A play has a memory too, with all the complications that go with it. Some people will want to follow a story on fingers. I prefer to follow it like an intense pleasure, without any physical implications.
In this obsessed world, I have something catching up to do. I am acting, changing every action into a perspective with my own remote control. This is the charm of being an actor, and also an onlooker.

Territories was commissioned by Trinity Repertory Theatre and funded in part by the islamic World Arts/Culture Initiative. The funding includes the opportunity to translate the play into Arabic and develop it in workshop at Trinity Rep with Palestinian director Raeda Ghazaleh, whose work has toured many of the largest theatres throughout the Middle East and Europe and has recently been written about by Carol Churchill in The Guardian.


Betty Shamieh tells how two men fight for the control of a woman, carried by the differences of religions. The woman manage to keep both at distance and maintain her independence.
Setting to discover new things, being ready to accept critics or cheers, this play have been withdrawing from the bustle of life to gain a new perspective on life. Building this story testifies her love for human kind.

In 1187, the sister of the Islamic ruler Saleh Al-Din sets out on a pilgrimage to Mecca with the aim of saving her people from the Christian Crusaders. She never reaches her destination: The frenchman Reginald de Chatillon takes the unarmed young woman captive as an object for his cruel skills of seduction and torture. So much for the historical background that forms the basis for this play by the Palestinian-American author Betty Shamieh. It highlights the complex personal relations between the ruler, his sister and the Frenchman. In Shamieh's hands, spirit that allows her, in spite of her handicap of being prone to fits of and her powerful brother. Shamieh is searching for the root causes of religious conflicts and of gender politics. The result of this search is a tension-fraught example of the clash of civilization, which in its switching between different temporal levels shows three characters exploring the limits of their convictions.

Betty Shamieh gives us a play about people and allow them to mix with the onlookers. This allow them to make their own conclusions. This is a great function of the human settlement reduced in a deliberate manner to theatre and can instigate to a series of landscapes, along the fault line that separated the characters from the onlookers.