Syrian Soap
Presented by HERE and National Queer Theater
A production in the Criminal Queerness Festival 2026
Written and Performed by E. Zaalan
Directed by Tallie Medel for Criminal Queerness Festival
Original direction by Natasha Mercado
HERE Arts Center, 145 Avenue of the Americas, in Manhattan
June 24, 2026- June 27, 2026
There are productions that invite audiences to suspend disbelief, and then there are productions like Syrian Soap, which ask audiences to suspend something far more difficult: their instinct to remain spectators. Before a word is spoken, E. Zaalan's dazzling solo performance has already dissolved the customary boundaries of the theater. Audience members are greeted not with solemn programs but with cups of herbal tea and bubble wands. Prompts about ancestors and the afterlife line the entrance. A children's inflatable pool, filled not with water but with beach balls and glistening sheets of bubble wrap, waits center stage as the Intergalactic Bathhouse—a heavenly hammam where the dead continue the ancient work of caring for the living. By the time Zaalan officially welcomes us as fellow ancestors, Syrian Soap has transformed the audience into collaborators in an act of collective remembrance.
Written and performed by the Syrian-born stand-up comic, clown, and conflict mediator E. Zaalan, and exquisitely directed by Tallie Medel, this extraordinary work—presented as part of the 2026 Criminal Queerness Festival—achieves something that seems almost impossible. It is simultaneously a riotous clown show, a piece of intimate autobiographical theater, a meditation on exile, a queer coming-of-selfhood story, and a political reckoning with Syria's revolution and its aftermath. Rather than compartmentalize these identities, Zaalan insists they are inseparable. Personal liberation and national catastrophe, inherited memory and contemporary identity, laughter and mourning all emerge from the same wellspring, each illuminating the others with startling clarity.
Zaalan's comic invention borders on the inexhaustible. As the Ancestor—a two-thousand-year-old Syrian elder wrapped in little more than a towel, a keffiyeh, oversized wooden bath sandals, an aggressively theatrical fake mustache, and a strategic constellation of bubbles—they conjure a figure who is at once absurdly funny and unexpectedly wise. Standing behind a bathhouse partition as the audience enters, they sway to Najat Al Saghira before inexplicably bursting into Tal Bachman's "She's So High," occasionally interrupting themselves to glare suspiciously through the curtain or retrieve a fallen bath brush with impeccable comic timing. A corded princess phone rings de-ling de-ling throughout the evening, connecting the afterlife to the present as descendants call seeking advice about anxiety, dating, taxes, failed situationships, family expectations, or simply how to survive being alive. Every exchange becomes an opportunity for improvisation, and Zaalan displays the rare gift of making audience participation feel neither obligatory nor gimmicky but genuinely communal.
The performance's visual imagination is every bit as sophisticated as its comic instincts. Zaalan's body becomes an endlessly elastic instrument of theatrical invention. A hydrating facial mask evolves into an unforgettable sight gag; bubble wrap becomes water; a burlesque-inflected finale set to the classic Bill Medley/Jennifer Warnes "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" somehow arrives as both parody and emotional catharsis. Even the recurring mustaches develop their own comic mythology, culminating in one glorious reveal that earns one of the evening's biggest laughs. Most delightfully surreal is the arrival of a life-sized traditional Syrian wooden slipper—a character who, despite every appearance of ridiculousness, becomes central to the production's emotional architecture. In lesser hands, such whimsy would dissolve into randomness. Zaalan possesses the clown's supreme discipline: every absurd image eventually returns bearing unexpected emotional weight.
That discipline allows Syrian Soap to pivot effortlessly toward devastating seriousness without ever betraying its comic soul. The Descendant—a version of Zaalan themself—steps forward to question whether making comedy amid political catastrophe is itself a moral failure. Through stand-up, parody of self-important performance art, recorded testimony, poetry, and an intentionally goofy extended allegory involving wooden slippers, bubble guns, exile, and hostile borders, the production constructs an astonishingly lucid theatrical language for discussing dictatorship, displacement, and survival. Zaalan even jokes about announcing their metaphors as metaphors, only to reveal that their deliberately childish theatrical vocabulary possesses a moral precision unavailable to realism. What begins as clowning quietly accumulates into one of the clearest dramatic articulations of exile one is likely to encounter this season.
What makes the evening especially remarkable is that it never permits politics to eclipse intimacy. The Ancestor gradually reveals that his own death, like the Descendant's struggle to live openly as a queer Syrian artist, is rooted in systems of social control. Questions of sexuality, religion, familial obligation, migration, censorship, and revolution never appear as abstract themes but as lived emotional realities. The bathhouse itself—drawn from Syrian hammam traditions, Aleppo's famed laurel soap, and the convivial spaces where stories and gossip were exchanged across generations—becomes a profound metaphor for cleansing not the body alone but inherited shame, grief, and silence. Even the show's invitation for audience members to offer advice to themselves becomes less an exercise in participation than an act of radical self-recognition.
By the final moments, Syrian Soap has quietly answered the question it poses throughout: what place does joy occupy during times of violence and repression? The answer is neither escapism nor defiance alone, but something richer. Joy becomes testimony. Laughter becomes preservation. Camp, clowning, and outrageous theatrical play become forms of cultural memory and political resistance. Presented during Pride Month, at a historical moment when queer communities again find themselves confronting renewed hostility across much of the world, the production's exuberance carries unmistakable urgency without sacrificing a shred of its generosity.
Few solo performances possess this degree of formal confidence, emotional intelligence, or sheer theatrical exuberance. Zaalan proves to be an astonishing performer, equally adept at stand-up, improvisation, clowning, movement, storytelling, and moments of piercing vulnerability. Under Tallie Medel's deft direction, Syrian Soap never mistakes chaos for spontaneity; beneath every delightful absurdity lies rigorous craftsmanship and profound compassion. The evening concludes with an invitation to remain in the bathhouse, to linger in the inflatable pool and continue sharing stories. It feels entirely appropriate. After seventy-five minutes spent dissolving the boundaries between performer and audience, comedy and catastrophe, ancestor and descendant, one leaves feeling less like a theatergoer than like someone who has briefly participated in a ritual—one devoted not merely to remembrance, but to the stubborn, life-affirming insistence that laughter, even now, remains one of humanity's most necessary acts.
Click HERE for tickets.
Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on July 2, 2026. All rights reserved.
