This weekend former refugees bring their stories to the stage at the Balch Street Theatre in Akron. Their production “Brokers Without Borders” focuses on how as immigrants they act as cultural brokers for their families and neighbors. Ideastream Public Media’s Carrie Wise has the story.
“No, no, no, that’s Korean, we need Karen language, K-A-R-E-N…”
From lining up translators to helping family navigate medical care, young immigrants face many challenges. And the latest production from Akron’s Gum Dip-Theatre spotlights what it is like to act a as bridge between different cultures.
"You become a broker. But there is no border that boundary, because in the same moment you also have to work."
Sam Byake demonstrates the toll that can take on a person in the show by carrying a backpack people keep adding their “stuff” to until it becomes too much.
"We’re trying to tell people like what you go through and how best this is affecting us and how best we can do to make it better than what we are facing right now."
Byake says she and her family left the Congo when she was in middle school seeking safety and asylum in Uganda. She lived there for several years before coming to the U.S. in 2019.
"Upon arrival I was like. I shouldn’t only sit and relax because I'm in America, I'm getting food, I'm getting everything that they want, but they’re people are suffering and that's how that's when I started getting more and more involved into the outreaches, getting to my community, seeing how best I can help them."
Byake and her fellow actors- Hsa Win from Myannmar and Neema Bal from Nepal - all give voice to the refugee experience in “Brokers Without Borders.” It’s a play they devised together to share common struggles as well as their own cultures.
"There is so much trauma and there is so much like to heal. But at the same time, there is so much to celebrate in every state in our life."
Neema Bal not only performs in the ensemble he also is one of the leaders of Gum-Dip Theatre, which focuses on community building and sharing stories to create original plays.
"Building this connection with each other and sharing each other's story and having this understanding of each other's background and sharing the resources that we know in our circles."
Gum-Dip was started a few years ago by Katie Beck. She says the Gum-Dip name is a metaphor for the work they seek to do.
"Gum dipping was a process that Firestone tires use where they would dip a rubber or they would dip tire coil in rubber gum, which would create an adhesive that would make the tire blow out truth. So the idea is becoming that adhesive or strengthening the community to not blow out?"
Gum-Dip is one a few Akron theater groups now in residence at the Balch Street Theatre taking the reins from another longtime theater group, New World Performance Lab, which ended its run in Akron during the pandemic.
"Being able to be in a place where there has been a lot of magic that has already happened, we can really feel that kind of affecting and inspiring our work now in the theater."
One inspiring part of this production for Neema Bal is a line he says that his fellow actor Sam Byake’s mother always told her.
"It's like, kill, like could do it, that Salama. So that means everything will be all right. So, like it's been like such a. Healing for me, that like. When he resigned, going through a tough time now, like I'm seeing that line can lucky too, if that was Alema, everything will be all right.
“Brokers Without Borders” is on stage in Akron for the next two weekends at the Balch (Balk) Street Theatre.