From the contents

About the play: In 2007, I joined the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) in Eritrea for a month. I traveled through the villages and saw the remnants of war, the trucks leaving the capital, Asmara, loaded with soldiers being led to the borders. I experienced firsthand life in a dictatorship when I stood in line for a bag of milk and when the water and electricity supply to the house where I lived was sometimes cut off for hours and days. I was afraid to take a picture or say something critical of the country to the wrong person for fear that "I would be disappeared," I was warned. At the end of that month, with relief mixed with a sense of farewell, I traveled from Eritrea to the Netherlands, where I did extensive research at the Dutch immigration office, visited the refugee center, learned about the processes for handling asylum applications and the criteria for deciding: who will be recognized as a refugee and who will be returned to their country of origin? "Dependents," written five years before the 'refugee crisis' in Europe, invites viewers to look at the people Trying to remove the stains from the window that separates them from their future; the window in which their past is reflected.

Maya Arad Yasur