to the deer
Theatrical Play
When Izzy’s family move to a small rural town, the young queer Muslim boy becomes the salvation pet project to the local Pastor Isaac. In his attempt to reconcile his sexuality and faith, Izzy invents an imagined Garden of Eden, where Adam and Hawa’s (Eve in Arabic) relationship is turned upside down by the arrival of Steve, a beautiful, blue eyed, white skinned northerner.
The Hooves Belonged to the Deer was the 2021 Runner-Up of the Major Matt Mason Collective's Wildfire National Playwriting Contest!
2023
World Premiere at Tarragon Theatre in association with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
2022
Audio Play by Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
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The Hooves Belonged to the Deer - An Audio Play produced by Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
DIRECTOR: Peter Hinton-Davis
DRAMATURGY: Evan Medd
ROLE: Izzy
CAST: Makram Ayache, Qasim Khan, Dalal Badr, Brett Dahl, Eric Wigston, and Ian Leung
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Giuseppe Caldoron
SOUND DESIGN: Chris Pereira
The Hooves Belonged to the Deer - An Audio Play, was released as part of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre's "Queer, Far, Wherever You Are" Series in 2022.
2020
The Hooves Belonged to the Deer was commissioned by the Alberta Queer Calendar Project in 2020 and had a month long release as a lifted reading on the Alberta Queer Calendar Project Podcast.
The following team recorded the AQCP's lifted reading:
DIRECTOR: Peter Hinton
DRAMATURGY: Evan Medd
ROLE: Izzy
CAST: Makram Ayache, Matt Nethersole, Helen Belay, Mathew Hulshof, Nathan Carroll, and Evan Medd
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Tori Morrison
SOUND DESIGN: Chris Pereira
POSTER DESIGN: Makram Ayache
"There is nothing pinched or cautious about the theatrical vision at play in The Hooves That Belonged To The Deer. It has a kind of cosmic expansiveness in its vistas, its theatricality, and its counterpoint of scenes. In a small conservative Christian prairie town, supremely white in palette and power structure, a young Arab Muslim boy, the quintessential outsider, enters the sin/salvation/damnation orbit of a Christian pastor who holds out the temptation of “belonging.” At the same moment, Izzy’s world acquires a fraught, risky erotic dimension; he’s gradually discovering his queerness.
In alternating scenes, “beyond space and time,” we fly into a disorienting, mapless desert, beyond the prairie horizon, into the vision of an ancient Edenic paradise in “the middle of the middle of the middle of the Middle East,” where the tree of forbidden knowledge grows under guard, but the view from the top is irresistible.
It amounts to a cosmology, a new origin mythology no less. And the play, I think, is about how competing mythologies collide, run parallel, and play out, in a love story infiltrated by tradition, and by the toxic inheritance of white colonization." - Liz Nicholls, 12thNight
Click here for the full response.