Playing against type: Hend Ayoub’s ‘Home? A Palestinian Woman’s Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness’

“Someone should sue America for false advertising,” says Hend Ayoub, playing a lightly fictionalized version of herself in “Home? A Palestinian Woman’s Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness,” which opens a four-week run at Z Space on July 26 as part of the San Francisco Playhouse’s Sandbox Series of works in development.

To Ayoub, who spoke to the Bay Area Reporter recently, the most obvious falsehood, particularly in light of our current political regime, is the notion of America as a cultural melting pot, with opportunity for all. The allure of that ideal was a major factor in her Ayoub’s to immigrate to the U.S. just over 15 years ago, during the Obama administration.

In Ayoub’s native Israel, it was virtually impossible for her to find work. Just as the U.S. has long promoted itself on the global stage as a land of harmonious diversity; Israel has built its international identity on being a Jewish state. But approximately 21% of Israel’s population is of Palestinian or other Arab descent. That’s higher than the percentage of either Blacks or Latinx in the U.S. While the U.S. and Israel each attempt to tighten borders, false advertising seems to have no bounds.

Everywhere an outsider
 “I don’t think I had to code-switch a lot as a small child,” said Ayoub, who grew up in Haifa, Israel’s third largest city. “My best friend was the local rabbi’s daughter; and we were like any two kids playing. There’s always some segregation in Israel, so I did go to Arab school, where we spoke Arabic. But it was totally natural to speak two languages. I didn’t really recognize the difference between and Arab and a Jew.

“But then when I went to university to study, I could feel the Jewish Israelis looking at me differently. All I had to do is open my mouth for them to know that I was different. I have an Arab accent.”

In “Home?,” a solo show, Ayoub plays a range of characters, crossing ethnicities, ages, and genders. But perhaps the piece’s most formidable acting challenge, which Ayoub takes particular pride in meeting, is playing herself from age five to the present.

Over those years, her accent continually changed, sometimes inadvertently as she acclimated to new environments, and sometimes with strategic intent. In her post-collegiate years in Israel, despite great efforts to refine her Jewish Israeli accent, Ayoub discovered that few parts were available to her on stage or screen.

“They never give Arabs Jewish roles,” she said of the Israeli entertainment industry, and they don’t write Arabs unless they’re terrorists. There’s no representation of us.”

Ayoub briefly moved to Egypt, hoping to advance her career by working in that country’s Arab-dominated media. Instead, the experience –parts of which are painfully reenacted in “Home?”– left her feeling even further adrift.

“Then I chose to come to the United States because in entertainment media it was portrayed as a place with all sorts of people, different colors, ethnicities, nationalities, all getting along” recalled Ayoub. “The reality was completely different.”

While Ayoub has enjoyed some enviable successes in the states, including making her Broadway debut in “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” which starred Robin Williams, she’s also discovered that acting skills aside, her name and appearance continued to place limitations on the roles she was offered.

On the one hand, it’s a coup to land gigs on lauded television programs like “Madam Secretary,” “Transparent,” and “Damages.” But it’s telling that those parts –none of which lasted for more than three episodes– were Moussa’s Wife, Janan, and Afghan Woman.

Role of her lifetime
While those television parts leaned on stereotypes, it was playing another, far more authentic Afghan woman that brought Ayoub the opportunity to develop her solo show and bring it to San Francisco.

Ayoub was cast as Mariam, one of the two leads in an adaptation of novelist Khaled Hosseini’s “A Thousand Splendid Sons” at Washington, D.C.’s esteemed Arena Stage. The show was directed by Carey Perloff, former longtime artistic director at San Francisco’s A.C.T.

Ayoub had been working on her script for “Home?” over several years and decided to share it with Perloff, who was sufficiently impressed to put Ayoub in touch with her friend San Francisco Playhouse artistic director Bill English.

English, too, felt the show merited further development, and after shepherding it through two writing workshops with Ayoub and Perloff is producing this debut production to mark the long-awaited return of the Playhouse’s Sandbox Series, a showcase for new playwrights that has been on hiatus since the pandemic.

Following San Francisco, Ayoub will perform “Home?” in her adopted hometown of New York, Off-Broadway at the 59E59 Theaters.

“I want to introduce Americans to a way of looking at Palestinians that they’ve probably never considered. My hope is to give people a look beyond the labels imposed by society and the media. There are always human beings behind those labels, with worlds of hopes and dreams.”

‘Home? A Palestinian Woman’s Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness,’ $46, July 26-Aug. 16, Z Space, 470 Florida St. http://www.sfplayhouse.org