Miranda

A psychological riddle set in the world’s most explosive region, Miranda is a play about the dedicated women and men who work in the Middle East to secure intelligence and the local citizens who may or may not be willing or able to help them.  Miranda is the mind-bending, existential crisis of a CIA operative who goes by many names. Who is she? What keeps her working in the Middle East after all these years? Why can’t she leave? Whose war is she fighting?  Who are her friends and who is the enemy? Who can she trust and who’s playing whom? What happened to her in Jordan? And how does she now find herself directing a production of Othello in Yemen with teenagers? One teenager, that is. A Yemeni boy is the only local who shows up and wonders if only an American could truly understand the double-crossing Iago in Shakespeare’s play.  Miranda is in pursuit not only for answers to those questions—but also for what those answers might mean about who she was and who she’s become. This is a play that humanizes the CIA while not sugarcoating the moral ambiguity in which it does its job. Miranda weaves a taut, layered story of what happens as operatives become emotionally intertwined in the intimate lives of their assets against the high stakes of the agency’s work.