Documentary theater, spaces of joy, and the responsibility of artists

Sahar Assaf, on leave from her post as AUB Assistant Professor of Theater Arts and co-director of the Theater Initiative, is executive artistic director of the Golden Thread Productions company in San Francisco. She recounts her lifelong professional and personal journey from her youth in Lebanon, when she saw theater as an escape into an alternative world where one could remain happy; in recent years she discovered the transformative power of ‘documentary theater’ – no longer a means of escape, but a way to fight forward and resist the stresses and injustices of the status quo. On her journey, she also seeks to show the ‘spaces of joy’ in the Middle East that are not often portrayed abroad.