Play Reading of
Hakawatis
By Hannah Khalil
WHEN: Saturday, December 7th, 2024 at 3:00pm
WHERE: Tenley Town/Friendship Heights Library (4450 Wisconsin Ave NW, Washington, DC 20016)
PRICE: Free, donations welcome
Join us for a free play reading of Hannah Khalil's critically acclaimed re-imagining of the classic story, 1001 Arabian Nights.
'Hakawati /hakəˈwɑːti/. Noun: Storyteller. From the Arabic terms hekaye meaning story and haki meaning to talk.
A tyrant revenges his wife’s infidelity by wedding, bedding and beheading a new bride every day. Years later, only five brides-in-waiting remain.
These women are unapologetic, and united in their fight to keep themselves – and the whole of womankind – alive. They’ve got other ideas for their future, and it starts with a story…
Hannah Khalil is an Irish-Palestinian playwright. She was writer in residence at the Globe 2022. In December 2022 her play Hakawatis played at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, while her adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's The Fir Tree returned to the main stage at the Globe making Hannah the first writer other than Shakespeare to have had her work on in both spaces at the Globe simultaneously. Further work at the Globe includes an adaptation of Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII while A Museum in Baghdad played at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2019/20 making Hannah the first woman of Arab heritage to have a main stage play at the company. Hannah was also a Creative Fellow of the Samuel Beckett Archive for 2021/2022 and was named Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University, Spring 2021. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.
