Global Foreigners

Global Foreigners is an anthology of plays about what it means to be a foreigner today. The editor defines foreignness as both a physical relocation and the state of mind that follows it: your perceptions are not shared, your history is unknown to those around you, and your future is uncertain. Old values and beliefs collide with new ones, and a gap opens between inner reality and the place where one actually lives. War, genocide, poverty, oppression, totalitarian rule, collective trauma and personal loss deepen and multiply that sense of being apart. In this view, globalization has produced a new kind of exile, and the movement of people away from a single geographic and cultural identity shapes every play in the collection.

In Waxing West, Daniella has recently arrived in the US from Romania and is haunted by the ghosts of the deposed dictator Ceausescu and his wife Elena, until she lives through 9/11. In Eyes of the Heart, Thida San cannot free herself from the memory of her daughter's execution under the Khmer Rouge. In My Political Israeli Play, Miriam Bloom, a young Israeli woman living in the US, is asked by her agent to write a political play.

America Dreaming sets a professor's lecture on the policies that governed American colonists beside the experience of a young Japanese woman in the US during World War II. The Black Eyed takes aim at conventional views of sex, family and terrorism as four Arab women from different periods wait at the Gates of Martyrs. The range of the playwrights' backgrounds reflects the diversity that globalization has produced.