Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s The Hundred We Are (2009), which earned the Swedish author the Norwegian Hedda Award for Best New Play, is playful and intense, intimate and enigmatic, direct and all-embracing. Three women appear on stage, though perhaps there is only one, or perhaps all three are versions of the same self. Together they speak about life and the countless choices that shape it. They are born, start to walk, fall in love, travel the world, become activists, poets, dental hygienists; they have thousands of female lovers or a single conventional husband; they begin affairs with a charming stranger on a train; they settle down, rebel, remember, forget, dream, and begin again, and try over and over and over again. Which of these stories is true? Or are they all true? A web of possible lives, permutations of identity and experience unfold before us. Archetypal female figures spanning three generations create a kaleidoscopic image of shifting colours that leap into the parallel universes of the multiverse of all existing hypothetical existences.

Khemiri reflects on the multiplicity within every individual, on the unreliability of memory, and on the lies we tell ourselves in order to continue along the paths we have chosen while still dreaming of those we did not take. This map stems from a specifically female experience; it plays with social stereotypes while questioning whether being trapped in domesticity, ordinariness, and expected social roles is an insignificant problem in view of the cataclysms of the modern world. How can we, amidst all this, prevent the betrayal of our younger, brighter, more radical, and more ambitious selves? Where are all the poems we never wrote, all the awards we never won, all the experiences we never had? And what lies hidden beneath the tight lid? Traumatic memories, discarded ideals, shattered mirrors? The play cleverly and humorously captures the questions we all inevitably ask ourselves, while tomorrow and again tomorrow and again tomorrow slowly slips from day to day, to the very last syllable of time… What if we could start over?