World Premiere of Real-Life Drama About Refugees Resonates for RU-N, NJIT Communities

Coming Dec. 2-6 from the RU-N/NJIT Theater Program

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana once warned.  That is one of the lessons that Rutgers University-Newark and the New Jersey Institute of Technology hope to teach through a ground-breaking new play that the two universities are co-producing.  From Dec. 2-6 (including a panel discussion following the Dec. 3 performance), the RU-N/NJIT Theater Program will present the world premiere of Numbers, a drama about refugees in 2006 that you could mistake for one of today’s nightly newscasts showing boatloads of refugees seeking asylum.  While asking its audience to ponder the past, the present, and the future, the play also forces theater-goers – and the cast and stage crew -- to consider whether we as humans truly are each other’s keepers –or do we help out only when it is convenient or forced upon us?

The joint RU-N/NJIT Theater Program is a decades-long collaboration between two of Newark’s anchor institutions, RU-N and NJIT, bringing together students and faculty from both universities to present top-quality productions for the greater-Newark community while giving students valuable hands-on learning experiences.  The program produces an original or developmental play every other year; Numbers was chosen this year since it seemed a perfect fit for two universities with extremely diverse student populations.  Each is ranked among the most ethnically diverse in the U.S., and at both schools, many students are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. So, the messages of Numbers hit close to home.  “There's a compelling story behind the play -- and equally compelling are its intersections with the experiences of so many of our students as some of the nation’s ‘newest Americans,’” states Nancy Cantor, RU-N chancellor.

NJIT’s leader agrees. "The world premiere performance of Numbers by Mar Gómez Glez emphasizes the diversity of the programs we offer at NJIT and our cultural engagement with issues such as the migrant crisis, which is a great concern for the world community," says NJIT President Joel Bloom.

“This is not the first world premiere that the joint theater program has staged, but it is the most  relevant,” explains Michele Rittenhouse, director and NJIT faculty member.  “It has the students in the cast and crew questioning what is going on with the refugee situation, bringing them out into the real world through self-examination and meaningful discussions.  As professors, that is an important lesson,” she states.

An interactive panel discussion, also open to the public, will follow the Thursday, Dec. 3rd performance, thanks to Tim Raphael, the  director of RU-N’s Center for Migration and the Global City.  The play and discussion bring together many of the elements driving RU-N’s mission as an urban research university: relevant research, critical analysis, art making and public dialogue, all applied to “the exploration of contemporary issues and experiences of direct relevance to our students,” notes Raphael.  The open discussion will involve the audience, the cast, director Maria Aladren (left), playwright Mar Gómez Glez, and two faculty members with personal insights into the plight of refugees: Sadia Abbas, associate professor, RU-N Department of English and Program in Women's and Gender Studies, and RU-N’s Mohamed Alsiadi, an Arabic lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies and a graduate student. Abbas spent the last two summers working with migrants in Greece, and saw first-hand the struggles of boatloads of immigrants.  Alsiadi has been working in the cultural and political arenas to draw attention to the more than 2 million Syrians who have been displaced since 2011.

Numbers is based on the true tale of the fishing boat Francisco y Catalina. In 2006, its crew rescued 51 refugees from a sinking raft in the Mediterranean, and attempted to bring them to safety at Malta, their intended destination. Instead the ship and its passengers were trapped in a net of political bureaucracy and in-fighting as it was denied the right to dock.  The play will be performed by 10 students from both universities, and the production crew also consists of 10 students from NJIT and RU-N. (Dates, times and ticket information are here.)  Sadly, the situation for refugees is little improved; most of the dispossessed children and adults aboard the Francisco y Catalina, rejected by the country where they sought sanctuary, were sent back – and that is the case for tens of thousands fleeing by boat today.

Playwright Gómez Glez (right) wanted her audience to realize “It’s easy to make life or death decisions when you are not on the front lines” and to feel the dilemma of the crew, which wants to do the right thing and is abandoned by bureaucracy as political leaders spend days debating the fate of the refugees. “I tried to show the relationships and challenges and needs of daily life and how the

Director Aladren believes theater-goers will have no trouble identifying with the stranded refugees. “When you look at your own life experiences, or your family’s, you’ll find solidarity.”

That is true for Rianna Evita Ronquillo, Class of 2019, an RU-N theater major who plays the role of “Ambassador.” Ronquillo had heard about the play years ago and was eager to participate. “I am an activist for immigration rights and very interested in activist theatre, this was right up my alley.” The Colonia, N.J., resident was born in the U.S. but her father and several siblings are immigrants. “I have seen my family go through the extremely long and treacherous process of getting their green cards, getting naturalized, and finally becoming official US citizens. Of course, they did not go through the troubles the castaways in the play endure, but it gives me more perspective for my role in the play.”

NJIT student Eric Holzer, Class of 2017, plays the Mediator as well as doing the sound design for Numbers. The Middlesex Borough, N.J., resident, notes, “Every piece of theatre that I've done has helped me grow as a person and gain new perspectives, and I felt that this play would definitely allow for that growth and insight.” Holzer, who is in the NJIT Honors College and  majors in both mechanical engineering and theatre arts and technology, has drawn several lessons from the play. One is “to give, even when you think you can't, and persevere. The thought of doing the right thing comes easily, and it’s easily discussed. Yet the implementation of it is where the difficulty comes in. Perseverance through that difficulty is what makes the play, and can be said for life in general.”

He echoes the playwright’s philosophy when he observes, “It becomes very easy just to dismiss people as ‘Numbers,’ separating them from that empathy. This play fights that notion, and asks for the audience to realize that these people are not numbers, but other human beings.”

The production will use a bi-level platform to represent what is happening on the ship, on one level, and in bureaucratic offices on land, on the other level.  Multimedia images will be projected in real time of news footage of the ongoing refugee crisis.

Numbers was translated from the original Spanish by William Gregory.

Photos: above, part of a poster for Numbers, designed by NJIT student Rebecca Jean Cortés; left, director Maria Aladren; right, playwright Mar Gómez Glez