"Otherwise Occupied," which had its premiere at the Jump-Start Performance Co. on Saturday night, opens with static. An annoying crackling noise that lets you know something has gone wrong.

Playwright Dianne Monroe sees it as a metaphor for the stories of the Palestinian women told in her play. They shout at the universe, and all that seeps through is static. Snap, crackle, pop. Sorry, we can't hear a word you are saying.

Monroe conducted interviews over the phone, jury-rigging a tape recorder to capture the conversations. The system worked fine when she tested it. But hooked up to a Palestinian woman on a cell phone? Static. She took good notes. Blessed are the women who take good notes.

I sweet-talked my way into a rehearsal last week. Her collaborator, Salwa Arnous, and I were in the Middle East together last year so I, too, knew the women whose lives were being acted on the stage. It was the next best thing to propping up my elbows on the kitchen table, sipping a steaming cup of sweet mint tea and catching up on the gossip.

All the women requested that their names not be used, not because they are afraid or shy but because they know that they are symbols of thousands of other women who have similar stories to tell. It's not about me, they say, it's about all of us.

The women in the play have no names, just stories. Stories trying to break through the static.

"This is my life!" one cries in anguish. I've tried to keep up with the complicated lives of my Palestinian friends.

The schoolteacher from Jerusalem — the one whose husband has a West Bank identification card and would get arrested if he was caught spending the night in his own home with his wife and two daughters — is getting a divorce.

The wall, which I scrabbled over just a year ago, is a looming nine meters high. A year ago, it was a five-minute walk from the teacher's house to her school. Now it's a half-hour drive, with a frustrating and humiliating detour at an Israeli checkpoint along the way.

Her small school lost 77 students this year. Some families just couldn't handle the commute. Some, who worked on the other side of the wall, have lost their jobs and can't afford food, let alone private school tuition. She still has loans outstanding from 1999, when she founded the school, and has had to leave the day-to-day operations to the deputy headmistress while she works another job to pay the debts.

In the play, the teacher talks warmly of her Jewish friends. Her 12-year-old daughter recently asked, "Why are you in contact with them? They kill us." She laments that this wall will prevent her daughters from knowing any Jewish women, from hearing their stories. And what will that mean for peace?

The student from Gaza has not seen her mother in seven years, since the day she sneaked across the border — a border within her own country, she sharply notes — with nothing but a pocket full of tuition money, her ID card and the university's acceptance letter.

Her family could not get permission to attend her graduation: no brothers to call out her name, no mother or sisters to wail the ritual ululation. She graduated in a well of humiliating silence.

When she got her master's degree from an American university last year, she could not face her own graduation ceremony. She stayed home, wrapped in a profound loneliness, mourning the loss of her family.

She's in a Ph.D. program now. When she graduates, alone again, this newly minted doctor plans to go home to the refugee camp in Gaza. Once there, they will never let her leave. Never. "This is my life," she says.

At the diplomatic level, relations between the Israelis and Palestinians are improving. There is a cease-fire. The Israelis are pulling their settlers out of Gaza. But the lives of the Palestinian women still steadily deteriorate. Perhaps we are the ones who are "otherwise occupied." Too occupied with the headlines to break through the static to hear their cry: This is my life!"