jump for jordan
By Donna Abela
PREMIER PRODUCTION
Produced by the Griffin Theatre Company at the SWB Stables Theatre, Sydney, and the Merrigong Theatre, Wollongong,19 February to 5 April 2014.
AWARDS
Griffin Playwriting Award 2013.
Australian Writers Guild 2015 AWGIE Award for Stage.
NOMINATIONS AND SHORTLISTS
NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2015 (Multicultural NSW Award).
Best New Australian Work in the Sydney Theatre Awards 2014.
John West Memorial Award, Most Outstanding New Australian Performed Play 2014.
HIGHER SCHOOL CERTIFICATE 2019-2022
Included in the Studies in Drama and Theatre unit of the NSW Higher School Certificate Drama course - Topic 3: The Voice of Women in Theatre.
NSW PREMIER’S LITERARY AWARDS JUDGE’S REPORT
… Abela shows that while the past can be full of unresolved traumas, it is also a place of nourishing traditions and important connections — a place from which new identities can grow.
PUBLICATION
Abela, D 2014, Currency Press, Sydney Australia (rehearsal draft).
Abela, D 2017, Currency Press, Sydney Australia (production draft).
PODCAST
“Jump for Jordan: caught between cultures l Award-winning Australian theatre”, episode 24, Not in Print: playwrights off script - on inspiration, process and theatre itself, 2014,
https://notinprint.podbean.com/e/interview-jump-for-jordan-donna-abela-australian-plays-theatre/
REVIEWS (A SELECTION)
Griffin have done it again with this tremendous production, the world premiere of Donna Abela’s fabulous 2013 Griffin Award winning play, Jump for Jordan, which looks at the personal and social challenges faced by second-generation Australians. Directed by Iain Sinclair, Jump For Jordan is an extraordinary volatile powder keg of politics, family and emotions which sets the tiny stage of the Griffin alight. - Artshub
http://www.artshub.com.au/news-article/review/writing-and-publishing/jump-for-jordan-198206
… Jump For Jordan is an absolutely brilliant play... It is a fascinating window into culture and tradition and femininity and language and memory. Donna Abela’s script thoroughly deserved to win the 2013 Griffin Award, and Iain Sinclair has realised it wonderfully on the stage. - Australian Stage
Abela’s play energetically dashes between realism, farce and surrealism, but most of all it captures so poignantly the pain migrants must face of leaving behind the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and customs that we call home. It had a terrific cast, in which Doris Younane, as the Jordanian-born mother, was very, very fine. - Deborah Jones
“A baker’s dozen: 2014 theatre in review”
If we're frank about it, so many plays promise the world and deliver a small domestic drama. Griffin Theatre's Jump for Jordan promises a small domestic drama but contains the world. - Concrete Playground
http://sydney.concreteplayground.com.au/event/180476/jump-for-jordan-griffin-theatre-co.htm
DON’T miss this intelligent and humorous play which examines the conflict in a migrant Jordanian family within and between generations. - Daily Telegraph
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/inner-west/jump-for-jordan-is-intelligent-and-humorous/story-fngr8h4f-1226864565029
The play is funny, melancholic, and, best of all, empathetically informative of what, I have come to know to be traumatic cultural and social adjustments, for all, in those families. It is the first time that I have witnessed such lives on our stages, so vividly. The structures in the writing, of quick short scenes set in the past and present, hither and thither in location, of conversations with a ghost, projections of exaggerated, comic figures of terrorism, heartfelt romances of aspiration, and bitter, bitter angers- are all juggled wonderfully by Ms Abela with swift tonal shifts of mood daringly juxtaposed. The writing is terrific and has the pulse of the fast world of new media interaction.
http://www.kjtheatrediary.com/2014/02/jump-for-jordan.html
With little more in the way of props than a pile of sand and a wooden shelf, the play transports its audience from a plot of land in Campbelltown to gardens in Jenin and from an apartment in Glebe to an archaeological site in Petra, traversing the homes and stories of three generations. Through the use of Sophia and Samantha’s love for archaeology and their unrealistic plans to move and work in Petra, the story explores some interesting elements of what it means to belong somewhere and to someone, how this sense of belonging can change over time and, most pointedly, how sometimes this sense of belonging can remain the same for generations.
http://sajjeling.com/2014/04/09/jump-for-jordan/ accessed 31 March 2015
Jump For Jordan is a joyous, tearful, hilarious and heartfelt experience and yet another success for Griffin and its artistic visionary, Lee Lewis. The play is complex and multi-layered, it takes place in the past and the present, the single setting represents various locations and the characters are both real and imaginary. As well as a ripping story there are elements of sit-com and farce and all are underpinned by a classic Wog family drama. At the same time, it's also clear and concise and an entirely absorbing 90 minutes that zoom by in frequent flashes of brilliance.
http://www.stagenoise.com/review/1984?fb_action_ids=10152232271781327&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582
This surprisingly funny and very moving play, directed by Iain Sinclair, deals with issues that first became familiar in the drama of multiculturalism in the 1980s, but it does so with such a freshness that the story feels as if it is being told for the first time.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/shifting-sands-of-a-migrant-life/story-e6frg8n6-1226833007233
Jump for Jordan is about love, family, identity, change and living in the present. And it is beautiful.
https://emilyldash.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/jump-for-jordan-review/
SYNOPSIS
Jump For Jordan is a full length original stage play about Sophia, a young Australian woman, and would-be archaeologist, who ran away from her family home at the age of twenty. Her Jordanian-born mother, Mara, shamed by Sophia’s abrupt and unmarried departure, disowns Sophia and cut ties with her own community. Three years later, on the eve of the wedding of Sophia’s younger sister Loren, Mara attempts to save face in front of her sister Azza, who is visiting from Amman, by conditionally inviting Sophia back into the family fold. Desperate to be accepted, Sophia denies the existence of her Australian girlfriend Sam, and agrees to be lavishly lied about. However, Sophia’s fear of being disowned again, and her internalised racism, unleash a character called Avenging Azza, a stereotypical “mad Arab” who is keen to give her a disciplinary beating. When Aunt Azza learns that Sophia works in a shop, not in a museum restoring cultural artefacts, rather then reprobation, she offers Sophia a trip Jordan and the support to kick start her archaeology career. Sophia’s dream of unearthing antiquities in the Middle East is reawakened. However, Avenging Azza returns, this time wanting to restore the family’s honour by forcing Sophia into an arranged marriage. Assisted by imagined conversations with her girlfriend Sam, and her dead father Sahir, Sophia overcomes her paranoid panic. Aunt Azza tells her the story of her activist aunt Layla who was killed by Palestinian militants in a refugee camp in Jenin. Recalling her archaeological training in interrogating an artefact, Sophia contextualises this unearthed family “find”. She better understands her father’s flight from Palestine, her mother’s punitive bitterness, and her own sense of cultural and personal displacement. Aunt Azza passes on the family’s Nakba key to Sophia - the key to the house her grandparents fled - and Sophia’s walk towards self determination has begun.
Produced by the Griffin Theatre Company at the SWB Stables Theatre, Sydney, and the Merrigong Theatre, Wollongong,19 February to 5 April 2014.
AWARDS
Griffin Playwriting Award 2013.
Australian Writers Guild 2015 AWGIE Award for Stage.
NOMINATIONS AND SHORTLISTS
NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2015 (Multicultural NSW Award).
Best New Australian Work in the Sydney Theatre Awards 2014.
John West Memorial Award, Most Outstanding New Australian Performed Play 2014.
HIGHER SCHOOL CERTIFICATE 2019-2022
Included in the Studies in Drama and Theatre unit of the NSW Higher School Certificate Drama course - Topic 3: The Voice of Women in Theatre.
NSW PREMIER’S LITERARY AWARDS JUDGE’S REPORT
… Abela shows that while the past can be full of unresolved traumas, it is also a place of nourishing traditions and important connections — a place from which new identities can grow.
PUBLICATION
Abela, D 2014, Currency Press, Sydney Australia (rehearsal draft).
Abela, D 2017, Currency Press, Sydney Australia (production draft).
PODCAST
“Jump for Jordan: caught between cultures l Award-winning Australian theatre”, episode 24, Not in Print: playwrights off script - on inspiration, process and theatre itself, 2014,
https://notinprint.podbean.com/e/interview-jump-for-jordan-donna-abela-australian-plays-theatre/
REVIEWS (A SELECTION)
Griffin have done it again with this tremendous production, the world premiere of Donna Abela’s fabulous 2013 Griffin Award winning play, Jump for Jordan, which looks at the personal and social challenges faced by second-generation Australians. Directed by Iain Sinclair, Jump For Jordan is an extraordinary volatile powder keg of politics, family and emotions which sets the tiny stage of the Griffin alight. - Artshub
http://www.artshub.com.au/news-article/review/writing-and-publishing/jump-for-jordan-198206
… Jump For Jordan is an absolutely brilliant play... It is a fascinating window into culture and tradition and femininity and language and memory. Donna Abela’s script thoroughly deserved to win the 2013 Griffin Award, and Iain Sinclair has realised it wonderfully on the stage. - Australian Stage
Abela’s play energetically dashes between realism, farce and surrealism, but most of all it captures so poignantly the pain migrants must face of leaving behind the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and customs that we call home. It had a terrific cast, in which Doris Younane, as the Jordanian-born mother, was very, very fine. - Deborah Jones
“A baker’s dozen: 2014 theatre in review”
If we're frank about it, so many plays promise the world and deliver a small domestic drama. Griffin Theatre's Jump for Jordan promises a small domestic drama but contains the world. - Concrete Playground
http://sydney.concreteplayground.com.au/event/180476/jump-for-jordan-griffin-theatre-co.htm
DON’T miss this intelligent and humorous play which examines the conflict in a migrant Jordanian family within and between generations. - Daily Telegraph
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/inner-west/jump-for-jordan-is-intelligent-and-humorous/story-fngr8h4f-1226864565029
The play is funny, melancholic, and, best of all, empathetically informative of what, I have come to know to be traumatic cultural and social adjustments, for all, in those families. It is the first time that I have witnessed such lives on our stages, so vividly. The structures in the writing, of quick short scenes set in the past and present, hither and thither in location, of conversations with a ghost, projections of exaggerated, comic figures of terrorism, heartfelt romances of aspiration, and bitter, bitter angers- are all juggled wonderfully by Ms Abela with swift tonal shifts of mood daringly juxtaposed. The writing is terrific and has the pulse of the fast world of new media interaction.
http://www.kjtheatrediary.com/2014/02/jump-for-jordan.html
With little more in the way of props than a pile of sand and a wooden shelf, the play transports its audience from a plot of land in Campbelltown to gardens in Jenin and from an apartment in Glebe to an archaeological site in Petra, traversing the homes and stories of three generations. Through the use of Sophia and Samantha’s love for archaeology and their unrealistic plans to move and work in Petra, the story explores some interesting elements of what it means to belong somewhere and to someone, how this sense of belonging can change over time and, most pointedly, how sometimes this sense of belonging can remain the same for generations.
http://sajjeling.com/2014/04/09/jump-for-jordan/ accessed 31 March 2015
Jump For Jordan is a joyous, tearful, hilarious and heartfelt experience and yet another success for Griffin and its artistic visionary, Lee Lewis. The play is complex and multi-layered, it takes place in the past and the present, the single setting represents various locations and the characters are both real and imaginary. As well as a ripping story there are elements of sit-com and farce and all are underpinned by a classic Wog family drama. At the same time, it's also clear and concise and an entirely absorbing 90 minutes that zoom by in frequent flashes of brilliance.
http://www.stagenoise.com/review/1984?fb_action_ids=10152232271781327&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582
This surprisingly funny and very moving play, directed by Iain Sinclair, deals with issues that first became familiar in the drama of multiculturalism in the 1980s, but it does so with such a freshness that the story feels as if it is being told for the first time.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/shifting-sands-of-a-migrant-life/story-e6frg8n6-1226833007233
Jump for Jordan is about love, family, identity, change and living in the present. And it is beautiful.
https://emilyldash.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/jump-for-jordan-review/
SYNOPSIS
Jump For Jordan is a full length original stage play about Sophia, a young Australian woman, and would-be archaeologist, who ran away from her family home at the age of twenty. Her Jordanian-born mother, Mara, shamed by Sophia’s abrupt and unmarried departure, disowns Sophia and cut ties with her own community. Three years later, on the eve of the wedding of Sophia’s younger sister Loren, Mara attempts to save face in front of her sister Azza, who is visiting from Amman, by conditionally inviting Sophia back into the family fold. Desperate to be accepted, Sophia denies the existence of her Australian girlfriend Sam, and agrees to be lavishly lied about. However, Sophia’s fear of being disowned again, and her internalised racism, unleash a character called Avenging Azza, a stereotypical “mad Arab” who is keen to give her a disciplinary beating. When Aunt Azza learns that Sophia works in a shop, not in a museum restoring cultural artefacts, rather then reprobation, she offers Sophia a trip Jordan and the support to kick start her archaeology career. Sophia’s dream of unearthing antiquities in the Middle East is reawakened. However, Avenging Azza returns, this time wanting to restore the family’s honour by forcing Sophia into an arranged marriage. Assisted by imagined conversations with her girlfriend Sam, and her dead father Sahir, Sophia overcomes her paranoid panic. Aunt Azza tells her the story of her activist aunt Layla who was killed by Palestinian militants in a refugee camp in Jenin. Recalling her archaeological training in interrogating an artefact, Sophia contextualises this unearthed family “find”. She better understands her father’s flight from Palestine, her mother’s punitive bitterness, and her own sense of cultural and personal displacement. Aunt Azza passes on the family’s Nakba key to Sophia - the key to the house her grandparents fled - and Sophia’s walk towards self determination has begun.
