Three weekends ago, on either side of the NYU Abu Dhabi East Plaza, two events were taking place. The first was titled The Migrant and Refugee Crisis in Europe, a panel held in the A6 Conference Center with international diplomats and academics. The other was a student production called Yellow Brick Road, an adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, held in the Black Box theater.

As global movements of people have eluded the grasp of bureaucrats and technocrats, both events reminded us, again, that the personal will always be the political. As Assistant Professor of Practice of Theater Tomi Tsunoda, who directed Yellow Brick Road, pointed out, migration is not confined to one region, and in the context of climate change and the increased numbers of people displaced by natural disasters, the Syrian migration is the tip of the iceberg.

However, rather than only focusing on those movements that have become crises, Yellow Brick Road also contained the ambiguities and ambivalences of an ever-moving humanity. The play, which only contained a single line of dialogue, let these tensions speak for themselves.

A similar, unspoken yet self-evident nature of migration and movement is also highlighted by Shaun Tan, in his graphic novel The Arrival. Tan lets his photorealistic illustrations stand on their own without text. Using color ranging from grayscale to sepia tones and with multiple, unnamed characters, this story, just as much as Yellow Brick Road, remains completely up to the reader’s interpretation. The characters’ motivations, dreams and accents are only in the mind of the viewer, allowing the performance to contain unexpected resonances.

For the student performers, these resonances came through in their own experiences of movement and migration. As she reflected on her performance, actor Marika Niko found that her representation of the character of the witch contained her own story of living outside of her native country.

In one of the talk-back sessions following the production, another resonance was highlighted by a member of the audience. While noting that the story of Dorothy’s loss of home reminded her of the loss following Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, the audience member guessed that this story could also be the current story of Aleppo.

For Tsunoda, these glimpses of a shared human experience came from a focus on micro-level experiences. Drawing on events she witnessed surrounding the Brexit vote in the U.K. as well as her own history, Tsunoda did not want to tell just one historical or contemporary story.

“We did not come at it from the point of view of ‘This is what’s happening globally, how do we represent that on stage?’ so much as letting … the global conversation be in the room and be a guiding force but focusing on the moment-to-moment humanity of the characters on stage right now,” said Tsunoda. “I think that trying to find empathy on the micro level with the characters and what’s happening becomes a more successful access point for trying to engage [in] the complexities of the global conversation.”

The focus on the micro level is also a feature of Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn, which tells the story of an individual female Irish immigrant to the U.S. Indeed, as Tóibín himself noted, the author is “chart[ing] what is deeply private and etched on the soul, and find[ing] form and structure for it.” It is this form and structure which allows us, as readers and audiences, to connect to the events that we may not have experienced.

Tsunoda noted how that even if the audience has not shared in the experience of what is represented on stage, it is an inherent characteristic of the stage that allows us to connect to experiences foreign to our own.

“Empathy is about ‘I can understand the human experience of this, in a way that gives me an access point for further understanding of something that is not my experience.’ … I think one of the many great purposes of theater is to create opportunities for empathy,” she said.

Tsunoda hopes that this moment of empathy “is going to lead to a more constructive dialogue [rather] than an us versus them crisis narrative.”

After all, at its core, Yellow Brick Road is about a little girl who is displaced and torn away from her home and her family, and this is intrinsically Dorothy’s story. Yet at the same time, this feeling of being an outcast may have resonances in other plays. An example is Harold Pinter’s one-act play Mountain Language, in which a group of prisoners are prohibited from speaking their own language and similarities between the guards and the prisoners are denied. This feeling of unjust separation was on show as Dorothy and her troupe are made to feel like outsiders in the waiting room, while being surrounded by individuals who are waiting for the same door to open.

These stories, when we see them produced on stage, essentially remind us of something else. Just as the audience member was reminded of New Orleans, each audience member found their own fiction within the performance.

For Tsunoda, the fact that we can see so many different stories in Dorothy’s story is evidence of the truth of the performance to the individual audience member.

“Rather than trying to tell every story, it is telling this story in a way that is trying to get at a fundamental human narrative experience … if Dorothy’s story resonates with [the audience] … that means in telling Dorothy’s stories we’re hitting on some fundamental human truths.”

The space in which the performance exists, as a fiction or an allegory, can have the potential to reframe the world and current events. While on the other side of the East Plaza we saw the world as it is, maybe what was happening in the Black Box helped us see the world anew.