August 21 – August 22, 2026
7:00 – 9:00 PM
RSVP Required. Reserve your tickets using the links below:
Friday, Aug. 21st
Saturday, Aug. 22nd
Join us for the premiere of EVE, a queer Palestinian play, re-interpreting Paradise Lost, asking: how do our communities keep going in the aftermath of failed revolutionary struggle?
As Arab American National Museum writers-in-residence, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi and George Abraham began this project as a poetic exchange throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, noticing a mutual obsession with John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, which culminated in a 2021 residency that staged a preliminary excerpt consisting of poems, experiments with puppetry, and oral storytelling.
In the years that followed, the urgency and scale of EVE expanded, evolving in genre as the history of the ongoing Palestinian Nakba spiraled onwards. What was once a campy, meta-poetic, DIY experiment has evolved into a fully staged performance piece that shatters and re-imagines the Adam and Eve mythography of Paradise Lost through the lens of Palestinian liberation. Just as Milton wrote Paradise Lost in the aftermath of a failed revolution against the British monarchy, EVE examines the long century of Palestinian anti-colonial resistance, from the British mandate era to the Al-Aqsa Flood, to ask: how do we, collectively, keep on resisting empire in the aftermath of failed revolutions? How do we grieve an impossible loss, in such revolutionary moments, and how might our grief become a tunnel to a liberatory future?
Through collaborations bringing together poets, playwrights, experimental performance artists, puppet-makers, visual artists, choreographers, and sound artists, EVE is a 90-minute live performance, directed and co-created by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, co-written by George Abraham, and starring Abraham & Tbakhi alongside Leila Awadallah of Body Watani and acclaimed Palestinian playwright William Nour.
EVE is a National Performance Network project, made possible by lead sponsorship from the Arab American National Museum, Mizna, and Silk Road Cultural Center, with grants from the Map Fund & more.
George Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet, essayist, critic and performance artist. They are the author of When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America (Haymarket, 2026) and Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020), which won the Arab American Book Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. They are the Editor-at-Large of Mizna and co-editor of HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE US: Palestinian Poetry (Haymarket, 2025), which was long-listed for the Palestine Book Award. They are a graduate of Northwestern’s Litowitz MFA+MA program and teach at Amherst College as a Writer-in-Residence.
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a Palestinian performance artist and the author of TERROR COUNTER (Deep Vellum, 2025) and ANTIGONE. VELOCITY. SALT. (Deep Vellum, 2027).
Made possible in part by:
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