For this past semester, one corner spot in Sama Dining Hall has been reserved for weekday dinner by the same group of four NYUAD females. But these meals — which are never skipped — are not like a gossip gathering with Carrie Bradshaw or the “Mean Girls” table that only wears pink on Wednesdays. These girls get together to talk about women’s experiences within the NYUAD community and how to organize a platform for this kind of discussion in a more public sphere.

This week, the ideas they devised over Sama samosas and the occasional Baskin-Robbins binge will come to life in the student production, “Headspace.”

Last semester, sophomore Valentina Vela signed up to organize the “Vagina Monologues,” which has been produced over the first two years at NYUAD. However, Vela soon decided she wanted to produce something more specific to the student experience in the UAE.

“I really didn’t think that this was the kind of play that does to this community what people wanted it to do anymore,” Vela said. “I decided that I couldn’t speak for everyone, so I could at least speak for women.”

Vela approached three classmates about creating a documentary-theatre piece on the experience of women in Abu Dhabi and at this university. Freshman Veronica Houk and sophomores Sachi Leith and Laura Evans were eager to get involved.

“It just made total sense to me that this is something I should be part of,” Evans said. Two days before Vela approached her, Evans had voiced her discomfort when, among a group of male friends, someone made an inappropriate comment about a woman. The next day, Evans was told the way she handled the situation was not okay because she had publicly put her male friend on the spot.

“I knew some of these incidents that had happened and I think we don’t really get a forum to talk about them,” she said. “Sometimes you get this feeling that you just have to deal with it and keep moving and I thought it was really important to give people a space, to give me a space, to give us a space to put [these incidents] out in the open and just say it.”

The four women designed a system of steps to accomplish this goal through theater. They started by brainstorming about the kinds of issues they wanted to cover and spent winter break researching articles and videos that dealt with these topics. To gain a better understanding of women’s rights in the UAE, they also met with Judy Lee, a gynecologist from the Corniche Hospital, Julie Avina, the Dean of Students, and Birgit Pols, the Director of Health and Wellness Center, before beginning the interview portion of the process.

“We asked about all the rumors that we heard and that we were unsure about,” Vela said. “We didn’t want to interview people about how much they know about laws and how much do you know about women’s rights when we hadn’t asked ourselves and put in the effort to research something.”

“Headspace” came together in a single Google Doc, where Evans, Houk, Leith and Vela complied interview questions that range from topics like religion, gender expectations and sexuality to more localized issues like being a female student at NYUAD and going to college so far away from home.

They interviewed about 60 students from the community under the condition of anonymity, asking seven core questions and an assorted 15-20 others from the shared document. Once all of the responses were compiled, the collaborative writing of the play began. The team came up with 14 total scenes and monologues, 80 percent of which were inspired by the interviews they conducted.

The play is set up to facilitate discussion about what was explored in these interviews. The creators hope that after the performance, audience members will stick around to talk about the issues raised in the play, and they are expecting it to get a little uncomfortable.

“We really wanted to build the play in a way that invited conversation and invited people to stay and to talk, and that has been translated into our staging to our ideas for the space and for the end of the play,” Vela explained.

“I want at least one person to get angry about something,” Leith said. “We’ve spent so long writing it and we’ve had fights over things so much that I’m willing to defend everything that’s in the play.”

Evans agreed that they welcome people to disagree with what’s in the play.

“What’s important is that they acknowledge that these are voices within our community and there are people that think this way and feel this way,” Evans said.

The fact that this is a piece inspired by the community has been one of the greatest challenges for the "Headspace" crew, who have worked hard to try maintain the privacy of those who were interviewed. In a place where it is hard to keep the personal details of one’s life to oneself, the risk of using a circumstance from someone’s interview that could be an identifiable personal story is quite high. The students had to create imaginary scenarios where these conversations were happening without exposing specific people from the community.

Leith described the moment of handing the script over to the cast to be like sending your child off to school for the first time and knowing other children might tease it for being so different. But the four women take pride in the work they have put into approaching theater in a way this university has not yet experienced.

“It’s really different from what NYUAD has seen before, but we hope there’s more projects like this in the future,” Houk said. “We want to give it the power that it can move on for years after this and be 'Headspace' about whatever — about race or sexuality, that it has potential to go further and continue.”