“The redlines.” This is how Reem Almenhali, a 21-year-old writer from Abu Dhabi, describes the constraints that arise when an Emirati teen girl enters womanhood. She remembers how, when she was 16, adults began bombarding her with injunctions about how to behave and what to be wary of. She was told she would have to get married and have children. Many things she wanted to do would be out of reach afterward. Confident that these constraints belonged to another generation, Reem refused to give up on her dreams.

She achieved one of them in January when she performed in a self-written play. “Al Raheel” made its world premiere at the Arts Center of New York University Abu Dhabi, a platform for contemporary art that brings performing arts ensembles from around the world and seeks to encourage innovative artistic productions from locally based artists. Reem’s work, which was also supported by the Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation, fits into this mission. “Al Raheel” shakes many assumptions about theater and what it means to be a young woman in today’s United Arab Emirates.

The show features an all-women Emirati cast, a rarity in a country with mainly men on the stage. “Al Raheel,” which means departure in Arabic, carries a universal message by exploring what people leave behind as they become adults. What makes the play unique is that it gives way to rarely heard voices: those of young Emirati women in their early 20s. Through the writing and innovative set design, the spectator is brought into an intimate conversation about what influences the creation of identity.

Reem created the piece with Joanna Settle, an experienced American theater director. Joanna is Reem’s professor at New York University Abu Dhabi, where the young woman is completing a curriculum in psychology and theater. A world-class director, Joanna is accustomed to big productions, large venues, million-dollar budgets, and “New York Times” coverage. When she relocated to the UAE two years ago, she started looking for new models of theater that would reflect and contribute to her new home.

“On the last day of my directing class, Reem came in,” Joanna recalled. “She asked me if she could bring in poems that she had written to see if they might be staged. She performed them in a mix of Arabic and English. I was really captured by what she was saying and how she was saying it.” The poems were all about departure. “The first one was about leaving childhood, the second about leaving love, and the third about leaving life. I put them together. It was the skeleton of the play,” Reem recounted.

Poetry and theater have always been intertwined for Reem. Both brought valuable experiences to her life. “I used to watch a lot of plays with my father. We would frequently go to Sharjah (where there is a vibrant Arabic-language theater scene),” she recalled. She also grew up listening to Nabati poetry, the vernacular oral poetry of the Gulf Arab states. “My great grandfather never spoke with common words. It was either a poem or an enigma. It was common among his generation.” Today, Reem likes to write plays, fiction, and khatra, “a form of Arabic writing that captures small snaps of consciousness.”

Under Joanna’s direction, Reem’s departure poems expanded into a 50-minute show. In addition to Reem, the cast included three other young Emirati female students: Maryam Khalifa Alsehhi, Maitha AlSuwaidi, and Sara Rasheed. Joanna said creating the show was an extraordinary process because she was the only one who had done this work before. “We had to reinvent everything, including the rehearsal process, which included considerations like ‘my family needs me to pick up my grandmother at the airport; I can’t come’ or ‘my father won’t let me leave the house, it’s raining.’”

Because the rehearsal process was very gradual, it too became part of the creative process. One example is the chips scene. Joanna was captivated by a ritual performed by the cast during their breaks. “They would sit down with snacks and potato chips and speak in a mix of English and Emirati dialect from Sharjah or Ras Al Khaimah. It was a jumble. I thought this was the greatest thing I had ever seen.” The scene, now part of the show, reflects the UAE’s multilingualism, where most locals, especially the young, commonly speak English and Arabic. “Al Raheel” is playing with this reality. The cast performs in both languages and sometimes translations are provided.

The play addresses the redlines that Reem sees framing the lives of young Emirati women, including the actresses literally drawing lines on the stage. In one gripping scene, Reem, her long black hair running freely over a white dress, is given a black abaya. Words appear on a screen: “Let me hand down your social role. This is your costume, wear it. Those are the morals which you will live by.” Other injunctions follow: “Our rules might not make sense, but they keep our social net sturdy. You will feel loved if you follow the instructions.”

By acting onstage, the performers further challenge these mores. Maryam, a member of the cast, said that during rehearsals, she worried about what her parents and friends would say. “Many people consider Emirati women acting a taboo because they associate being onstage with devaluing all of these tags that you were born with, and because of the constant worry that the topics brought up will be political or taboo.” Once onstage, her concerns dissolved. “I was barefoot, wearing a mukhawar, the Emirati traditional costume – sometimes with an abaya – and the stage really felt like home to me. No one enforced values or told me to do things I was not comfortable doing.”

Maitha, another actress, had previously performed in a musical at her university. It was not an easy step, she reflected. “When I first got into theater, family members – even myself at certain points – were skeptical about whether theater was something I should be doing.” Not having female actresses to identify with created some apprehensions. The only time she saw a female performer wearing a hijab was in a Broadway musical in New York, and it had not felt like an accurate representation of Muslim women. When she started acting, she thought she was breaking a barrier. “I learned that it was not unnatural for an Emirati woman to perform onstage, nor was it unachievable.” The positive reception of “Al Raheel” among Emirati spectators comforted Maitha in her desire to continue performing onstage.

Reem is convinced that resistance toward seeing Emirati women onstage, including married women, will fully fade in the next few years. “Everything is changing now. The redlines are here temporarily. People try to limit you based on what they think should happen, but there is freedom. And this is when the transformation happens.” In the future, she is dreaming of arranging an international festival for cutting-edge theater in her country, on the model of  “Under the Radar,” which she attended in New York. Maryam and Maitha also want to contribute to the UAE’s growing theater scene. “I want to defeat the lack of enthusiasm toward professional theater,” Maryam said.