We Are Not These Hands

In We Are Not These Hands, playwright Sheila Callaghan considers the effects of rampant capitalism on a country that is ill prepared to deal with its fallout.  The genesis of the play came to Ms. Callaghan during a trip to China, where in poor villages along the Yangtze, she noted illicit cyber-cafes hidden down side alleys. In news stories at home, she read of the death of 41 students, blown up while assembling firecrackers in their eastern China school [see photo, right], and of 24 people dying in Beijing when two teenagers set fire to an unlicensed cyber-cafe from which they'd been 86ed. Asked about the impulse behind the play, Callaghan said: "I wanted to write about the challenges facing third world countries but didn't know how. So instead, I wrote a love story."

We Are Not These Hands is set in a fictional landscape where a river divides a prosperous country from one where war, poverty, and dictatorship have destroyed the infrastructure - with the exception of ubiquitous Internet cafes. Ever since their school blew up, teenagers Belly and Moth have spent their time peering through the windows of an illegal Internet Café hoping to cross over into the mysterious realms they can only glimpse on the screen. When Leather, a pampered scholar from the other side of the river, arrives to do research on their culture, the girls take particular interest in this strange man with a secret. As their relationship develops, the encounter threatens to explode their understanding of history and forge a connection that will save them all.