"A Knock on the Roof" Pushes too Hard

When the Palestinian playwright Khawla Ibraheem began working on her one-woman show A Knock on the Roof a decade ago, it was a 10-minute monologue. Now the show, which is currently playing at New York Theatre Workshop, runs about 85 minutes and I wish I could have seen the shorter version. I don’t mean that to be a slam against the current show’s message. I’m just lamenting how it goes about delivering it.

The title refers to the Israeli military’s practice of dropping a small “warning” bomb on the rooftop of a building in Gaza or the West Bank to alert the inhabitants that they have just a few minutes to get out before a larger bomb will destroy the entire structure and everything in it. 

This story about one woman's attempt to live an ordinary life in the face of such extraordinary circumstances is particularly resonant right now after 15 months of Israel’s scorched-earth response to Hamas' Oct. 7 assault has led to the deaths of over 45,000 Palestinians and the displacement of nearly 2 million others.  

Ibraheem’s character Mariam is the young middle-class mother of a six-year-old son who has become obsessed with how she might respond to the “knock.”  And so she begins to rehearse grabbing up her son along with whatever necessities she can stuff into a backpack and making practice runs to see how far away she can get from danger. 

It’s a compelling set-up. And it’s a welcomed reminder that there are real people behind the statistics we see on the news, people who worry about serious things like how to deal with aged parents and frivolous ones like which skin care regimens really work just the way those of us in far less fraught situations do.

But Ibraheem and director Oliver Butler who is credited with developing this longer version with her (click here to listen to an interview about how they did it) don’t seem to know what to say once they’ve gotten our attention and so they just keep repeating the same things over and over again. 

My friend Lisa suggests that the repetitions might represent Mariam's mounting mania. It's a good theory but if that's the case, I wish Ibraheem and Butler had been able to make that clearer.

Instead, they introduce some other characters—Mariam’s mother who further complicates things by moving in with her daughter and grandson, her husband whose constant calls from abroad where he's studying become another hassle and their young son—but since Ibraheem is the only performer, she has to portray all of them, and I'm afraid she doesn't always make them distinct enough. 

To be fair, Ibraheem is an engaging performer but her accent and the pitch of her voice can make it difficult to understand some of the dialog, regardless of who’s supposed to be speaking.  And I just got tired of watching her pretend to run on NYTW’s bare stage. 

There are a few attempts to more actively involve the audience (some members are seated onstage, the lights are often left up and Ibraheem occasionally asks questions like how many underwear should she pack and then waits for people to answer) but, at least at the performance I attended, those interactions were awkward. The show's surprise ending was strained too.

A story as intrinsically powerful as this one doesn’t need a lot of gimmicks. It doesn’t need to be drawn out either. As the saying goes, sometimes less can be more.

5 Shows I Most Want to See in Spring 2025

Some theater-goers lust after seeing big-name stars and there will be plenty of them for those folks to see in the upcoming spring season, from theater-grown ones like Idina Menzel in Redwood, the original eco-musical that she co-conceived; to Hollywood imports like George Clooney, making his stage debut in Good Night, And Good Luck, a theatrical version of the 2005 movie he co-wrote about the showdown between the newscaster Edward R. Murrow and the demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy. 

I like seeing stars too, but only when they come with good acting as Rachel McAdams did with her impressive performance in last season’s Mary Jane. But, as anyone who has caught my podcasts Stagecraft and All the Drama can tell you, I’m most turned on by playwrights and so the shows I’m always most eager to see are those by smart writers who have interesting things to say about the ways in which we try to make sense of—and make connections in—this complicated world in which we all live. 

So my spring preview is a little different from others I’ve been reading. I do want to see the shows that so many of my colleagues are touting but below are five that I’m really desperate to see:

LIBERATION by Bess Wohl @ Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre, starting Jan. 31: One of the things I most admire about Wohl is her refusal to write the same kind of play twice. She’s written a romcom about young Nazi lovers, a musical about porn stars and a comedy about people at a silent retreat in which only a couple of lines of dialog are ever spoken. This time out she's given herself the challenge of looking at women’s attempts to figure out what they want for themselves in two separate time periods set 50 years apart and I can hardly wait to see what she makes of that. 

GRANGEVILLE by Samuel D. Hunter @ Signature Theater, starting Feb. 4: There have recently been a slew of works—Blood Quilt, The Hills of California, even the excellent movie “His Three Daughters”—about siblings coming together to mourn a dying parent but it’s hard to find a more thoughtful or sensitive playwright working today than Hunter and so I’m really curious about what spin his play centered on two half-brothers played by Brendan Fraser and Brian J. Smith will bring to that theme.

PURPOSE by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in a Steppenwolf production @ the Helen Hayes Theater, starting Feb. 25: Although he’s been turning out one provocative work after another over the past 15 years, it was last season’s production of Appropriate that put Jacobs-Jenkins on many theatergoer’s radar. It featured a dysfunctional white southern family with some skeletons in their closet. This new work is switching the focus to an equally troubled midwestern black family who will be brought to life by such catnip performers as LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Henry Lennix, John Michael Hill and Kara Young.

WINE IN THE WILDERNESS by Alice Childress @ Classic Stage Company, starting March 6: Back in the 1950s and '60s, the theater world wasn’t quite ready for the nuanced ways that Childress insisted on portraying black people in plays like Trouble in Mind and The Wedding Band. But as the success of recent revivals of those works have shown, Childress, who died in 1994 at the age of 77, was a master storyteller and so I'm sure you'll understand why I'm over the moon about the fact that the actress and producer La Chanze is making her directorial debut with Childress' two hander about an artist and the model he believes will help him create his image of black womanhood. 

FLOYD COLLINS music and lyrics by Adam Guettel and book by Tina Landau @ Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, starting March 27: It’s not just writers who create straight plays who draw me in. I’ve been waiting for years for a revival of Guettel’s musical which I missed during its brief 25-show run in 1996. Its story, based on the true 1925 incident of a cave explorer who set off a media circus when he got trapped underground, sounds intriguing; Landau, who is also directing, is a whiz at staging shows and the role of the explorer seems almost tailor-made for Jeremy Jordan who left The Great Gatsby to take the part. But it’s the chance to hear Guettel’s score live that has me chomping at the bit because as he’s shown with The Light in the Piazza and The Days of Wine and Roses, he knows how to play to both the minds and hearts of theatergoers like me.