The Fever Chart: Three Short Visions of the Middle East

by Naomi Wallace

“Naomi Wallace commits the unpardonable sin of being partisan, and, the darkness and harshness of her work notwithstanding, outrageously optimistic. She seems to believe the world can change. She certainly writes as if she intends to set it on fire.”—Tony Kushner Naomi Wallace, the rare writer who combines lyrical theatricality with political ferocity, turns her sight to the Middle East, with a new triptych for the stage. Vision One, A State of Innocence , is set—as the playwright describes, in “something like a small zoo, but more silent, empty, in Rafah, Palestine. Or a space that once dreamed it was a zoo”—and features a Palestinian woman, an Israeli architect, and an Israeli soldier. Vision Two, The Retreating World , is of an Iraqi bird keeper from Baghdad and his address before the International Pigeon Convention. Vision Three, Between this Breath and You , takes place after hours in the waiting room of a clinic in West Jerusalem, where a Palestinian father confronts the nurse’s aide, a young Israeli woman, about the meaning of the loss of his son and the impact it had on her life. These multifaceted works explore the urgency and complexity of the Middle East’s political landscape, through the voices and bodies of the people who inhabit it. Naomi Wallace is a poet and playwright from Kentucky, who currently resides in England. Her numerous awards include the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Her plays, including One Flea Spare , In the Heart of America , and Trestle at Pope Lick Creek , are produced throughout the United States and around the world.

Genres: Plays, Theatre, Drama

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Naomi Wallace is an American playwright, screenwriter and poet from Kentucky. She is widely known for her plays, and has received several distinguished awards for her work.

Her Finborough Theatre productions include And I And Silence, which subsequently transferred to Signature Theater, New York City. Other theatre productions include In the Heart of America (Bush Theatre), Slaughter City (Royal Shakespeare Company), One Flea Spare (Public Theater, New York City), The Trestle at Pope Lick Creekand Things of Dry Hours (New York Theatre Workshop), The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East (Public Theater, New York City), and Night is a Room (Signature Theater, New York City).

Naomi has been awarded the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize twice, the Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, the Obie Award and the Horton Foote Award. She is also a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts development grant. In 2013, Naomi received the inaugural Windham Campbell Prize for Drama, and in 2015 an Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Her play One Flea Spare was recently incorporated into the permanent repertoire of the French National Theatre, La Comédie-Française. Only two American playwrights have been added to La Comédie’s repertoire in two hundred years, the other being Tennessee Williams.

Reviews

[June ✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read it for class, but absolutely loved it. Had tears in my eyes a few times. It's not a text I would've picked up myself. I'm really glad I was assigned the play.

[alyssa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just as good as the first time I read these short plays years ago.

[Hagar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three very short plays- or visions as Naomi calls them- of the Middle East!I've watched it performed as well in the AUC..and was a remarkable performance!

The book also contains another 10-min play...

Merged review:

Three short one-act plays that have the Arab in common..and takes you to Palestine, to Iraq, to oppression, to marginalisation, to see how you're setereotyped! To see the Israeli..as the murderer and as the human being! It's about seeing human beings! Especially directed to address the blindfolded West!
I've seen the play produced in the Falaki Theatre (AUC) and it was a nice performance..only the AUCians messed a bit with it! But, was really worth-watching..and more..worth-reading! :)

[Sean Carman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three brilliant, short, dreamlike plays, the first two about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the third about the war in Iraq. The genius of these plays is their ability to capture, through the poetic dream of fiction, the tragic despair of their oppressed subjects.

[Eli Hemmila · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first read Fever Chart, I ended up re-reading The Retreating World five or six times, out loud, until I feel asleep on the couch with the book open on my chest.