Portland Phoenix | Conjuring Home: Maine playwright dazzles with ambitious Refuge *Malja* ملج at Portland Stage

When Jewish-American photojournalist Jamie (Brooke Parks) meets a shoeless Syrian boy on the island of Lesvos, she feels compelled to shelter him. But she hasn’t thought through what to do next, and her compulsion to help the boy, Waleed (local actors Mohammad Adam, Hussein Al-Mshakheel, and Anwer Ali, in rotation), is complicated. Seeking advice from a former lover, the journalist Ibrahim (Amro Salama), Jamie revisits a history of relationships and choices. Moving back and forth in time, across continents, and between external and interior worlds, we follow Jamie’s reckonings with language, commitment, and home, in the lyrical Refuge * Malja * ملجأ. Written by local playwright and performer Bess Welden, Refuge is the latest in Portland Stage’s season of shows about borders and boundaries, and is on stage now, under the direction of New York City-based director Kareem Fahmy.   

Malja is the Arabic word for refuge, and Welden brought in a translator, Ali Al-Mshakheel, to provide the play’s substantial Arabic dialogue — some with English translation, much without. It’s one of several thoughtful choices that decenter us from a white American perspective. Images projected on a large screen help us range geographically between Greece and Israel, displaying now Jamie’s photographs of refugees, now the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, where she traces the fate of her grandfather. The stage itself presents a wide stretch of Lesvos sand, vast and stark, punctuated by an iconic pile of orange life vests that never leaves the stage.