MONA MANSOUR grew up in a Southern California suburb, the daughter of a Lebanese immigrant father and American mother from Seattle. Her earliest obsessions included the kidnapping of heiress Patricia Hearst and the various battles of World War II. Global politics were brought inside when various cousins, uncles and aunties came to live with the family during the Lebanese Civil War. She studied acting as an undergrad, but in her senior year a class in improvisation led her down that path; she then studied at Second City Chicago and was a member of the Groundlings Sunday Company, which gave her a visceral first taste of writing. Her first play was Me and the S.L.A, where she turned a childhood obsession into a solo play about a kidnapped heiress, urban terrorists, and the nature of...
MONA MANSOUR grew up in a Southern California suburb, the daughter of a Lebanese immigrant father and American mother from Seattle. Her earliest obsessions included the kidnapping of heiress Patricia Hearst and the various battles of World War II. Global politics were brought inside when various cousins, uncles and aunties came to live with the family during the Lebanese Civil War. She studied acting as an undergrad, but in her senior year a class in improvisation led her down that path; she then studied at Second City Chicago and was a member of the Groundlings Sunday Company, which gave her a visceral first taste of writing. Her first play was Me and the S.L.A, where she turned a childhood obsession into a solo play about a kidnapped heiress, urban terrorists, and the nature of brainwashing.
Her commitment to theater deepened after a move to New York City in the wake of the Sept. 11th attacks. At this point, the Middle Eastern theater community was ascending, fired up by an urgent need to change the narrative around Arabs and Arab-Americans. Into that community Mona began to write into her bicultural existence. This awakened in her a deep desire to create complicated and difficult roles for Middle Eastern performers, who especially then, but still now, often play only cab drivers, imams, bodega owners, and terrorists.
The questions around her own father, who left Lebanon by choice, took her to his village in Southern Lebanon, and an examination of the “villages'' next to it — the camps Mieh-Mieh and Ain El Hilweh, where thousands of Palestinians live in stasis, stuck in place since 1948. This notion of displacement became a central theme she began to explore and inspired her to create the play Urge for Going in what would ultimately be The Vagrant Trilogy.
Urge for Going garnered her a spot in the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group in 2009. The Hour of Feeling (dir. Wing-Davey) premiered at the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and an Arabic translation was presented at NYU Abu Dhabi as part of its Arab Voices Festival in 2016. The entirety of The Vagrant Trilogy made its premiere at the Mosaic Theater in Washington, D.C. in June 2018, (dir. Wing-Davey.) In April 2022, The Vagrant Trilogy finally made its New York City debut at The Public Theater, directed by Wing-Davey; the production was in technical rehearsals in March 2020 and had been postponed due to the Covid-19 shutdown.
Other plays: Unseen, April 2023, Mosaic (dir. Johanna Gruenhut; OSF, spring-summer 2022 (dir. Odcikin).
In 2019, Mona formed the theater company SOCIETY, with Scott Illingworth and Tim Nicolai. The aim was to create a company where work could be created, joint stock style, with improvisation, research, and discussion that involves every company member. She wrote Beginning Days of True Jubilation, which performed in repertory with Emily Zemba’s The Strangers Came Today at New Ohio in summer 2020.
Other credits include: The Way West at Labyrinth (dir. Mimi O’Donnell); Steppenwolf (dir. Amy Morton); and Marin Theatre Company (dir. Hayley Finn) We Swim, We Talk, We Go to War, Golden Thread (dir. Odcikin).
In September 2020, Mona received the prestigious Kesselring Prize, awarded by the National Arts Club to one playwright a year. She was nominated by Seattle Rep for her play The Hour of Feeling. Other awards and fellowships include: Award in Literature (Academy of Arts and Letters); Helen Merrill; Whiting, Middle East America Playwright, MacDowell, and New Dramatists Class of 2020.
Mona recently wrote a short play for The 24-Hour Plays, starring Christian Slater as a bonobo rescuer. She was a writer for NBC’s long-running series New Amsterdam and is currently creating a series for Waleed and Joana Zuaiter’s FlipNarrative.