A Knock on the Roof – 30 January 2025

One of the most outstanding solo shows I’ve ever seen, A Knock on the Roof tells the story of a mother in Gaza who is physically training and preparing to respond to a knock on the roof from the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) indicating that she has 5-15 minutes to get out of her home before they bomb the building. Throughout the course of the show, we watch Mariam (Khwala Ibraheem) build up her physical endurance while her mental health deteriorates as she is too busy training her body to attend to any kind of self care (including sleep).

At the start of the show, Mariam is vibrant and relatable, talking about her son going to the beach, how she likes her coffee, being too tired for the pile of dishes in her sink, the repetitive nature of her phone calls with her husband (who is perusing his dreams while she doesn’t get to pursue her own). She is educated, mildly sarcastic (in a lovable way), and devoted to her son. She is full of pride and has a house full of personal possessions that are a testament to what is important to her and her family. There are difficulties mentioned created by the IDF not adhering to designated times to provide clean water and electricity, but they are mentioned as a matter of fact part of Mariam’s life. This establishes her baseline— what she would call normal.

Mariam’s anxiety about the knock on the roof begins when she sees on TV that another war has broken out, and, just as an experiment, she tries to see how far she can actually get from her seventh floor apartment in 5 minutes (the shortest possible case scenario if she hears the knock on the roof). This one time experiment quickly turns to daily then to multiple times per day then to constant then to constant and including her mother and son. As the severity of Mariam’s highly justified anxiety worsens, her body cannot hold the tension. She struggles to “act normal” and feels like she is watching herself act out her life. She finds a building that has already been bombed and begins secretly moving her personal possessions into it, one pillowcase worth at a time, as she calculates the weight of each journey to simulate carrying her son and her pre-prepared bags of necessities. On one of these journeys, she is stopped by an armed man. She does not specify what entity he works for, though he does speak to her in Arabic and appear to sympathize with her. In the end, Mariam’s body forces her to sleep and the actual knock on the roof happens. She does exactly what she conditioned her body to do and manages to survive, observing the bomb hit her house from a distance. In the final moment, she discovers that she had conditioned her response so thoroughly that she inadvertently grabbed her practice bag instead of her son.

The text of this play was so rich and I wish I could analyze every thematic element— being baptized and renewed by polluted water, the inherent contradictions of being raised with parents of different religions, having a BA in Statistics, the constant demands that the audience confront what Mariam defines as normal, the minimal crowd work sparking inner questions— how far can I run in 5 minutes? What would I pack as essential? How far would I go to save myself and my loved ones?

I remember learning about the knock on the roof policy from my mother, not long after an antisemitic encounter I had in my early teens. When explained to me, it was a point of pride that Israel is the only country that warns civilians and gives them some time to evacuate. A Knock on the Roof presented a side I’d never considered— the psychological torture of needing to be hypervigilant at all times waiting for a signal that could come at any time but also might never come. In a way, watching Mariam break down helped me understand the do-or-die, give-it-all religious extremism in a lot of predominantly Muslim countries. If you are living your life in a state of constant psychological and physiological distress, it makes sense to revert to binary choices and not have the bandwidth to analyze shifting cultural norms. The armed man that Mariam meets tells her to cover her hair, even though there have already been several moments in which Mariam had found a tug on her hair grounding. In that moment, had she had a scarf, I imagine she would have covered it to survive. But when you live in a constant state of needing to survive, you have to accept your reality. In Mariam’s situation, I would have done what she did— running my feet off until I was over prepared to survive.

Since this play was published in 2023, the situation in Gaza has changed dramatically. One of the elements of this play that I appreciated most was this portrait of Gaza before the war that included the people of Gaza having access to many things that social media and propaganda have claimed Gazans never had access to. As portrayed in A Knock on the Roof, Israel supplies Gaza with water and electricity, even in times of war. There are not many foreign nations that provide resources to territories that are outside of the borders of their country. People in Gaza have cell phones. They have possessions including flower beds and laundry lines and coffee pots and books. It took a month for Mariam’s husband to get a permit to leave Gaza to study— that’s way shorter than it takes to process US student visas. People in Gaza can go to the beach and have ingredients to cook special sweets. Cutting off access to supplies in response to the October 7 Massacre changes those facts, but it doesn’t negate that people in Gaza have not been living on nothing since, as some claim, the foundation of Israel in 1948. But the fact that Gazans had access to resources and possessions and moments of joy was irrelevant when faced with the constant, everpresent knowledge that it could all explode in an instant. It makes sense to me now the way Islam and Judaism differ on whether or not it is an honor to lose your life— when you might face no other options, of course you do what most people would do: convince yourself that there’s a higher purpose and it’s not all that bad.

As for the actual policy of knocking on the roof, I still see both sides. I’m not sure if I’d want the opportunity to get out. I’m not sure if I could live with the weight of it. But then again, if Israel behaved like other countries in war time, there’d be no chance to evacuate and no choice about whether or not to do so. I’d be living with the constant fear that I could suddenly be gone. I don’t know what’s worse, but A Knock on the Roof went a long way in showing some cultural differences in what is perceived as humane and what is perceived as a kindness. It showed the resilience and persistence of the people of Gaza— particularly the women, as depicted through Mariam and her impressions of her mother. The show is powerful and a beautifully monumental portrait that preserves Gaza as it was before the chaos of 10/7— not ideal, but not bereft of intelligent, educated people who love each other fiercely and celebrate the smell of rising bread before sunrise on Ramadan.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Print Shop PR.