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Articles

Volume 36, Number 2 (2015)

Accented Actors: From Stage to Stages via a Convenience Store

  • Diana Manole
Submitted
December 21, 2015
Published
2015-10-01

Abstract

Manole explores how an exilic actor’s foreign accent can evolve from a barrier to working in mainstage theatre to a site of simultaneously acknowledging and negotiating differences between natives and exiles. As a case study, she discusses the career of Nada Humsi, an Arab Canadian born in Syria, who reinvented herself as a hyphenated Arab-Canadian theatre artist. Manole emphasizes not only her professional but also her emotional journey, from a theatre star in her native Syria to a retail associate in a Canadian convenience store, to an actress and an Artistic Associate with the MT Space theatre company in Kitchener, and finally to one of the founders and the Artistic Producer of the KitchenerWaterloo Arab Canadian Theatre/KW-ACT. The second part of the article analyzes Humsi’s performance in Hazim Kamaledin’s Black Spring, where she played both an Iraqi immigrant and an American journalist.