than human rights circles. And I always wondered like, what would it have been like to be on that boat?  And so I knew a lot of people who were like 20 in 2001, and they became my friends. And I would like, even if they were not on the boat, they knew people who were, or they knew people who had been arrested, or they knew people who had had similar incidents happen to them. And obviously this is all informed by class and the intersectionality of regions and so on. I was like, even before I moved to the US, I was very much like a third culture kid living between a lot of different places. So I had a certain access to privilege that was different, but I always like was interested in that. And it like, when I came into, again, my first playwriting experience with Abhishek, my playwriting mentor in that class, he asked us like, what are things you want to write about on day one? And I always thought like, I want to tell stories of more gay Arabs. And that has evolved over time, like since I have migrated to the US, I've finished college. I have become much more interested in migration. I've become much more interested in gender non-conformity and transness. I'm much more interested in my work, becoming more holistic than just talking about like a gay cis male experience. And I'm thinking about class much more critically, but it continues to, not just as a playwright, but as a TV writer, as a dramaturg, as a producer, I am interested in telling stories about people or communities, not in a tokenizing way, but exploring people's experiences and rendering people who have not had the chance to be represented fully in ways that are. And often that intersects with my own experience, but it does not always. And I think that that's okay. Absolutely. So many brilliant things you said there, Adam. And I want to highlight how you spoke about seeking stories sometimes to help you understand and bringing also Carol Martin. She's one of my favorite scholars. I'm so glad to learn. Like I want to ask you more about that class. Oh my God, who would love her in real life? I love her definition of documentary theater saying that it's superior to mainstream media because it's subjective not because it's subjective. And just resonates with what you're saying about seeking these stories to understand and it's also like really bringing your own, sometimes personal history to them and sometimes not really, sometimes just, and that was my experience doing documentary theater. My drive has been, when I do documentary theater has always been, there's something that happened that I cannot wrap my mind around it. I cannot really understand how could this happen? Or, you know, so, and that would be the starting point, but then the research and the process kind of inform the outcome and the process itself. So this is also so great. I want to ask you like, because you spoke about all of this, how do you see the process different between writing a documentary piece like Memorial, for instance, which is totally based on, I believe, on verbatim interviews that you and your collaborator, Ariana Stuckey, is that how you say the last name? Stuckey, Ariana Stuckey and yourself, you did interviews with survivors of the shooting that happened in New Zealand. And then Drowning in Cairo, which is, which takes a real event as its inspiration, but then you go on and you craft a story that's not necessarily true, right? About centered about the life of these three Arab gay men. Like how is that process different for you as a playwright? What's, you know, how do you experience it? I'll name that every play is different. So I've only made one documentary of verbatim piece so far. I'm about to start my second one, which I can't talk about yet, but my second one will not be the same as the first. It will not start with the same kind of interviews. It might be documentary, but not verbatim. And same with my plays. Drowning in Cairo is not my only fiction or narrative play. And each one has had a different story. Drowning in Cairo came again from me hearing this every time I talked to an older Egyptian gay man, hearing the ghost of Queen Boat being like what people always talk about me being like what was this event?  I was initially a sociology or social research major. I just read a lot of human rights reports about it. And so I had all this knowledge. So it's not a documentary, but it's very much based on like details of what happened on that boat. And then hearing people talk. And I did speak to a couple of people who had been on the boat before writing, not with the intention of writing. It was just that we had been in the same space. But I will say that character is often where I start with fiction or narrative work. I'm often like who is this person? I credit this to Jessica Blank and to my friend Ariana Stuckey who introduced me to Jessica Blank. The idea of the core wound of who is this person? What is their backstory? Where did they grow up? What is the street they grew up on? Who was their first date? Who was their first crush? Who was their first kiss? Were they middle class? Were they upper class? When we are meeting them, what is the thing that they're hiding from? What is their core wound that they're always not trying to avoid? And then what is, how do they have the craft of their lives and what is their coping mechanism so that they cover that core wound? And then what are, the plot of the play has to basically destroy that core wound and they have to actually change or transform is how I, or maybe they don't, but that's the point. But that's how I often think I always start from character. I'm actually just while we're talking about different medias like just starting to move from theater to other mediums, screen mediums and like working with collaborators who don't start from character. I'm so lost. People are like, what if this happens? And I'm like, but why is it happening? Like for me, who's story is that? I'm also a very slow writer until I'm not.  But once I really know the characters and I start writing a draft, the draft will come out in two weeks. But like it's never, I can't do that without living with the characters for months and months. I'm like almost trying to become them. Yeah. So that's how narrative stuff work. With Memorial specifically, I won't talk about like my documentary theater process because I think it'll be different with every piece. I know that upcoming piece will definitely be different. But with Memorial, I want to give credit to Ariana Stuckey who was my dearest friend in the world. And when the event happened, I was traveling and she reached out to me and I didn't know that it was happening. Actually, the first thing that happened was a couple of people reached out to me to ask me if I was okay. And I was like in Sweden at the time. And I was like, yeah, why wouldn't I be okay? And then they told me about it. And I was like, oh, that's terrible. But also at the same time, there were attacks on Jewish synagogues in Pittsburgh and there were things happening in England. And I was like, for me, all of these events like equally are horrific. Like I'm not more affected by this event because it happened to a musk. But Ariana was really, really affected by the event. And we got to talking a lot. And I was curious why are you so affected by this event? And she really had the impulse of like going there and she thought I could make a documentary play but also maybe I go and people are not ready and that's okay. And we both studied with Carol and so we knew all the processes. We knew how like Laramie Project did it. We knew how Yale Firebird did it. We knew how the Truth and Reconciliation people in South Africa did it. And people often would speak with trauma victims. She also studied a lot on trauma years out. And so the fact that she was going two months in was like, is it right? Are you ready? And so on. But we ultimately decided that she would go and if people were not ready to talk to her, that was fine. And so yeah, I wanna give credit to that. The interviews were done by Ariana. She conceived of the piece. I was initially functioning as a dramaturg before I became a co-writer. But I was also supporting her with like my knowledge of Islam and like helping draft questions for the interviews. And simultaneously once an interview was done, I was leading a team of like 30 transcribers transcribing all the interviews. But she did all of that. And she went there and surprisingly, 17 people really wanted to talk to her. And they all had something really relevant. And not all of them were Muslim. Some of them were part of the government. Some of them were people who were very upset. They were gun rights advocates. People who were upset that the New Zealand have taken such strong gun law precautions. But it was people from different facets of life in Christchurch who wanna talk to her and had something serious they wanted to say. And so we came back with thousands of pages of transcripts and we just started building. And it became like, we have thousands of pages. We can write 15 different documentary plays. What is the play? What is the thing we're actually trying to explore? And we made that the guiding question. And that for us became how do humans, individuals and communities attempt to create narratives to overcome trauma? And how do they process an insurmountable loss that causes trauma? And then from there, we were interested in also how these different ways of coping with trauma could hurt each other or intersect with each other. And so that's how memorial was built. But yeah, this is the very long answer to your question. That's a great answer. Thank you so much. And you're right. Like I think with every documentary piece the process is different because the material you're using might be different. In the memorial case, I believe it was on the interviews but sometimes if you're using like hybrid, what we call hybrid documentary when you're using documents or studies or other material, it's definitely it becomes a different process. I wanna pause for a moment because we have a question actually in the chat and I wanna lift it up from American Iraqi poet Bo Boussoulael, hello Bo. Bo's asking, theater has so much to do with the human body and that is part of its power for me to see the narrative inhabited by someone so close is magical. How much of a sense of the body enters your work as you write? As a queer writer, are you even more aware of the human body since the body of a queer person has for so long frightened theater producers into only presenting them as stereotypes on this stage? Yeah, thank you. That's an excellent, excellent question. I think I used to be, again, my bankrupt, I was as a teen or as like a child. I read like, I was the kind of person who read like one book every day. And so I came from such a literary background. And again, when I came into college I wanted to study literature. So when I first made this transition to playwriting, I just like kept, we had this one theoretical professor who always talked in every play we would talk about, she would ask us the first question after was how do these bodies function in space? And I, 18 year old me was like, that's such a annoying question.  Sorry, expletives. And that question is so important to me now. It means so much because as I, my plays used to be like talk, talk, talk, talk. And drawing in Cairo is one of my earlier plays. So it is more that than some of my more contemporary plays. But having seen more plays and seen how bodies function and embody text, I think playwrights have such an intense responsibility of thinking about you have the responsibility that you're putting words in someone's body and putting someone's mouth and what that means and how bodies function differently. So yes, as a queer, I was very, one of the first observations I had when I was meeting people who had been on the queen boat or people who even knew someone who were in the queen boat. And you know, queer people, not stereotype, but often there's like levity and fun and humor and sarcasm and irony. But like the way people embodied or would look down or would look differently as they were talking about this thing was something I was really fascinated, not fascinated or like, you know, sad to see but also somewhat like intrigued by as an anthropologist or as an artist. But yes, I think like in the play, if you see it, when you see it, there is very much like how each of these men's bodies and movement and physicality fundamentally changes as a result of this incident and how this incident, how their bodies are being policed within this incident is very much part of this. And it's become more of a thing in my work in later pieces with, and thanks to the, again, to quote or to give credit where credit is due to my collaborator, Ariana, for whom bodies and like how the bodies are embodying and taking up space are like central to how she makes work and that, and so she brought that background to us building Memorial and that became very central to how we were thinking about it. For example, Memorial has in its current draft requires seven actors or seven bodies on stage and some of these tracks are hard to cast. Like our lead is a Bangladeshi man in his late fifties who is disabled or is in a wheelchair and is paraplegic. And even in New York, like we were most of the, where there's the biggest abundance of actors, it is almost impossible to cast this role entirely accurate, entirely authentically, or would be all of these demographics in mind. And so we've always had the question of what does it mean if a different kind of body is embodying these words? And how do we acknowledge that to our audiences? So we're not claiming that Fareed's man is not disabled or so, but how do we create the dissonance between the body or emphasize and explore what it means that there is a dissonance between the words that were told in the body of the actor? I mean, we could think about that with like something like Hamilton or what does that dissonance mean? And so what we did in Memorial is we actually have recordings from the actual interviews. And so this doesn't happen the whole script, obviously. It happens like maybe five times in the script, but an actor who's clearly not 59 or Bangladeshi or paraplegic will say the line. And then the recording of the actual person will say, and it is a moment that invokes humility for the actor because they then realize that like, I will never fully be this person and I'll never fully be able to experience what this person did. But it's also a reminder for the audience that these actors are like coming in as themselves with their identities telling you the story rather than like, they are these people. So yeah, that's again my short answer. Yeah. That's great. Actually, I just want to highlight again one thing that you asked about and you beautifully responded to, which is the idea of like stereotyping characters like queer Arab or queer in general. And this is one thing that really stood out for me when I read Crowning in Cairo. And that was it really offers a very complex alternative reality, like a narrative to the often simplistic and reductive narrative about what it means to be gay in the Middle East. So that was something that, I really enjoyed in this play. We don't want to give away obviously like the story or more juicy details, but that's something that I hope audiences will be able to see. It's very empowering in its own way. So Adam. And I want to actually add to that and say that you challenged me a little bit in the beginning of our collaboration in a way that I really appreciated where it's again, I wrote this play when I was in college, but up until like three months ago, the character descriptions in the script were like describing how each of these three men looked in my head when I was writing them. And Sahar was like, okay, but that's not what we want to put in a casting call. We actually like, who are these people? Like what is their characters? What is their personality? What is the thing that makes them tick? And I suddenly found myself writing like two sentences about each of these men that like was so much more important than the fact that one of them was short or lanky. Like it didn't match. Like it was, and I was like, oh, right. Like I've thought about like the closet bro-ey dude as like who ends up being a policeman. Again, like, sorry. I was like a 200 pound muscular dude with a big mustache, but like, what if he's not that? What if he's actually like very fam? And that's part of what this character embodies. And so we became interested in like what it, cause I don't think people's, the archetype, like what we think, like if you look at what someone looks like in a photo and then how they actually embody that body is not like, is more often than not, not accurate to what our stereotypes and what our brains want to make snap judgments about. And so I was very, I'm very excited by how we are going to complicate some of these things with how bodies take our bodies morph. Me too. I can't wait really to be in a rehearsal room with you, Adam. I want to say like this conversation is just a starter really for us. I'm hoping we're going to have many more of these around drowning in Cairo, especially when we start working. And I wanted really to use it as a chance to introduce you to our community, get to know you a little better. So one thing I did is I reached out to friends and collaborators you've worked with. And I have some surprises for you. So we have, I have a surprise guest. Wait, what? I was not. Yeah, you're going to be like, let's see. We have a surprise guest waiting in the wait room. I want to admit right away, please Wendy, can we have our guests join us? Literally what is happening right now? Show your face. Oh my God, hi. Hi Adam. I'm so crazy. People watching, this is Amin El Gamal, Egyptian-American actor, active in theater, film and television that I've had the pleasure of meeting recently in person. And obviously we spoke about drowning in Cairo and about you, Adam. And I said, you know, we have Adam in a no summary. Can you come and say something about your experience reading the play in 2018? Because for those of you who don't know, Golden Thread actually gave drowning in Cairo. I believe it's very first home in a development workshop with Evren and Taranj and others. And Amin was reading Moody. So, so hi, I'm so happy that you're here. I'm so happy to be here. This is so fun and so exciting. Wow. I just wanted to share, Adam, how profound that reading was because I grew up in the Bay Area and I struggled, you know, I had my own internal struggles and my struggles with my family culturally and a lot of progress has been made. But even so, a lot of times we don't talk about these issues explicitly and the reading gave such a safe space for us to just unapologetically bring this stuff up and like shine a spotlight on it and to be surrounded by all these people, like these tons, you know, and my parents, my brothers.  It was frightening. But it was also like, it gave the community an opportunity to show up and to be supportive, which I don't think we always, we don't always do. And a chance to have like a safe space for like some kind of dialogue. So I just wanted to share that experience with you. I have so many feelings right now. Sahar, why did you do this to me? This is much like an Oprah move. That is such an Oprah move, actually. No, but yeah, I don't know what to say. I mean, we had a couple of, when I was still in college, when I was developing it for my thesis, we had a short workshop that was in India with my playwriting mentor and then one in Abu Dhabi, but obviously in neither of those, did I actually work with a queer error person? And I remember I was having, again, I had not decided to move to the US at that point yet. And I was having this existential crisis of like, I can't present this play in Egypt. It's also in English because I'm like, was raised in a certain way in a certain place. And so it's not actually accessible to most of the queer Egyptian community. I can't really present to the UAE where I lived either. And I don't know who this plays for. I don't just want to present it to like white audiences. And Catherine, again, shout out to Catherine. I really wish she was here. Catherine was like, send this to Everyn, send this to Golden Threat. I actually didn't know Everyn at that time. She said, send this to Golden Threat. And I did. That was just like a cold, random email middle of the spring of my senior year. And I didn't hear back for like a few months. And then a few days after graduation, I was still in Abu Dhabi. And I got this email and I was like, what? Like, what do you want to do with my play? What is happening? Who are you? And so I called it my graduation trip. I flew to San Francisco. And I've always wondered who this play was for. I never, never thought that it's audience. First of all, I never thought that I would work with a queer Egyptian actor whose experience is fundamentally different from mine because I did not grow up in the U.S. at all who was gonna find value in working on this play. And so just having the privilege of doing that, of being with you and seeing you, seeing people be affected by the work. Cause, you know, as a writer, you're always like, like, does anybody care about this as much as I do? Does it matter? Is this just all like vanity?  That's right. Again, a very intergenerational conversation between three different queer Arab men from across contexts was so profoundly meaningful. And then having our audiences, again, be like a group of like diasporic, mostly Egyptian, mostly Arab American, older, not older, but like older women who are primarily not queer, who were there for this work. Like I just never thought that like an Arab straight audience would sit through this play and be like, yeah, that's fine. We are finding value and meaning in this. And just seeing that, I'm like, they took me out for like, with a bottle of champagne after it. And I was like, people actually like appreciated this. And I never thought that I would. And honestly, like I always, I credit Evern because he was the person who read that play from a cold email. I credit him for identifying Khaled as a person. I credit him and then casting Amin and other Egyptian folks who were in the piece. But I think like, I don't think I would have moved to the U.S. or like continue to write plays if it weren't for that experience. And so it feels like such a homecoming to, for this play like many years later to be getting its premiere here. That's so beautiful. I just want to send our regards to Evern Ochikin who is our very own resident artist and also right now in the Associate Artistic Director at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I want to send regards to Khaled Abonega who did a fantastic job on that piece. Obviously to Taranja Ghazarian, the champion of it all and to you both. So I mean, I want you to stay on please because we have more surprises for Adam and I want you to witness and experience that. So I'm gonna invite Wendy. So some folks Adam wanted to share some messages and questions but they really did not, weren't available to join us live but they did send some video messages. So I want to show you the first. We want the name that like Sahar Phich this to me as, I want people to know that I did not come here with the expectation of like being serenaded. No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We're gonna like have like an open work session, playwright director talk about our backgrounds like with people and I was like, that sounds cute. Let's do it. I didn't know this was gonna be like a whole thing. It's all about you Adam. You're our star. I wanna talk to you and hear more We'll get more time. You can do that offline. And I hope you're looking at all the love we're receiving in both of you in the chat. This is so intense. I'm so happy. Yeah, that's great. Wendy. Hi Adam. Terribly sorry that I was unable to make it for the live online celebration of you.  Super, super excited for your premiere of drowning in Cairo with the Golden Thread team. I think it's going to be a wonderful exploration of the work and I really think it's the kind of material that needs to be on our stages today. So I wish you well. I wish you a lot of good, good vibes as you move into this process. I wish you love, growth, lots of luck and I can't wait to be bringing all my colleagues and friends to watch in the spring, I believe. So in the winter, big, big hugs and I hope to see you again soon. Mabruk, see you. Oh my God. How can you even know Karishma? Like I have questions. Well, I have to give credit to Catherine Coray because I was like, Catherine, give me some names. And obviously you know what, I'm genuinely like Catherine is. Oh my God. But I have to say, so this is Karishma Vahgani a producer, researcher, theater maker from Vahsa, Kenya, for those of you who don't know and she's currently pursuing a PhD in theater and performance studies at Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. And I can't wait to meet you Karishma when you watch this. You'll hear this, Adam. Yeah, Karishma is one of my dearest, dearest friends and when she got into, when she was like started her program at Stanford and then just a few weeks later I learned that you were going to feature the play in the season. I was like, oh my God, I've got to come see you more often. And also like, I want you to like be a part of every part of the process of this place. Karishma is also the key producer on Memorial and is just one of the most brilliant people who does like, not just like work between the middle between, she's from East Africa and not just work between East Africa and the US but she's very interested in South-South collaborations and she deeply inspires me as a director and a producer. And yeah, I know some of Karishma's friends are also here in the chat. Hi, Marina. Hi, Marina. And yeah, we can't wait to meet Karishma at Global Thread and learn more about your work. I, we have two other messages. My God, two. Yeah, we've done some research. Let's see Wendy. Hi. Hello, Adam. It's Arianna tuning in from our sweet graduation photo in our kitchen. For those who don't know me, my name is Arianna and I am a close friend slash often collaborator slash roommate of the wonderful Adam El Sayi. And Adam, I was thinking of when I very first spoke to you, you told me that you had the hopes of someday creating a play out of the Great Gatsby and specifically that what you loved about the Great Gatsby was the fact that the story sometimes breaks out of time and space in exciting ways that gives us the best experience of the story. And for anyone who's coming to see Adam's work, that's what you'll receive. That's what you'll get is, I think Adam is an incredible crafts person of narrative and how one event leads to the next event in ways that still are surprising and innovative to the form and to the story itself. So my question for you, Adam, would be what excites you so much about narrative in theater about using story events leading to the next events in theater? And how do you get inspired to play with them? What inspires your choices within narrative structure? That's kind of heady, but I bet you'll give a good answer. So much love from New York and I'll see you soon. We had to bring in Arianna, come on, Adam. What is, I barely heard her question because I was gonna go, wow, this is wild. This is Arianna's thinking. Did I ask the question? I don't know, it feels. Just to say to everyone this thing, Arianna is an actor and playwright and current BNMFA acting student at the Juilliard School and Arianna is the friend and collaborator Adam was referring to when he spoke about memorial. And Arianna is asking you about what inspires you in the narrative structure? Like, I think we did speak a little bit about that, but I'm happy to have you listen again to the question. Here, no, no, no, I think I have it together. Wow. I think when I first wrote, I mean, I can talk about my work generally or like I wrote drowning in Cairo linearly. And it was actually really boring as the first draft when it was linear because you were seeing these kids as they were like figuring out they were queer, but there wasn't, I was interested in, I'm interested in how we see things in retrospect. I'm currently dramaturging our town, which is one of my all-time favorite plays not because of all the like Americana stuff, but because of the third act where we see Emily looking at her 12th birthday. It's funny, our town was never a direct influence on driving in Cairo or I never thought of it as such, but I'm interested in like these moments of mundanity or moments where it's just like, here's a bunch of kids that are just talking about like Britney Spears and that's it. Like it's just 12-year-olds, or 13-year-olds talking about Britney Spears, like who cares? But they actually, when you know like what happens next and what it means, it means so much. And Rajiv Joseph's play, gruesome playground injuries was the most direct like thing that I looked at and was like, I think I wanna do that. And yeah, that last seat, the question that weirdly always comes up in every talkback is, okay, I don't wanna tell you what the last scene is. People ask why we end at the last scene. And I always say because it's not linear, that's what I can't tell you. And people ask why we end there. And I've always thought like we end there because knowing what these kids thought was their lives were going to be and seeing them full of hope about what that life will be, knowing what their life actually ends up being is more profound than anything that I can like write about like them saying out loud. Like I don't think that's as profound as like just the structure of it. It's funny, I'm actually working on another, the first project that's like very directly like about queer Egyptian life, it's post-Egyptian revolution. So it's very different project and it's not for theater, but it's a project that I started thinking about non-linearly a few years ago. And just now after it's been not working for years and like I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working. And I realized that my first impulse, which was to start seven years into the future and then go back is actually what I need to do to make everything that we see as a flashback relevant. So I'm always interested in like what, or I'm also interested in repetition.  I think, I don't know who said this. It's like the A, B to A star. Like it's a weird nerdy playwriting thing that I don't know how to describe properly right now. Moving on. I wanna say one thing that you just said like also without giving too much of the play because we're not there yet. But I wanna say like one thing also that I read in this play and I wanna ask, I mean, if you would agree with me that there's so much obviously like heart wrenching sorrow reflected in the play and the story of the three young men. But at the same time, there's something for me that kind of felt that this is also a celebration of life and love. And that became really something that I wanted to highlight.  This we can say, right? We can say that that's the play starts with. I think it's the one who really insisted on that being there. Yeah, I like it. My impulse ethos with writing was always like to tell a story for of people and for people not of people only but for people who have not been represented and or have been represented badly. And for me, it is very much that.   And it's like, no, it's both. Yes, it's like, we all overcome. We all like as marginalized communities and not just marginalized communities, everyone goes through shit, right? Like who doesn't?  Like that's just the reality of like being a human. And I'm just not interested in like joy or trauma or pain as pair as like binaries, but like things that create each other. Right. I mean, sorry, you're invited to speak and I just took over. That's okay. No, I agree with you. I think that life is not a comedy or a drama and it's most interesting and most profound when the tone, for me, I'm really interested in how like tragedy and like comedy almost can converge at the same time. Like sort of like the check off thing where one person's life is falling apart and the other person's in love and joy and they're in the same conversation somehow, but not, I always find that the most interesting work because that's more how life is. But yeah, I mean, I can see the concerns with marginalized communities and their sort of pain being mined as some sort of balm for like Western guilt or whatever or a way to like, I know there was a conversation with like these incredible black centered plays on Broadway, but so many of them, also there's the conversation about how so many of them are about like trauma and like how you balance that out. So yeah, it's complicated. I also like, and this is a little bit different, but I guess it's a question for you because we have different background, I was curious what you think the role of diaspora, queer Arabs, artists might be in relation to stuff that's going on like in Egypt, like that's depicted in Brown and Cairo because we do have privilege, and it's not so much what can we do to like assuage our guilt, but like what is our role in the conversation of without getting in territory of like pinkwashing or like demonizing the Middle East further, you know? I mean, just the way you're asking that question tells me that you're the right person to actually have a role, which is to say that like, I've heard the bad version of that question from like an older white gentleman in the talk back where it was like, so how do we fix this in Egypt?  But like as someone who is of that descent who grew up in the US, like as an actor, I would say your role is like the same way any artist's role is it's like embodying stories that matter and telling them and telling them in ways that are authentic and sincere to what the lived experience of the actual character or person is. And I would say that like, that role is more profound and more important for you because let's face the reality, like for a play like Drowning in Cairo, someone who was born and raised in Egypt who still lives in Egypt cannot go and act this play in a local theater in their hometown.  And I have complicated feelings about that myself. Like just because I grew up in Egypt doesn't mean that I have the authority to tell the story.  I have a lot of class privilege. I don't think my experience of queerness is the same as like your average Egyptian gay person. And so, but like, and for a long time, I think between drowning in Cairo and the project I'm currently working on, there was a solid couple of years that I was like, I shouldn't be telling queer Arab stories, but like I also have privilege and I have training and I have passion and I have privilege of like having built my career around telling stories, which is something that a lot of people can do for a variety of economic, cultural, social, like security reasons. And so like, I may not be the best person to tell the story, but I can be conscious of that and try to bring the right people, which is why I'm also passionate about producing and like being a literary manager in this theater. I can think about other ways to cultivate that, but I think that's a profound question. As long as it's not pinkwashing, I mean, I do like, like whatever. It is an excellent question, really. Yeah. It's just so funny to be talking about pinkwashing while wearing all pink, but anyway. It's not related, Adam, it's okay. We can't wear pink. I love it. I just want to say that at some point we have a conversation about language in the play and it's a bilingual play. And I know that you have some drafts that the Arabic kind of is more at 50% or more. So actually like, this is a question that has been on my mind. And you did speak briefly about this, but do you think it's important to take these stories back to the communities that they came from? And what would you need to do? Like what should become, maybe something needs to be compromised to be able to do that given the atmosphere and the hostility against homosexuality and queerness in the Arab world. So is this something that's on your mind, for instance, in response to the audience? I think what I have talked about like a potential Beirut production down the line, there are a couple of places in the Arab world where it's possible. I think the story would have an impact with the Lebanese queer community as well. We can't produce it in Cairo right now, but maybe we will in three decades. I don't know. But I know that like I've had to make, I wouldn't say compromises, but I've had to make adaptations or shifts for it to like have a life on American stages. And I have realized that like, it's also, again, the onus is not on me to tell the story of like for every Arab queer. What I can do like if I'm developing a workshop for like new emerging queer playwrights or like teenagers to try and really include like a couple of Arab queer playwrights who maybe are not, who are not gonna like go to NYU, who are not going to have like the privileges or access that I have had the privilege of having in my life. But so that they can write in their communities and they can build with their communities and they can do the work that I can't. Like I think I used to, again, a few years ago, used to have this fantasy about like I'm going to, one day I'm gonna come back to the Middle East and like, you know, start a theater company and do things for queer Arabs. And it's like, I could one day, but maybe I'm not the best person to do that. Maybe what's best is for me to like do the fundraising for that and empower is not empower, but like give access or resources to someone else to do that. Cause yeah, I think it's important to also know like where are not our strengths or our contexts. Yeah, absolutely. We are at our time, but this is the last No Summary episode for 2021. And I wanna extend our time a little bit because we have one more message and question for you. Adam, Wendy, please. Hi Adam, a very, very good afternoon to you. I hope you're doing very well, my friend.  That is wonderful for the theater community, for the audiences or Golden Thread production has because your work deserves to be in more main stages more than ever now. I think you know how highly I think of you when you're writing your commitment as an artist and of course I think the more the world has witnessed to that the better it is. Also at the same time, I think I'm gonna take this opportunity actually to ask you a question which is about how has your thought on the relationship between form and content changed over the years? And I'm asking this because right from the time when you were a student, you were so enthused by the idea of finding the right form and content. And in all these years, you have worked in quite a few different playwriting forms from documentary to writing stuff that is more autobiographical and also being at the forefront of queer writing. So I'm wondering as you move to another phase of your life of writing, how do you see the relationship between form and content emerge in your own work? Looking forward to your answer and to everything that you have to say in general and to more of your writing. Take care and bye-bye. Oh my God. Do you wanna tell us? I know that I actually referenced all the people that you brought in. It's, I know it worked perfectly. I wouldn't, I know people might think that we would be. I promise you, I actually did not know about this. I actually did not know about this. I know, I know, I was like smiling inside. You know, I was so happy. You're referencing everyone. This is Abishak Majrumdar, playwright, theater director, scenographer, visiting associate professor of practice of theater at NYU Abu Dhabi, and Abishak is Adam's teacher and mentor. Yeah, so Abishak is the person who taught me my first playwriting class when I was like 18. Oh my God. He also would always ask me deep questions like this and I always was like, I don't have a smart answer for you. You are like the smartest person I know. Stop. So I would say, I think I used to be so, this is embarrassing to say out loud. I used to be so anti-experimentation. I think I wanted to tell like the naturalist stories in the most traditional sense of that word. Like I wanted to just stage real life. Like I always was like, why can't dialogue just be like, how are we talking real life? Very Chacovian. And Abishak was like, no, but there's more. Like that works for certain things and there's more. And the first play I read in his class was very that, was very like Chacovian. He always described it as. And I think I've learned more than ever that most of the time I want form to be determined by content would just to say that like, especially as I'm working across forms now, not just live audiences, but I've just seen a lot of, I've just like, I come up with ideas and I'm like, this is gonna be like one, two hour play. And then I start writing it and I'm like, actually maybe this is a screen thing or maybe it's not linear like I was saying. And so content for me has always been where I start and character as I said, character is always where I start. And that often been in forms form. So yeah. Well, thank you so much. I don't know what to say, so I'm gonna cry. Thank you so much. Yeah, I really, we just wanna celebrate you Adam and tell you how much we are happy to be producing drowning in Cairo as part of our main stage season in 2022 and get to know you. And again, create this chance for our community to get to know you. I'm sure we're gonna have many more of these conversations. We're gonna be hosting a workshop, hopefully in January around the play. And we'll see, like we'll try as much as possible to engage our community in every step of the way. So I just wanna say that it's been such a privilege and pleasure to have you here with us today to close this, you know, no summary for 2021.  It's been such a pleasure to get to know you more closely recently. And I look forward to all our future conversations and working together, hopefully, soon, inshallah. I'm so excited. Yeah, so, and I wanna thank, you know, the special guests, Kereshma Abishak Adriana, also who appeared on video. So grateful for you and looking forward to connecting further with all of you. I would like to thank HowlRound for hosting this session and all of our sessions this year. The program offered nine new episodes in 2021. We hosted around 27 artists from various backgrounds and ethnicities, including playwrights, directors, storytellers, makeup designers, artistic directors, founding members of emerging MENA theater companies, Swana queer artists, cultural advisors from Turkey, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine and the MENA diaspora. And all these episodes live on Golden Threads website and on HowlRound. Thank you always to Wendy Reyes-Christiel for their technical support and to the rest of the Golden Threads small but mighty team, Michelle, Linda and Nadine. And big thank you to you, our audiences, without whom really nothing would make any sense. We love you and we hope to see you next year in person and online. If you're not already on our email list, please sign up today so that you stay on top of our programs and events. We just launched a new era campaign for Golden Threads. And if you would like to support our work and the voices we bring to you, please consider making a donation. More information on that on our website, goldenthread.org. We're always looking for volunteers and board members. So talk to us if you're interested. It really takes a village to make great art. Thank you everyone. Thank you again, Adam and Amin and goodbye for now. This was wild. Amin, Karishma, Ariana, Abhishek, I will definitely be sending you long, tearful messages but thank you. Sahad, I can't believe you put this together. I don't know what to say. I can't wait to be in the rehearsal room again and with you, Adam, hopefully Amin. I'm teasing. Okay, I'll stop. Bye, everyone. Bye. Thanks for having me. This was really wonderful. Good to see you both. Love you both. Bye bye. Thank you. Bye.


trainings płꈜ you you isn't all one was wrong haven and the day when wasn't es This country belongs to all of us. It belongs to the farmers. It belongs to herty. Those who are wearing their cattle peacefully. It belongs to those who have no cattle, who have no farms, who just want to live in peace. And I want to urge you all as leaders that it is our business to find what it is that will enable peace, not just in Nassarar state but across that country.


Okay, welcome back everyone, this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm John Jeff Kelly, my co-host, the chief research officer for Wikibon's big data practice. We are here with Peter Zeitz, the co-founder and CEO of Percona. This is his show, Percona Live. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So you guys have over 1,000 people attending. It's not a sexy show relative to Microsoft's Big Build in San Francisco, where they're interested in the iPhone, not iPhone, the Windows iPhone clone wannabe, and other events, but it's a lot of very important event because developer action right now is all about the data. We saw the NoSQL databases actually come onto the scene very rapidly with the advent of big data and fast data and mobile computing, but my SQL's not going away. I mean, if anything, it's escalated in importance at the scale level, at many levels, and you're seeing analytics being powered by some structured database, you got to roll that data up into some schema. Maybe some schema less designs come down the road for handling the new data types? No problem, but SQL's not going away. My SQL in particular. So with that in mind, what is the focus of this show? Why is this important? Share it with the folks. Why Percona Live is such an important show? Well, I believe that Percona Live is important because this is this sort of big tent. We really keep it open. We invite all kind of players here, wherever our partners or our competitors where their opinion matches our or different from us. And I think because we keep it real, that is very much appreciated both by our attendees, our speakers, and our sponsors. What is the, just share the numbers of some people here. What are some of the vendors here? Give some examples of the kind of people that are showing up here. So if you think about the MySQL, those days there are three major MySQL variants. There is obviously like the true MySQL by Oracle and we have tons of folks from Oracle Development Team participating here, giving talks, including Thomas Olin, who runs the engineering at Oracle. We also have their MariaDB team here with a lot of folks, which is the second variants. And they actually have chosen this show to time the, do the GA release for their new major MariaDB tent, which we are very proud of. And of course, there is Percona with our products, which are also well presented here. What are some of the challenges people have and what's the opportunities with scale? When you look at MySQL, you've seen all the great ones that have taken Open Source MySQL and built companies around it because they didn't have the big bucks like Facebook when they started. Obviously Google and Amazon and LinkedIn, Twitter, they're all Open Source guys.  They're just unique. They're like, they're eating glass, they're spitting out nails. They're hardcore dudes. Now, the normal market, Blamstack Developers, they're building software, doing stuff in the enterprise. They've used Mongo in the past. It's worked well. But everyone's hitting this glass ceiling. So I got to ask you the question. What is the main thought leadership today around breaking that glass on performance and taking scale to the next level? Well, I would say for MySQL, I like to see what there are two kinds of applications. And I will call them simply large and small, right? If the large applications, these are like Facebook, or even at a little bit smaller scale. And those... Facebook's a large application. Check the box. Yeah, so, and those things have to have a very advanced technology for scaling. They need to scale to large amount of service implementing technologies like Sharding, Cache, and they use a lot of very advanced stuff. I think it's already has been proven that the MySQL can be used to build application of a really extreme scale. And for those guys, the challenge right now comes, I believe, in two-fold. First one is efficiency, because in the Facebook scale, when you're running tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of service of MySQL, every 10% is millions of dollars worth of cost savings. So you really try to squeeze as much from existing hardware as possible. The second is efficiency in terms of automation, right? You can always find what even those very famous companies have a hard time recruiting the qualified DVAs and their operational team usually cannot grow as quickly as amount of their applications and database instances they're running. So there is a lot of heavy investment, how we can automate things, how we can do more, manage our databases better with the smaller stuff. This is all what comes to the larger applications, right? And then another trend that I believe is the MySQL with application I would call small. Now, small doesn't necessarily mean like small as your home DVD collection, right? It may be actually a quite significant scale of application but which you can still run from their relatively simple architecture with single MySQL server or maybe very simple replication setup. And because of recent hardware advances, you can run phenomenal amount of traffic from those kind of applications. We have companies which generates many tens of millions of revenue from essentially this kind of setup or supporting internal website for a company of 200,000 employees, stuff like that. This I think is a very interesting trend. Let me ask you a question. Tell me how to phrase it. Okay, so here's how I'll phrase this one. What are the biggest things for the folks out there? Share with the audience out there. What is the biggest thing that they may not know about what's going on in the MySQL world that hasn't hit the mainstream yet that you guys know in the thought leader, geek circles here under the hood? What's happening and what's next? What's the most important thing that's going to come out of this sea change? We heard from Fusion IO around nonvolatile memory compression. You mentioned sharding. There's just a technique in managing data but some things are happening. But what is it that people don't know today that they should know about what's happening? Yes, well, I think it's the most exciting thing in MySQL right now is what there is a lot of very rapid innovation happening and in a lot of cases this is driven by competition. I think in MySQL, right now even MySQL at Oracle is moving much faster than ever before partly because of the resources Oracle have available and partly because of the competition from folks like Marie Dibi and Percona server. And I think that's competition really benefits MySQL users. Another interesting announcement which a few of folks may have heard about is there something called a web scale SQL which is an engineer cooperation between Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn which may be somewhat competing, right? But they have chosen to work together on getting the next generation of MySQL variant for an extreme scale and I'm very excited about how much great stuff could come out of that. So talk about that a little bit more. You know, it sounds like, I mean clearly MySQL is still extremely important part of their infrastructure and they're the way they support their applications. Do you think kind of the work they're doing together is going to have an impact on more traditional enterprises or is this pretty much going to stay with the large scale companies or do you see us moving to a point where eventually as we've seen with other technologies like Kadoop some of the things developed at these at the large web scale companies make their way into the enterprise? Or are we a long way from that? Yes, well, when they're speaking about the MySQL and web scale SQL is a product focused particular on their MySQL like environment, right? So I believe there is going to be a fair amount of changes integrated in the mainstream MySQL in the Oracle branch. In fact, they have already taken some of the patches from Facebook or Twitter and Google and integrating that in the main line. And I think also some of the changes may be very specific to how Google use MySQL or Facebook use MySQL, right? Which will remain in their respective branches. And I think that's fine. Now you mentioned there Kadoop, Mongo and other technologies. I think it's very important to understand but even though some of those companies they want to position like they are replacing MySQL. I believe in majority of cases they run alongside MySQL, right? Take a look at Facebook, for example. They run a bit of everything. There is a lot of MySQL there but you can find there Cassandra, Mongo, Memcache, a lot of other technologies. And I think that is what really makes the open source data management technology so exciting because when you have a single vendor approach, right? You say, hey, I am with Oracle, right? And they want me to do everything with Oracle. Your application series Oracle, QNIS Oracle, Cache and Oracle. That is not so an open source environment. MySQL is great for certain set of things but not for everything. And we have to all recognize that and there is room to use Hadoop and MongoDB, Redis, Memcache for other things. And we are finding ways right now how to operate those technologies together effectively. And I think that is one of the great trends happening right now. What do you think about what's going on in the cloud mobile world relative to data? Honestly, I'm higher up the stack and a lot of the databases have always been the enabler for that. So database, it's a cool time to be a database guy right now. I mean, yeah, I have to say, one of my degrees in computer science is in database design and the other one's in operating systems and hell, I never told anyone I was a database guy. It's like, ah, I don't want business. But it wasn't a sexy degree back in the 80s, right? In the 90s. But now it's all the rage because of all the enablement. How is databases changing today? Is it the intersection with NoSQL? Is it the connectors? Is it the coexistence? Is it the open source, all of the above? What's your take on that? Oh, I think there's a lot of trends out there, right? Like, I will start with the last one, the open source, right? I think when it comes to computing, the open source really has proven itself, right? We have the open source operating system for a while, MySQL, open source database, a lot of innovation, where I've been at Hadoop or MongoDB Cassandre, these are all open source technologies, right? Which is very important. Cloud is an important factor. From a different perspective, I think cloud really changed how a lot of innovation happens. A lot of startups can start with the application much faster and less expensive than ever before and be a lot more agile as well. Cloud also allows us to really have a dynamic scaling, right? So you can go from one zero to 100 in a matter of minutes if you have to and that allows us to build a newer, much more effective application, especially for some applications which are seasonal or IOS spikes of activity. Now, you mentioned the mobile and I think there is another interesting trend which drives a lot of challenge in the database. We are generating much more data those days. This data can be not structural and a lot of that data is also location specific. If you think about that, this ability to support your location when it comes to the data was one of the great the focus of a lot of modern technologies like MongoDB, for example, does that pretty well. And I'm also excited to see what my school is catching up. One of the announcements Oracle has done yesterday was MySQL 5.7 release with special high-performance support for location searches, which looks like a minor thing that's very important enabling factor for mobile technologies and investment. So another kind of important topic I think when you're talking about open source technology, shifting gears a little bit, talk us a little bit about Percona's business model. So when you're in the open source world and you're providing services and some level of some software, it was over the question of, okay, what do we open source? What do we charge for? How do you make those kind of determinations? What's Percona's approach? And is that, it sounds like that's a really critical question when you're trying to play in the open source community. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And when you look at the Percona approach has been a full throttle open source, right? If you take a look at that. Our technologies like Percona Server, Percona XRDB cluster, Percona Toolkit, Percona XRBucket, these are all open source. And in many cases we have investment into development technology which are alternative to the close source technologies which Oracle provides. For example, there is a rather expensive in mySQL enterprise backup, but there is also Percona XRBucket, which is the alternative from Percona, which is completely open source. Now, you will see a lot of features in the mySQL enterprise such as support for very high level of connections called enterprise scalability or integration with their active directory and other authentication system which is commercial only extension Oracle but it exists as an open source solution in Percona Server. And I think that is very important for us to really push the open source forward as much as we can. Now, at the same time, we are not the open source zealots and then there are solutions exist which are proprietary which we can bring into our customers, we use them. So for example, our support customers have access to their Monio platform which we extended with additional what we call Percona advisors to really empower the DBA in their, a lot of the companies. For our Percona XRB cluster support, we have a provider with our support script which is a script from the best of breed software called Cluster Control done by several Nines and I think that is a great thing and there is a place both for open source and a proprietary software. I want to get your final thoughts here as we wind down the segment on just give us an update on the company. You guys have a lot of customers. Just give us a quick stats. Give us the, how many customers, how many employees, how's the funding? You guys feel good about yourself and Intel invests $700 million this week and you guys, give us some data. Come on, share with us. Yes, sure. Yes, Intel invests $700 million in you? No, no, we wouldn't take that. Too low of an evaluation. Yes, so we've been around for about seven and a half years. So the company was started by myself and by Dintka Chentka. We previously work in the engineering team in my school. We also have a pretty hardcore ground in the woods when we need to be. The company is about 120 people right now and we have what is called the distributed company. And truly so, we have people in more than 20 countries. Do you have a GitHub handle? Yeah, there's the corner. Okay, you personally? Oh, me? Well, I have a login but I don't share. Oh, you don't share public code? Okay. Yeah, yeah, so. So we can't look at your code? Well, I will have to tell, I don't go too much, right? I found out, coding is way too slow, right? I rather like to come up with wonderful ideas and then have. Have someone else code them. Have someone else code them, right? That's my thing. I see a couple thousand customers, seven years funding. Did you guys self-funded yourselves? Yes, it is self-funded bootstrapped so there is no outside investors or outside. Zero today. Zero today, yes. Congratulations. Thank you. We have no outside investors. No one can fire us except the customers. Yes, indeed. That's what I like. Well, you're one of us. Okay, any other stats you want to share? Employees distributed? 120, 120 employees, 22 the country or so. So that's, that's it. We have the three major business areas we provide. It's MySQL support, consultant and also remote-based services. All right, so the hardest question I'm going to ask you is, where do you guys decide to have your big meetings? Which country? U.S., somewhere else? Oh, well. Do you guys have everyone around the country? Do you guys have that debate internally? Yeah, well, we've been running pretty large company meetings until, until recently when it becomes too hard to pull off and too challenging for our customers. And we try to mix fun and pleasure so then you can go to, we had meetings in places like Mexico as well as in Turkey and Egypt because before all of those events, right? Of course, yeah, off-site planning events. We've had those too. Not in Egypt though, Jeff, we got to get on that. Well, we might want to wait till a little- Turkey's got some good- Things settled down a little bit, part of the world, I don't know. Well, thanks so much for coming. I really appreciate it, Peter. Lights, welcome to theCUBE. Great event, great to be here our first time here at your event. We'd love what you're doing. Obviously a big proponent of open source, MySQL, growing up again, going to scale, web scale, SQL, obviously a big, big flashpoint for the industry with all the big guys who use data coming together to say, hey, we can share information, take you home to the level for performance. Thanks for putting on the event. Thanks for having us. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back after this short break. We're here live in Silicon Valley in the heart of Silicon Valley and Santa Clara Convention Center for Percona Live. We'll be right back.


Let's be honest here people, the only weapons we see that can glitch at Grave Ward like this under my testings have previously been snipers. This thing, wow. Has it gone guys, my name's DPJ and today I'll bring you another BR3 video, if you do enjoy it leaving a like really helps out and subscribe if you do want to see more. So I'm going to begin this video with straight up honesty, no hanging about and state. This is probably the best assault rifle in the game right now. You guys just witnessed what this thing does to Grave Ward. When you think of another assault rifle capable of that DPS, if you don't in reality bring a certain build setup to do said damage into the equation because I can't think of one. So the Clairvoyance assault rifle is a true unique monster. Where this differs from almost all assault rifles in the game is the fact it basically acts like a full auto sniper, with a backup of tons of ammo due to it being an AR. So this Clairvoyance comes after in trial damage only and its dedicated burst drop is critchy upon Cursed Haven, where I will show you guys a route to at the end of the video. Now this Clairvoyance does drop in a variety of different variants, including a Masha variant which I ain't too keen on, as with all my experience with the Masha variants instead of weapons from this DLC, they all seem to lack in comparison to the standard variants. So you can see the variants I have on screen now, we can see damage and mag size for the most part are the things that differ the most. The Masha version we see is more powerful at the bunch, but it also consumes 2 ammo per shot and it does have the smallest mag size, so yeah. So what does this beast do, what's special about it and what is it capable of such crazy damage. So that what it actually does is quite straightforward, and that is, crit shots, stick and an explode doubling its damage. And it's good to know that having active anointments like the Sentinel Crayol 100% additional damage, doubles upon both sets of damage via the crit shots, and I said it's because under testings of other weapons from this DLC too, that isn't always the case. Now also as it's a Jacobs weapon it also has the trait of crit shots ricochet their bullet to the nearest enemy. So what are we actually seeing here? That ricochet doesn't actually happen until the stuck projectile explodes. And if we land multiple crit shots we see these shots firing crazy directions, obviously though they would seek a target form as nearby, and it's because of these people we see lays down an incredible damage to Grave Ward as I believe these ricocheted shots are also applying damage to Grave Ward, so in reality we are doing three shots of critical damage per single shot. Now the question is, on that third ricocheted shot, does it also have that doubled up damage from this anointment? Well people that's something I had to test as what kind of content creator would I be if I left you with more questions and answers. So after testing I went. So after testing this it was soon apparent that shots ricocheted from the most part hit the body, but indeed within that certain instance they can hit the head, and when they do they do do full crit damage, and to answer the question of doing anointments such as the one I have double up that ricocheted shot, yes people, yes indeed. So what we actually get here, when fighting off against Grave Ward we get a massive damage increase when that anointment is active, the initial shot gains 100% damage, the projectile gains 100% damage, and that ricocheted shot also gains 100% damage. So what we are looking at here guys is a possible 500% extra damage over that initial shot, like wow. Which is incredible, I don't see enough from almost anything this game offers, especially assault rifle wise. So here we have an assault rifle with capable damage output unmatched, you know actually this reminds me of a lot of people even though it acts nothing like the weapon, it reminds me of the sequel, because the sequel is an assault rifle which acts like a shotgun, this is an assault rifle which acts like a sniper, it has many of the benefits of a sniper, but it also has the insane amounts of ammo to go with it. And actually after having it look around online, there aren't many people talking about this thing either and I don't understand why, now besides destroying buses what else is this thing good for? Well guys with the right build this thing can cause destruction everywhere, it's amazing against mobs of enemies too due to its power and ricocheted shots and I can tell you guys there are variants out there which have much bigger magazine size, like this one here you can see on the screen now with 20 in its mag, this one belongs to my power 10 dollars down who is also clued up when it comes to this weapon, he actually pushed me to try it out so I must give him credit for that. So yeah guys we have here one of the best weapons in the game right now, a weapon for many many people who indeed sleep in on and I do 100% recommend you get in this thing and try it out.  And on that note guys we have come to the end of the video, if you guys enjoyed it leaving a like really helps out, if you're new around here and want to see more borderlands be sure to subscribe if you never want to miss a video upload, you can't do notifications on by hitting that bell button. But guys thanks as always for stopping by, hopefully you enjoyed the video and hopefully I will see you on that next one.