KW Little Theatre’s latest production, Scorched, finishes its run this weekend after three weeks, wrapping up the community theatre’s 2024-2025 performance season.
Originally titled “Incendies” in its native French, the play by Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad is no stranger to being retold, having toured Canada in 2008-2009 and even adapted into a 2010 movie of the same name by Denis Villeneuve, renowned director of the popular Dune film adaptations. The piece tells the story of two twins, Janine and Simon (Jeanne and Simone in the original French) whose mother Nawal dies suddenly, leaving them two letters: one for their father and another for their previously unheard of brother. As the mystery behind their mother’s past and the identities of these two are gradually revealed, the twins re-discover not only their mother’s story in the country she left behind but also the consequences of war, intergenerational trauma, and both the power and the price of knowing your past.
Jasmine Rajaballey, recent graduate of UW’s Theatre and Performance program, plays Nawal at different stages of her life, from an energetic, passionate teenager to a more grounded older woman and mother. Born and raised in a rural village, Nawal spends her adult life in the fog of war, meeting, losing, and reuniting with people who change the course of her life before her death at the beginning of the play. While Mouawad does not explicitly state the names of the countries in which the conflict takes place, his work makes heavy reference to the Lebanese civil war, which lasted from 1975-1990.
“She’s a dreamer,” Rajaballey said of Nawal in an interview with Imprint. “She always wants to be a peaceful person despite war surrounding her whole life. She hates violence; she doesn’t want to be violent.” The actor notes that she holds tightly to those principles throughout the play, even as she suffers grief, loss, and injustice in an environment where hope and peace seem distant.
Before stepping on stage for this role, Rajaballey started out working off stage in the technical side of theatre. She worked previously as assistant stage manager of props for the UW Theater program’s production TH’OWXIYA, before directing The Waiting Room in the festival UPSTART 2025 for her program capstone. She cites her program, particularly courses in performing text and voice held by instructor Heather Hill, as inspiration to try out different aspects of dramatic theatre and helping her build a solid acting foundation. “We’re really encouraged to dip our toes into anything we found interesting, and I really took that to heart,” she says.
One aspect in particular that drew Rajaballey to audition for Scorched was its connection to Multicultural Theatre Space (MT Space), a theatre company focused on empowering marginalized voices in theatre through producing and presenting culturally diverse works to the KW community. Several artists from MT Space are also active in the UW arts scene — Scorched director Hiyam Mahrat is the general manager of MT Space, and last year MT Space artistic director Pam Patel directed IMMOLATION. The latter piece was a form of devised theatre, where the ensemble collectively develops a work from scratch rather than sticking to fixed instructions on a script. Devised theatre is meant to be experimental, and can incorporate movement-based storytelling, which Rajaballey enjoys.
“It’s a challenge both emotionally and physically to play someone at those different ages,” she said in an interview with Imprint. Playing a young teenager in love versus an older, grounded woman requires drastically different approaches in physicality — Rajaballey mentions being guided to speak with more authority when playing Nawal in her 40’s and 60’s (”crunching in her stomach” to change her posture, she adds) compared to expressing more excitement, energy and uncertainty to reflect youth.
Aside from embodying the character herself through what’s seen in the script, Rajaballey brings her own personal touch to the role: “one of the reasons why Nawal is so near and dear to my heart… is because she reminds me of my grandmother,” who also grew up in a rural village. The play has several key scenes about the legacy of women being remembered by those that come after, and to that end, the actress wears an arm bangle, a personal item that is part of a tradition carried on by the women in her own family. She also incorporated the way Aslam Abdul Rahim, the actor playing Simon and Wahab, fiddles with his hair for her own portrayal to give a sense of continuity and inheritance through their characters.
“It’s also really cool because I’m interacting with a culture that I’ve never really interacted with,” she adds. Unlike her character, Rajaballey has Indo-Guyanese and French-Canadian heritage. She relates to how Janine and Simon, both raised in Canada, felt detached from their mother’s homeland and their cultural background before they embark on their quest for truth. “It’s kinda cathartic for me [because] I can relate to that sense of [being] diaspora.” The actress also had to learn the Arabic alphabet as well as certain words and names central to the play, crediting movement coach Nada Humsi and director Mahrat with being cultural consultants and helping her understand the nuances reflected in the story.
For those who see the play, Rajaballey hopes that the performance helps humanize people from the Middle East, and breaks prejudices about them, especially in light of the Palestinian genocide and other current conflicts occurring in the area. “They’re people; they love, they laugh, they find beauty in things… but they’ve also been hardened by these events. I want people to see all of these characters as human and all these conflicts as real and still occurring…they haven’t gone away.” She hopes that the audience can come in with an open mind, and that the play motivates viewers to discuss, question, and learn more about what they see.
To the UW community, Rajaballey encourages others to “try new things; don’t forget that the theatre program exists… and art is political.”
Scorched is playing at the KW Little Theatre in uptown until June 29. Tickets can be purchased here through Eventbrite. For more information about KW Little Theatre, you can visit their website here or join their Annual General Meeting on July 2 at 7:30 p.m. at the theatre.
