Video Plays
"Meet Mosque Alert" is a compilation of content created in Steps 1 through 4 of Jamil Khoury's 9-Step new play development and civic engagement process. Mosque Alert tells the story of two suburban American families living in Naperville, IL—one Christian, the other Muslim—who find their lives torn apart by a proposal to build a new mosque in their community.
Read MoreA thought-provoking and often-humorous reflection on the theoretical and practical differences between two powerful social ideas: multiculturalism and polyculturalism.
Read More“The Imam and The Homosexual” probes the “strange bedfellows” political alliance between Imam Mustafa Khan (played by Khurram Mozaffar), spiritual leader of a besieged Naperville, IL mosque, and Carl Baker (played by Nicholas Cimino), the gay son of the imam’s chief nemesis. As Imam Mustafa struggles to reconcile his support for civil rights with his religious and cultural objections to homosexuality, Carl imagines the Muslim and LGBT communities uniting against their common enemies.
Read More"The Balancing Arab" tells the story of Heidi (played by Leslie Frame), an Irish American personal fitness trainer, and Hanan (played by Amira Sabbagh), her once morbidly obese Arab American client. Set in a downtown Chicago gym amidst a strenuous training session, the mood turns tense as the two women recount an event at the Arab American Cultural Center a few nights earlier, an event at which the evening’s political discourse got filtered through decidedly different lenses.
Read More"both/and" breaks the shackles of "either/or" in this semi-autobiographical short video play by Jamil Khoury. In "both/and," the characters of Jamil, Arab Man, and Gay Man explore and explode the constructed borders between American and Arab, Arab American and gay, for profit and not for profit, and assorted other disputed territories.
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