Clarkston refugees inspire ‘Third Country’ at Horizon Theatre

For a writer, there are few experiences more stress-inducing than presenting a new work to someone you’ve written about. And as Atlanta-based playwright Suehyla El-Attar knows, if you’ve written about an entire town, the experience is even more daunting.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, the cast of El-Attar’s new play “Third Country” assembled at the Clarkston Community Center to give her script its first public reading.

“I thought maybe three people would see the flyer and come,” El-Attar says.

Instead, the event attracted a diverse group of about 50 Clarkston residents.

“We were all nerve-wracked,” she says. “I’m taking a true story and I’m fictionalizing it, and you don’t know how people are going to react. If it’s too far off the mark, they are going to say it never happened. If it’s too on the mark, they could be offended.”

In some ways, El-Attar was right to be worried. Residents of Clarkston are accustomed to being written about and some of them have expressed their unhappiness with the results. Starting in the 1990s, the town began seeing a huge influx of refugees from war-torn countries around the world. Now, as many as half the residents are from places such as Afghanistan, Bosnia, Burundi, Congo, Gambia, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, Somalia and Sudan. The stories of their journeys, and the tensions their mass arrival aroused, have been widely reported, first by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, then by New York Times reporter Warren St. John, who developed his story into a best-selling book. Others followed.

Now the town of Clarkston is the subject of El-Attar’s play, which will have its world premiere at Atlanta’s Horizon Theatre Sept. 20. She hopes to reveal perspectives on the story that haven’t been delved into before.

“I wondered if you could show both sides so people would pointing fingers,” says El-Attar. “I could tell a simple black-and-white story about ‘closed-minded Southerners,’ but then you think: Residents were given multiple cultures layered on top of one another in a small town that doesn’t have a lot of resources. There was no guide. That became an interesting story for me.”

El-Attar was approached by Lisa Adler, artistic director ofHorizon Theatre, in 2010 with the idea of creating a play about the Clarkston refugees. One of the theater’s missions is to increase global awareness, a process which, as Adler points out, often begins in our own backyards. Their initial thought was to adapt St. John’s book, “Outcasts United,” but a planned movie based on the book made the work unavailable to them. El-Attar had to start from scratch.

“The big question became, ‘Could I find the story that I wanted to tell since we couldn’t tell that one?’” she says. The playwright, who lives in Decatur, began biking out to Clarkston to explore the town and interview residents to see if she could find her own story. Though some initially had “interview fatigue” and were slow to open up, El-Attar eventually got to know some residents and narrowed in on her tale. Her play “Third Country” focuses on the town’s longtime residents and how the waves of immigration affected them.

“I never interviewed a refugee because that’s not the story I was looking to tell,” she says. She wanted to avoid what one of her subjects bluntly referred to as “trauma porn” — exploitation of refugees’ traumatic experiences.

“They lived it,” El-Attar says. “They’re done. We brought them here to move forward.”

“Third Country” instead focuses on the town itself and on the metaphorical journey of the residents, town leaders and the resettlement agencies. “Everybody’s trying to do the right thing, but everyone is a refugee in their own way and in their own life,” she says. “We’re all looking for home in some way.”

The play interweaves stories of six characters in Sidington, a fictionalized Clarkston. There’s Mary Margaret (Tess Malis Kincaid), director of a resettlement agency, who realizes she must expand her reach. Sasha (Marcie Millard) is an eager new resettlement agent who has just moved to town and is trying to establish a life for herself in a new community. Fictionalized mayor Malcolm (Tom Thon) is a Southern gentleman who has a pro-refugee platform but realizes he can’t sustain the position. Charlie (Bill Murphy) owns the local LuckyMart, inspired by the real Thrifttown in Clarkston, which transformed from struggling grocery store to thriving business after it began catering to the refugee population. Assad (Eric J. Little) is a Sudanese refugee on the verge of getting his U.S. citizenship, and Nura (Cynthia Barker) is a Somali refugee who is eager to acclimate.

The characters are composites — many of her interview subjects requested anonymity – but El-Attar says she would have been lost without the candor of the real residents of Clarkston. “There’s no way I would have been able to create these characters without the interviews,” she says.

In some ways, El-Attar’s focus on the town’s longtime residents may seem surprising. The story of her family’s background is a closer parallel to the Clarkston refugees. El-Attar’s parents were Egyptian immigrants. Her dad was attending the University Pennsylvania on a UN scholarship when the regime change in Egypt brought Gamal Abdel Nasser into power, thereby stranding him and his young wife in the US with their Egyptian citizenship revoked.

“Basically they were homeless,” says El-Attar, who told her family’s story in her first play, “A Perfect Prayer,” produced at Horizon in 2010. “They didn’t have a country to go back to.” Her father was able to secure a work visa, and he eventually accepted a sociology professorship at Mississippi State University in Starkville, where El-Attar and her siblings grew up.

“I wanted to be conscious in this play of the difference between an immigrant and a refugee,” she says. “Immigrants want to be here. Refugees didn’t have a choice.”

El-Attar developed her love of drama through acting in high school. She dropped out of college and moved to Atlanta in 1998 to pursue a career in theater and radio. She’s worked as a DJ at Atlanta radio stations including Z-93, 99X, and Q100, and she makes numerous appearances as an actress in Atlanta theatrical productions.

But her highest ambitions lie with her playwriting, which is one of the reasons the recent unstaged reading of her new play in Clarkston was particularly nerve-wracking. But she needn’t have worried. It received a rousing standing ovation.

“I want people to bring away a sense of responsibility,” says El-Attar. “I want people to see that even if the solution for this situation is simple, in the end, it’s still all of our responsibility.”