose challenges to editors who effectively (if not expressly) look to the solo-authored play text. The result is a collection of plays that found their first audiences in a range of nations through varied development processes. In some ways, that is one of the significant points of this anthology. Beyond the fact that these are six outstanding plays, part of the pleasure of reading Inside/Outside is to track the complicated trajectories by which Palestinian authors have found stages and to meditate on the idea of a national theater in the absence of a nation-state. It is worth noting that the collection prompts such observations because the editors have provided substantial author biographies, detailed the production history of each play, and (in all but one case) provided original cast lists. Equally important, Nathalie Handal has provided a brief but informative introduction that addresses theater and performance in Palestine from its pre-20th-century roots through the present day.

Two of the plays look to Arab history. Central images in Khalid Ismail's Tennis in Nablus depict British rule in the Palestine Mandate as both cruel and frivolous but invariably foreign to and oblivious of Palestinian consciousness. British officers seem to be endlessly playing dress up between their tennis matches and costume parties. The latter prompts a lieutenant to take part in an ambush of nationalists while decked out in full Maharaja regalia; later that same lieutenant and a general discuss manipulating Arab–Jewish hostility to undermine Palestinian nationalism while respectively dressed as a comedia dell'arte character and Hitler (no need to explicate the symbolism there). Tennis, as the title suggests, is a central image in a play about Palestinian nationalists literally reduced to the status of ball boys as great powers play games with the future of the Arab world. Betty Shamieh's Territories goes even farther back in time, inventing a female heroine to spark Salah al-Din's wresting control of Palestine from the Crusaders. This three-person play, prompted by the apocryphal account of Reginald of Châtillon's capture of Salah al-Din's sister, imagines a strange mix of desire and violence at the heart of East–West conflict.

Plan D by Hannah Khalil depicts the flight of a family from their home on the news that an unidentified population has invaded surrounding environs. After first hiding in the nearby woods as a precaution, the family makes its way to ever more distant villages as their promise to return next spring becomes increasingly less likely. The play scrupulously avoids references to a specific time or place, giving the work a distressing fable-like quality. (In fact, the author's notes explain that the play was inspired by oral testimonies by Israelis and Palestinians who lived through 1948.) By contrast, 603 by Imad Farajin, grounds itself in a specific time and place: cell 603 in the Askalan central prison in present-day Israel. Four Palestinian prisoners kill time caring for their pet mosquito, imagining their release, and trading less than fully accurate stories of their past political activities.

Handala, adapted by Abdelfattah Abusrour from the cartoons of Naji Al-Ali, and Keffiyeh/Made in China, by Dalia Taha, are the more experimental plays in the anthology. Each of the sixteen short scenes in Handala is an adaptation or extended riff on a well-known cartoon featuring the eponymous onlooker. The play enfolds like a series of politicized tableaux vivants. Throughout, an actor playing Naji Al-Ali appears on stage to comment on his art and the world he confronts. The pleasure of recognizing the cartoons (for those familiar) alternates with the dark humor of the scenes depicted. The anthology's most experimental and (for me) most powerful work is Dalia Taha's Keffiyeh/Made in China. In ten disconnected terse scenes of highly economical language, two or three characters describe the violence of daily life in the occupied territories. Parents avoid identifying the body of their child, killed after throwing stones. A man and a woman narrate the last sixty seconds of the man's life before a video (subsequently uploaded to YouTube) captures his death by a bullet to the eye. An elder revolutionary explains to a solider guarding a Picasso (presumably “Buste de Femme,” which was displayed in Ramallah in 2011) why the former chooses death in resistance. These scenes unfold quickly until culminating in a final scene, again between a man and a woman, who discuss the furnishing's for the room of their son, who may be the dead child in the play's first scene.

The stylistic diversity of these works is matched by the different and complicated national identities of their authors. Ismail Khalidi was born in Beirut and grew up in the United States. Dalia Taha was born in Berlin and grew up in Ramallah. Hannah Khalil was born in the United Kingdom and grew up in Dubai before returning to London. Betty Shamieh was born and lives in the United States. Imad Farajin and Abdelfattah Abusrour were born and live in the occupied territories. These plays were developed in Palestinian, US, and European theaters, written in English and Arabic, sometimes translated for their premieres. In the context of Palestinian theater, the organizing rubric of national theaters obscures as much as it clarifies. Inside/Outside draws attention to the complexity of Palestinian art making as well as the complexity and value of Palestinian art.