Below The Surface

Sophia is an aspiring archaeologist, an Arab who can't speak Arabic and is running away from home at the ripe old age of 21 – this is the site of Donna Abela's 2013 Griffin Award-winning play, Jump For Jordan, and Alice Ansara is responsible for unearthing Sophia on stage.

“She's from an Arabic family that has never taught her Arabic and she doesn't know anything about her culture or her family's past and so she's run away from home at the age of 21 which, for someone people, you know,” Ansara interrupts herself, “that's not running away from home, you're well over time to be going off, but, I know this from a lot of my friends from Middle Eastern families, you don't leave home until you get married. However, Sophia can't get married and leave home because she is a lesbian, so she runs away from home and lives with her girlfriend in Glebe.”

Ansara rattles off this rapid overview in the way one imagines someone in Sophia's position would – at breakneck pace, a mixture of optimism and self-doubt, and an ability to chuckle at the absurdity of it all. In many ways, the job shared by Ansara and fellow cast members Camilla Ah Kin, Sheridan Harbridge, Anna Houston, Sal Sharah and Doris Younane isn't too far removed from Sophia's line of work either.

“There's so much embedded in the play, I'm finding in rehearsals it almost is like an archaeological dig. I can think something means one thing, and then of course there's some subtext, but it's like Donna has laid deep beneath the foundations of the text all these subtle little clues that need to be unearthed, and I think if an audience listens really closely they'll find all of these little treasures that are almost like artefacts. The metaphor of archaeology is really obvious in the play. It's about somebody who is trying to unearth fragments from the past, put them together, and make sense of a life or a family. The fragments or the fragmentation is in the structure of the play; it is quite episodic.”

Ansara first came across Jump For Jordan while employed as a reader performing excerpts from finalists for the Griffin Award, and came on board the Iain Sinclair-directed debut production shortly after. “That's really exciting, to be able to work on a new Australian work that is evolving, that bring the site to life. In an archaeological dig and in places like the Middle East there's all these different layers of occupation, you know? There's different civilizations that have added to the sites. You can pull out the artefacts, and I guess as performers we can pull out different aspects of the story and of the text. But, ultimately, if you want to create meaning as an audience member you have to do that yourself.”