There comes a point late in “A Knock on the Roof,” a new solo play about ordinary people under bombardment in Gaza, when the boundary blurs unsettlingly and the audience can no longer tell: Is Mariam, the central character, awake or asleep? Are we watching a horrifying reality or a fear that’s taking shape in her dreams?
Her everyday existence is fraught enough. Portrayed with easy approachability by Khawla Ibraheem, who is also the playwright, Mariam spends her days wrangling Nour, her 6-year-old son, and meticulously planning how she would escape her apartment building if the Israeli Defense Forces attacked it.
“You see,” she tells us in narrator mode, “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 15 minutes to evacuate before the actual rocket destroys the building.”
So Mariam trains to run as far as possible in five minutes, weighed down by whatever necessities she can put in a backpack — plus Nour, a heavy sleeper who will need to be carried if the bombs come at night. She puts him through practice-run paces alongside her mother, who moves in when the unnamed war begins, not because it’s safer but just to be with them.
Directed by Oliver Butler at New York Theater Workshop, “A Knock on the Roof” long predates the current war between Israel and Hamas. As a program note explains, the play began as a 10-minute monologue that Ibraheem, who lives in the Golan Heights, wrote in 2014. Much of its further development came in the year before the conflict erupted in October 2023.
The immediacy of the current war is what makes this production, which moves to London in February, so timely. Surprisingly, that does not necessarily give it a dramatic advantage.
Part of the show’s tonal challenge comes from trying to balance comic absurdity with undeniable darkness. Part stems from the banality of ordinary life, still to a great extent unremarkable even when wrenched and mangled by war. The destruction that looms and threatens is as yet, for Mariam and her family, at bay.
To the audience, Mariam is friendly and relatable, addressing us directly, nudging us to imagine ourselves in her shoes. How many pairs of underwear would we pack if we had to flee? How far can we run in five minutes? (A voice from the crowd at the performance I saw: “I can’t run at all.”)
Even as Mariam’s anxiety escalates, she maintains her facade.
“I act normal,” she says. This is a motif.
But the play, which seems to waver between fleshing Mariam out and letting her remain an Everywoman, doesn’t allow us to know her very well. An eventual cluster of details about her relationship with her husband, who is abroad studying for a master’s degree, feels inorganic.
For the most part, Ibraheem keeps the play’s focus tight on Mariam, her mother and sweet, mischievous Nour; when it opens wider to take in the city around them, it gains a welcome heft.
Butler, returning to the theater where he had such great success with “What the Constitution Means to Me,” tries to encourage a connection between actor and spectators by seating some of the crowd onstage and leaving the lights up on the audience for a good chunk of the show. Both elements feel like obstacles to our immersion in Mariam’s life. (The minimal set is by Frank J Oliva, lighting by Oona Curley.)
“A Knock on the Roof” wants to draw us close and deepen our understanding. I’m not sure it succeeds at that. But we do leave knowing that Mariam, whether awake or asleep, has been trapped inside a nightmare all along.
A Knock on the Roof
Through Feb. 16 at New York Theater Workshop; nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.
