Kevin Spacey couldn’t make it to Los Angeles to accept his Screen Actors Guild Award on Sunday, because he had committed to being more than 13,000 kilometres away, in Sharjah, to watch an Arabic play put on by young theatre students he had spent two weeks personally mentoring.
Spacey took a seat in the front row at the Sharjah Institute for Theatrical Arts with Dr Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Ruler of Sharjah, for the hour-long production of Dhow Under the Sun, by the Iraqi playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak.
That the play was in a language he does not understand did not seem to concern him. Neither did missing the SAG Awards, where the Oscar-winner picked up a gong for his work on the Netflix series House of Cards, adding to the Golden Globe Award he took home a week before.
The play, with 34 hand-picked participants from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Territories, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan, was the product of a two-week long Home Grown theatre workshop, a partnership between the Kevin Spacey Foundation and Middle East Theatre Academy (Meta) in Sharjah.
Addressing the crowd before the play started, Spacey said: “Tonight is the kind of night I grew up with.
“This is what I experienced when I was very young. In my theatre class, I was a part of many programmes where I was brought together with other emerging artists to put on plays in workshops with professional directors and working actors.
“Tonight is only different in that all the performers you see are from so many different places. In many ways, just as the UAE was brought together by the spirit of a man who believed he could unite all under one banner, we celebrate that spirit by bringing together these young, remarkable talents from so many different places.”
Original article by Afshan Ahmed
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Kevin Spacey skips SAG awards to watch his Arab students perform in Sharjah
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