THE STORY: March 20, 2003. A date that the ordinary people of Iraq will never forget. A day that changed their lives forever: the day the Americans arrived in their country. Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen travelled to Jordan in June 2008 to find out firsthand what happened to the Iraqi civilians as a result of the events that began on that fateful day. They interviewed some 35 people—a cross-section of lives interrupted—who fled the chaos and violence that befell Iraqi society for the relative safety of Jordan. Following the visit to Amman, Jessica and Erik crafted their conversations with the Iraqis and have turned them into an unforgettable play.
“The exiles whose tales of displacement are related here may be embodied by actors, but you often feel that it’s the people they are portraying who are demanding the courtesy of your attention. How can you turn away? This aura of fraught intimacy has been achieved with subtle ingenuity by Mr. Jensen and Ms. Blank…AFTERMATH is shaped to make us feel as if we were the unseen interviewers, to whom coffee or tea is offered by our guarded but hospitable subjects.” —The New York Times.
“The arithmetic in AFTERMATH mostly consists of subtractions and divisions…The nine subjects of the play—including a translator, a pharmacist, an imam and a theater director—are stuck in a postwar attention-span lapse, forgotten but not gone.” —Time Out New York.
“In putting a human face on the thousands of displaced civilians who lost their homes, their families and their history in a catastrophe not of their making, this powerful piece of agitprop theater challenges us all.” —Variety.
“…graceful and gripping work.” —New York Daily News.