Media Archive

“Little Amal represents displaced people all across the globe,” said Muñoz. “Art is a beautiful provocation, a tool for collective understanding, for mutual understanding. This project allows an entire community to welcome this young girl who is a beacon of hope to understand this crisis more deeply.”

“I think we sometimes get overwhelmed with the news and all the struggles that we’re facing and then art comes along and theater and it grabs us and it moves our hearts and it gives us energy and gives us hope,” said Diane Paulus of the American Repertory Theater.

During the event, which was supported by the American Repertory Theater and the Harvard University Committee for the Arts, Amal — the product of the Handspring Puppet Company — arrived in Science Center Plaza just past 7 p.m. to an enraptured crowd, some of whom cried out, “Welcome!” and “Have a safe journey!”

“Our story is more than a play about Black dynamics and race dynamics,” says Jennifer Mogbock. “I hope [audiences] leave feeling connected to the story in a personal way, and feel changed, feel empowered, feel excited.”

The first time that director Taibi Magar read Inua Ellams’s “The Half-God of Rainfall,” she was “astonished at the creative act of writing a new mythology [in which] Zeus is the stand-in for the patriarchy and white supremacy and really oppressive ways of thinking.”

Read a poem featured in the September 7 event, written by Creative Advisor & Performer Sarah Hunaidi.

The Half-God of Rainfall marks director Taibi Magar’s fourth A.R.T. production in five years. Each told by an ensemble, her recent A.R.T. works all center questions of justice—a theme that she connects directly to the ancient foundations of storytelling and performance.

Little Amal, a 12-foot-tall puppet a Syrian refugee, arrives in Boston Thursday to begin a two-month walk across the United States.

Artistic Director Amir Nizar Zubai of “The Walk Productions” stopped by the Morning Mix to talk about how Little Amal will be walking across America carrying a message of hope to marginalized people everywhere.

In anticipation of Amal’s arrival in Boston, we look back at other puppet artists’ work in A.R.T. history, from 1984’s The King Stag to last season’s Life of Pi.