About the play

In 2007 I spent a month in Eritrea accompanying a UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) team in Asmara, the capital. I had the opportunity to travel to the villages, see the ruins left by the war and the trucks packed with soldiers leaving Asmara on their way to the borders. I experienced the life in a dictatorship when I was standing in line with the rest of the Asmarans for a bag of milk and when the water and electricity supply to my house was disturbed for hours, sometimes even days. I was afraid to take pictures or to say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time, as I was warned not to do. In the end of this month period I left Eritrea and went to the Netherlands, where I continued my research at the Dutch Immigration Service, visiting refugee centers, learning the asylum procedures and the criteria for decision: who will stay in the West and who will be deported back to his country of origin. Suspended, written five years before what was labeled "The Refugee Crisis" in Europe, invites the audience to look at the people who are trying to remove the stains off the window which separates them from their future.

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Maya Arad Yasur, playwright