What would you do if you were told to remain calm and wait for death to arrive at your doorstep? This is the unspoken premise of A Knock on the Roof, the New York Theatre Workshop’s latest production written and performed by Khawla Ibraheem.
Mariam, Ibraheem’s character at the heart of this one-woman show, is the archetypal frazzled mother, wary of the dishes piling up in the sink and worn out by the endless questions of her son, Nour. Like women everywhere, she has been saddled with the bulk of childcare and household responsibilities while her husband, Omar, is abroad studying for a master’s degree. But Mariam isn’t just anywhere, she’s in Gaza. There, her son’s innocent jaunt to the beach with friends suddenly becomes cause for alarm when she hears news that the Israeli Defense Force is sending troops to the borders of Gaza. War is coming.
As her will to survive and keep her son safe becomes all-consuming, Mariam narrates her daily preparations, explaining, “You see, two wars ago, they started using a technique called ‘a knock on the roof.’ It’s a small bomb they drop to alert us that we have five to fifteen minutes to evacuate before the actual rocket destroys the building.”
She begins training for the inevitable “knock on the roof” as if it were an Olympic sport. Mariam packs and repacks a go-bag. She sets a timer to test herself: one minute to the warning knock, five minutes to get out and as far away as possible. When the first buzzer goes off, she sets off running with the go-bag in tow, only to realize she hasn’t factored in Nour. She’ll have to carry him if she wants to move quickly, so she fills a pillow case with objects to mimic his weight. Mariam starts the timer again. As she waits for the alarm to go off, she tells herself to act normal. But of course, there’s nothing normal about preparing for your home to be bombed.
Mariam anxiously imagines every possible scenario. What if the knock comes when they’re asleep? Or when she’s on the toilet? Or when Nour is on the toilet—“It takes him forever to shit!”—how will she convince him to hurry? When she takes a shower, her mother chastises her for doing so naked. “What if the house gets bombed while you are in the shower and they need to dig us out from under the rubble! You must stay covered!” Preparing for war, it turns out, is not just about survival. It’s also planning for your own demise and the social conventions that must be upheld, even in death.
The absurdities of her situation are never far from Mariam’s mind. When she discovers a shelled out building within running distance, she starts offloading many of their prized possessions there, the kind of things she won’t be able to carry when the knock comes: expensive skin creams, photo albums, a green silk dress, leather shoes, books about samurais and dinosaurs, vitamins. The demolished building, she reasons, is safer than anywhere else.
At one point, exasperated, she demands of the unseen enemy:
Why do you need to warn me before killing me?
I wish it was done already—I wish I could destroy the house myself and be done with this!
I envy those whose house was destroyed, at least they know it won’t be destroyed again!
The play is filled with moments like this where you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Ibraheem’s performance as Mariam is powerful and disarming all at once, even when the one-person format burdens her with excessive narration. She watches kids in the street play-acting a funeral procession. She digs out an old baby monitor to place on their building’s roof, the better to hear the knock when it comes. Her husband calls constantly, but she never answers the phone; perhaps she’s pissed he’s not there to help her carry the load. The banalities of domestic life are familiar, but the conditions under which they are presented are utterly strange. It would be funny if the stakes weren’t so real.
The idea for A Knock on the Roof began as a 10-minute monologue that Ibraheem wrote in 2014. Later, in collaboration with director Oliver Butler, she developed the piece into a full-length play. It was scheduled to premiere at El-Hakawati (The Palestinian National Theatre in Jerusalem) and the Khasabi Theatre in Haifa in October 2023. However, after the events of October 7, the production was cancelled. Since then, more than 46,000 Palestinians have been killed inside Gaza, including 13,319 children. An additional 110,000 have been wounded, a quarter of whom must now cope with life-altering injuries.
Eminently relatable and darkly comedic, A Knock on the Roof is perhaps the closest many of us will ever get to inhabiting the madness and mundanity that comes with living through a war—and surviving to tell the story.
A Knock on the Roof | 80mins. No intermission. | New York Theatre Workshop | 79 East 4th Street | 212-780-9037 | Buy Tickets Here