By Naaz Hasan
UNIVERSITY CITY, SHARJAH – The Performing Arts Program at the American University of Sharjah is hosting a play, “Strawberries in July,” at the Arts Building this November.
The playwright, Konstantina Spyropoulou, said, “this play was an assignment for a playwriting class I took in Spring 2020.”
She is an AUS alumna who is now studying a master’s degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.
According to Spyropoulou, the play is about five sisters who are actually statues in a museum in Greece. They go through a traumatic event of losing one sister to a British museum.
She said, “the characters in the play resemble a variation of people in my life.”
Spyropoulou said that each sister has a unique characteristic. The playwright said that the title of the play refers to a memory the sisters have forgotten.
The director, Abishek Nair, is a theatre professor at AUS. This is his second semester at AUS and his first play here.
Nair helped in the casting process of the play. He said that when it comes to the characters of the show, “I don’t hold on to certain ideas and visions and let the actors perform what works.”
Nair said that the play portrays “familiarity and intimacy between women, which is rare on stage because there are not enough female playwrights.”
Tickets for “Strawberries in July” will go on sale two weeks before the opening night on Nov. 8, They can be purchased from room ART101 in the Arts Building. The play will be performed for six nights.
