National Queer Theater brings its annual Criminal Queerness Festival to PAC NYC in 2024, featuring productions of Achiro P. Olwoch’s The Survival, Raphaël Amahl Khouri’s She He Me and Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko’s Waafrika 123: A Queerly Scripted Tragic Rise to African Fantasia.
The Criminal Queerness Festival celebrates queer and trans artists from around the world who have the guts to risk it all—censorship, imprisonment and violence for simply sharing their truth. Since 2019, the Criminal Queerness Festival has produced playwrights from Syria, Venezuela, Uganda, Kenya, Iraq, China, Pakistan, Tanzania, Egypt, Mexico, India, Lebanon, Poland and Ukraine.
Achan, feeling pressure from her mother for not yet being married at 27, falls for Oyat after meeting him at a bar. Unbeknownst to Achan, Oyat is hoping she will be a surrogate for him and his boyfriend’s child. When Achan learns the truth from Oyat’s boyfriend, John, she must confront her own traditional upbringing to find love and new notions of family in modern Uganda. The Survival is a story of survival.
She He Me is the first Arab transgender play. It follows the true stories of three Arab characters who challenge gender norms. Randa is an Algerian trans woman who is expelled under the threat of death from her homeland because of her LGBT activism there. Omar is a Jordanian non-binary person, who, rather than body dysphoria, suffers social dysphoria when it comes to the strict codes of masculinity imposed and expected of them by both the heterosexual and gay community around them. Rok is a Lebanese trans man. His main challenge is convincing his very conservative religious mother that her daughter is actually a boy. Through humor and horror, the three characters come up against the state, society and family, but also themselves.
On the eve of the country’s first democratic elections, everyone is brewing with expression, even in the tiny, rural, fictional village, Luoland, with no electricity or running water some 250 kilometers northwest of Nairobi. There, although queer lesbians ‘don’t exist’ in Kenya, two queers fall in love: Bobby, an American development worker and Awino from the Luo tribe. To complicate matters, Awino’s father is also the Chief who enforces traditions and codes. So when famine strikes, the villagers blame the queers for the many, many deaths by starvation. To regain equilibrium, to make everything “normal” once again, Awino—non-binary queer (preop, no T) trans—must be “circumcised”—by force—so “s/he” can act like a real village woman rather than a woman “who wants to be” a man, and Bobby must leave. Will Awino and Bobby agree to separate for the good of their community? Or will the village itself change?
