Mona Mansour grew up in a Southern California suburb, the daughter of a Lebanese immigrant father and American mother from Seattle. Her earliest obsessions included the kidnapping of heiress Patricia Hearst and the various battles of World War Two. Global politics were brought inside when various cousins, uncles and aunties came to live with the family during the Lebanese Civil War. She studied acting as an undergrad, but in her senior year a class in improvisation led her down that path; she then studied at Second City Chicago and was a member of the Groundlings Sunday Company, which gave her a visceral first taste of writing. Her first play was ME AND THE SLA, where she got to turn a childhood obsession into a solo play about a kidnapped heiress, urban terrorists, and the nature of brainwashing.
Her commitment to the theater deepened after a move to New York City in the wake of the Sept. 11th attacks. At this point, the Middle Eastern theater community was ascending, fired up by an urgent need to change the narrative around Arabs and Arab Americans. Into that community Mona began to write into her bicultural existence. This awakened in her a deep desire to create complicated and difficult roles for Middle Eastern performers, who especially then, but still now, often play only cab drivers, imams, bodega owners, and terrorists.
The questions around her own father, who left Lebanon by choice, took her to his village in Southern Lebanon, and an examination of the “villages” next to it, the camps Mieh-Mieh and Ain El Hilweh, where thousands of Palestinians live in stasis, stuck in place since 1948. Through this work, the notion of displacement became a theme she began to explore. Her first play written of the trilogy, URGE FOR GOING, got her into the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group in 2009. This life-changing event brought her into conversation with other playwrights and gave her a home at the Public Theater and other places. Around this time she got introduced to the works of the poet Mourid Barghouti, whose memoirs, I Saw Ramallah and I Was Born There, I Was Born Here -- with their oscillations from humor to gravitas, and seamless pivots back and forth in history--- deeply influenced not just the Trilogy but all her work.
In 2019 she formed a theater company, SOCIETY, with Scott Illingworth and Tim Nicolai. The point was to create a company where work could be created, joint stock style, with improvisation, research and discussion, as fast and furious as possible. Their first production, BEGINNING DAYS OF TRUE JUBILATION, was performed entirely on Zoom in August 2020. The play, with its cast of 10, explores the absurdity, chaos and psychic cost of a fictitious start-up. The play will go up again, in person, in summer 2022 at the New Ohio.
Photo Credit- Layla Sharabi