Theatre News Wire

Goodman Theatre ushers in spring with its first world premiere production by a SWANA (South West Asian and North African) playwright: Martin Yousif Zebari's Layalina, a surprising new play about how multi-generational families fall apart-and find each other again-amidst turbulent global and social change. Sivan Battat directs the cast of five, featuring Waseem Alzer (Sahir/Amin), Atra Asdou (Karima/Layal), Ali Louis Bourzgui (Young Mazin/Yousif), Mattico David (Yasir/Mazin) and Becca Khalil (Young Layal/Marwa). Originally developed in the Goodman's New Stages Festival, Layalina appears March 3 - April 2, 2023 in the 350-seat flexible Owen Theatre.

"This story is inspired broadly by my own family's journey of immigrating from Baghdad to Skokie," said playwright Martin Yousif Zebari. "I've always been in awe of the ways in which displacement followed by assimilation has shaped my family's future. Their need to simultaneously fit in and stand out. I've weaved in real events, exaggerated truths and fictional resolutions to show not what my own family is like but what any family can look like."

Director Sivan Battat adds, "I am delighted and honored to be collaborating with Martin to realize this story at Goodman Theatre. By grounding in the particular specificity of this family and their journey, Martin invites us into a story with many universal sites of resonance: from how to live in a relationship to parental expectations, to navigating sibling rivalries, yearning for someone you can't have, wrestling with how to define yourself in your family and in the world, or even figuring out how to hit a joint for the first time. These characters, like my family, so often talk around the thing they truly mean, and find a way to say it with their hands, through food, or sewing, or touch. In rehearsal, I am excited to work with this brilliant cast to excavate the truths, fears, yearnings, shames and joys that hover inside of the words Martin has penned."

In Layalina, it's 2003 in Baghdad, and newly-wed Layal and her family prepare to immigrate to a Chicago suburb. Seventeen years later, Layal's life looks unimaginably different from what she had envisioned two decades prior, as she and her siblings explore queerness, face their grief and discover what it takes to make home in a new place. Layalina was cultivated as a developmental production during Goodman's 17th annual New Stages Festival-a free celebration and discovery of new works by some of the country's finest established and emerging playwrights, under the leadership of Director of New Works Jonathan L. Green.