"I miss Palestine very much. Nothing matters in America the way it matters there...Normalcy is something all Palestinians want, but normalcy can be a sedative, too. Everyone seems to be asleep in America."

-- "Rite of Return" by Victoria Linchon

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For many Americans, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a far-off, vaguely-defined struggle of wild-eyed, bandanna-swathed fanatics blowing themselves and others up over rights to a tiny, insignificant scrap of land. If the images are visually violent enough, snippets of the carnage might fill brief slots between commercial breaks on American TV news or the inside pages of local papers. For Americans besieged with a bleak economy, shrinking financial futures and the rising death tolls of their own sons and daughters in Iraq and Afghanistan, the struggle for Palestine is best kept as something happening "over there."

"Rite of Return," Victoria Linchon's new play opening April 29 at Theater for the New City in the East Village, seeks to bring "over there" over here. A visceral blend of the globally political with the intensely personal, Linchon's play weaves the friendship of two young women -- the American Amanda and the Palestinian Najwa -- through the complex, treacherous minefield that is contemporary Palestine.

Amanda, like America, is a stranger to her own history. Abandoned in infancy by a mother she never knew, Amanda was raised in New York City by her adoptive Jewish mother, Laura. "My parents were Judge Crater and Amelia Earhart," Amanda says ruefully at one point.

Arrested with Najwa by Israeli secret police because of Najwa's uncle's suspected ties to Hamas, the militant Islamist Palestinian organization, Amanda is roughly interrogated and deported back to America. Deeply affected by this experience, and by the depth of commitment to family by her Palestinian friends, Amanda begins a search for her birth mother that uncovers a violent personal past even as her friend Najwa moves inexorably towards her own desperately violent future.

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Passionate, angry and deeply political, "Return" is the versatile Linchon's third play as a writer and first as a director. As a producer, she most recently took the TNC production of "Girlstown" to Off-Broadway. As an actor, Linchon has appeared onstage at La MaMa ETC, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Synchronicity Space and, most frequently, at TNC, where she began acting at age 14 in TNC's annual Street Theater, a company of 50 that tours economically-depressed areas of all five NYC boroughs with politically-charged summer theater.

As TNC's Development Director since 1997, Linchon helps to oversee an exhaustive production schedule of 30+ plays per year upon 4 stages at the theater complex's mammoth 30,000 square foot space on 1st Ave., a WPA-era fortress originally built by Robert Moses as an indoor marketplace in an effort to get immigrant pushcart vendors off the street.

Founded by Crystal Field and George Bartenieff in 1970 and housed originally at Westbeth in the West Village, TNC moved to its present location in 1987. Over the years, its Resident Theater Program has been instrumental in nurturing the careers of a number of internationally prominent writers and actors, including Moises Kaufman, Miguel Pinero, Charles Busch, Tim Robbins, Maria Irena Fornes, Richard Foreman and Sam Shepard, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "Buried Child" was originally commissioned and produced by TNC. Along the way, the theater has picked up a staggering 43 OBIEs and, most recently, the 2003 New York Press Best of Manhattan Readers' Poll's "Best Theater Company" award.

An intense, tightly-wound native New Yorker whose persona defines the term "multi-tasking," Linchon is a first-generation American, her parents having immigrated from Taiwan. Bridging two disparate cultures as a child with home life and school, Linchon came to know first-hand the immigrant experience in America, and felt immediately in tune with TNC's politically aware theater and its focus on immigrant issues. This sensibility prompted Linchon to seek foreign-born actors for "Return", ultimately assembling a cast from Iran, Brazil, Lebanon, Algeria, Israel, Albania and Mexico.

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Though the core of Linchon's play may be intensely personal, "Rite of Return" subtextually raises sharp issues that could hardly be more topical and relevant on both domestic and world levels -- issues that slice through America's deeply-ingrained isolationism and naive arrogance about world affairs to expose the necessity of engagement and international responsibility.

In a symbolic sense, "Return" splits the millennial American consciousness into two parts -- stepmother Laura, continually wondering, "why make such a big deal about such a small thing" and cringing at the thought that the neighbors might hear raised voices, and daughter Amanda, who comes to understand a basic law of physics as it applies to America's relationship with the rest of the world: that for every action there is a reaction.

For every incidence of American support for the right-wing, iron-fisted Israeli government's agenda of murder and assassination of Palestinian leaders, more desperately angry young Palestinian men and women are drawn to the suicide bomber wing of Hamas; for each desecration and slaughter of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan at the hands of a right-wing, crusading American government, more Muslims of all ages are driven to take up the fight to preserve their way of life against the occupying invaders.

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The Cold War is over. The relative security of two superpower behemoths locked in a perpetual staredown is gone. September 11 proved conclusively that America's borders are breachable, its insularity penetrable, and if it allows its government to run amok upon the world stage, there will be consequences, and they will no longer be confined to far away, dusty lands.

"What happened on September 11...was your goods delivered back to you," al-Qaida's Osama bin Laden stated in a recent communiqué to the West. America's enemy is no longer the vast, orderly formations of Soviet military divisions strutting ceremoniously past the Kremlin on May Day. America's new enemy is the anonymous individual slipping inside its borders with a dirty bomb in a briefcase or a vial of deadly toxin.

America's enemies are no longer bonded by military or even national affiliation, but by a deep, all-consuming hatred of how the American people's lazy, somnolent indifference has allowed its government to poach their homeland, culture and way of life. It is a hatred that is sweeping up more converts each day, the same hatred that drives one of "Rite of Return"'s characters to a desperately destructive, climactic action.

"Funny to think 'home' is a really political word here," Amanda says to Najwa about Palestine early in the play. "It should be the opposite of political."

In the home that we have built, we lie in the bed that we have made. Through its murderous arrogance and unconscionable greed in distant lands, America will bring home more than the flag-draped coffins and mangled bodies of its own.

And from this, there can be no return.