Paul Spera Editor

Yasser Abu Shaqra, a Palestinian-Syrian writer and theater-maker, was born in Damascus in 1985 and graduated from Damascus’s Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts. Between 2010 and 2014, he organized a number of participatory theater projects in Damascus and the Syrian countryside. His play Before Dinner (2015) has been translated into English and Japanese, and was subsequently presented in Beirut, Baghdad, San Francisco, New York, Paris and Tokyo. A collection of his poetry was published in Denmark, and another play, Honey, Sun, and Gold (2021), was performed in Tunisia. He lives in France.

Actor and theater maker Paul Spera has collaborated with Masrah Ensemble since 2015, in Shatila and Beirut with the Family Ti-Jean project, and in Paris for the first French-language reading of Yasser Abu Shaqra’s Before Dinner, translated by Krystel Khoury and co-produced by Maison d’Europe et d’Orient and Théâtre des Minuits. He is a member of Kultursciok Live Art Collective based in Paris and Naples, and he has performed in theater pieces and films in Europe, the US, and the Middle East.

Agnes Borinsky (she/they) is a writer, performer, and theater-maker based in Los Angeles. She is interested in the unintended transformations that become possible when the things we’ve planned fail. Her projects include many plays (The Trees, A Song of Songs, Of Government, Ding Dong It’s the Ocean), experiments in participation (Working Group for a New Spirit, Weird Classrooms), and fiction (Sasha Masha). She has made work in collaboration with theater institutions – Playwrights Horizons, The Bushwick Starr, Clubbed Thumb – and outside of them, in basements, backyards, circus tents, community centers, and online. Her play, Brief Chronicle, Books 6-8, was published by 3 Hole Press, and Of Government is included in Clubbed Thumb’s 2021 anthology.