Marcus Youssef

A powerful new play by the author of Jabber and The In-Between, with a text exploring social issues, interclass dialogue, and the possibility of communal improvementAward-winning playwright Marcus Youssef takes his readers to the future with his riveting new play Do You Mind If I Sit Here? Thirty years from now, three social planners visit Vancouver's Russian Hall, long abandoned due to earthquakes and flooding, with a seemingly straightforward task: repurpose the hall for common use. But the trio soon discover the project won't be as easy as they'd thought. An eccentric squatter has made the damaged hall his home, and he not only possesses a trove of Soviet industrial films on 16-mm stock but also refuses to leave. Do You Mind If I Sit Here? is a witty theatrical allegory about the possibilities of radical transformation, in which Youssef dares us to imagine a future borne from our most important beliefs, fears, and hope.

Adopted as a baby by white parents who found her in an orphanage in Vietnam, Lily has always considered herself Canadian. When Karim - a guy she's liked for a long time - finally starts to show interest in her, Lily's best friend Brit starts to hang out with some grade-twelves with radical opinions about immigrants. After a conflict between Brit and Karim breaks out when other students share racist, anti-immigrant memes, a misunderstanding leads to a lockdown in the school. Lily finds herself right in the middle, forced to make hard choices about who she really is, and which friend she's going to believe. Set in a school facing the real-life challenges of immigration, income inequality, and fears of violence in our schools, The In-Between is a realistic, relatable exploration of the complex social circumstances students must navigate in contemporary schools. Like Youssef's international hit Jabber, seen by tens of thousands of young people across North America and Europe, The In-Between brings humour, sensitivity, and a deftly authentic ear to the adult-sized questions young people confront as they enter their later teens.

King Arthur's Night and Peter Panties are two plays with music by co-writers Niall McNeil and Marcus Youssef, with songs by Veda Hille. McNeil is a professional actor whose life includes Down syndrome. Youssef is one of Canada's leading contemporary playwrights. In these plays, based on the iconic King Arthur and Peter Pan stories, entirely new worlds and languages are invented. McNeil's singular voice and imaginative landscape are at the centre of these works. Niall's genius as a writer is his ability to associate, and to create through dialogue and play, with a seemingly preternatural ability to riff and shift perspective, subverting expectations. The results of this are counterintuitive, absurd, disarming, confusing, hilarious, frightening and occasionally heart-stopping. In the worlds of King Arthur's Night and Peter Panties there is a permeable boundary, between the source material, pop culture and McNeil's own world. McNeil has a gift for imagining links between characters and situations that defy traditional categorizations like fictional and real. In this work, McNeil and Youssef challenge the classifications "neurotypicals" assume must be the only legitimate means available to perceive and name the world. They're not. There are worlds none of us can name or even imagine, within every one of us. That's why we have art: to offer ourselves a glimpse. Art-making, and theatre in particular, is a natural place for people to come together to define new, radically inclusive ways of working together across historical presumtpions about diifference that have shunned and isolated many of of our fellow human beings for millenia. An assumption at the heart of this collaboration: every single one of us is very good at some things and very bad at others. No exceptions. All of us. Every single one. King Arthur's Night and Peter Panties were commissioned and presented by Canada's most prestigious theatre festivals (Luminato, the National Arts Centre and PuSh). They are among the first plays by a writer with Down syndrome published in this country.

Like many outgoing young women, Fatima feels rebellious against parents she sees as strict. It just so happens that she is Egyptian-born and wears a hijab. When anti-Muslim graffiti appears on the walls of her school, Fatima transfers to a new school. The guidance counsellor there, Mr. E., does his best to help Fatima fit in, but despite his advice she starts an unlikely friendship with Jorah, who has a reputation for anger issues. Maybe, just maybe, Fatima and Jorah start to, like, like each other ...As their mutual attraction grows, the lines Fatima and Jorah cross as they grow closer become the subject of an intense exploration of boundaries - personal boundaries, cultural boundaries, and inherited religious and political boundaries. Fatima and Jorah discover that appearances matter; they've been exposed for their whole lives to images that begin to colour their relationship: images of the Middle East, the working class, and how teenage boys and teenage girls behave. Put all these reactive factors together in the social laboratory that is a high school and observe: is there a solution for Fatima and Jorah?High school, like no other social space, throws together people of all histories and backgrounds, and young people must decide what they believe in and how far they are willing to go to defend their beliefs. Inside a veritable pressure cooker, they negotiate cross-cultural respect and mutual understanding. Jabber does its part to challenge appearances - and the judgments people make based on those appearances.

Two friends pass the time together playing a made-up game in which they name people, places, or things and debate whether they are successful or not; in other words, whether they are winners or losers. Each friend seeks to defeat the other, and because one of these men grew up economically privileged and the other did not, the competition very quickly heats up. Marcus Youssef is associate artistic producer at Vancouver's NeWorld Theatre and teaches theater at Concordia University in Montreal.James Long has been making theater since 1995 and is artistic director of Theatre Replacement in Vancouver. .

In this sequel to the hilarious and hard-hitting The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil, the agitprop collaborative team of Camyar Chai, Guillermo Verdecchia, and Marcus Youssef turns its idiosyncratic brand of political satire to new global realities. Following the election of U.S. president Barack Obama in 2008, collective optimism for a more tolerant, peaceful, and co-operative post- Bush world spreads to Canada -- and to the backroom of Salim's Falafel Shoppe in Toronto. There, Ali Hakim and Ali Ababwa, refugee entertainers from the fictitious, war-torn country of Agraba, are inspired to write a stage play in celebration of the new president's message of "hope and change." The premiere of their Yo Mama, Osbama! (or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Half-Black President) halts abruptly when an RCMP constable arrives at the theatre and arrests the pair for its financial ties to the Agrabanian People's Front, an alleged "terrorist organization" on the Canadian government's watch list. Continuity becomes more apparent than change when Ali and Ali are swiftly put on trial.As the hapless playwrights try to defend themselves in the farcical deportation hearing that unfolds, racial and cultural stereotypes are invoked -- and lampooned -- as quickly as dubious evidence is presented. But, in the midst of the biting comedy, more serious questions are raised about the cost for some when we endeavour to protect the "freedoms" of others. Cast of 1 woman and 3 men.

A group of almost-over-the-hill urban Egyptian hipsters gathers every night on a Cairo houseboat where they smoke weed, gab on their cell phones, and rag on everything they think is messing up their lives. Led by their master of ceremonies, a near catatonic petty bureaucrat named Anis, they get baked and try to forget that secularists like them are being shunted to the sidelines in the wave of alleged "fundamentalist" Islamic politics sweeping Egypt and much of the Arab world. When Samara, a young Islamic journalist joins the group, however, Anis's spell is broken. From the moment he sees this hijab-clad woman, he starts to remember the ugly journey that brought him to his almost total detachment from the harsh realities of the outside world. Threatened by this incursion into their long-established sanctuary, his buddies try to drive Samara away. But Anis resists. He has fallen in love. Unfortunately for him, however, this seemingly devout journalist also has a couple of secrets of her own.While Adrift begins as a stoners' drawing-room comedy, it ends in random, chaotic tragedy--by the end of the play the Nile River houseboat feels like it's been transplanted to flood-ravaged New Orleans. It is a play about the tragedy of the innocents caught between the Holy Wars of our twenty-first century. Inspired by the novel Adrift on the Nile by Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, Adrift is set against the backdrop of the US war on Iraq and a region burdened by the gorgon-head legacies of colonialism, corruption and violent dictatorship. It is about a group of people at the epicenter of conflict between the West's ever-accelerating and utterly ahistorical imperial culture, and its doppelganger: the tide of religious fundamentalism that is growing ever more powerful in its wake. Cast of 4 women and 6 men.

In this elaborate agitprop theatrical collaboration, the internal contradictions and duplicitous double-speak of the "war on terror" are exposed as the propaganda vehicles for the neo-colonialism of the West that they are. "Ali Hakim" and "Ali Ababwa," refugees from the imaginary country "Agraba," attempt to seduce their audience into providing them with food, refuge, security, freedom and the material benefits of Western consumer society, failing miserably at every step. A hard-hitting presentation of a play-within-a-play assaults the audience as Youssef, Verdecchia and Chai do Shakespeare, Shaw and Swift one better with an endless string of buffooneries and absurdities derived from an inversion of the cliches defining the geo-politics of the Middle East at the beginning of the 21st century. Informed by the research of Paul Krugman and Noam Chomsky, sent up by the post-modern cultural relativism of "Jean Paul Jacques Beauderrieredada," this political satire is not for the faint of heart. Cast of 4 men.