One play he saw there (the works were in Hebrew with English supertitles) particularly fascinated him. "Return to Haifa," a work based on an a 1968 novella by a Palestinian writer, Ghassan Kanafani, told the story of two couples, one Jewish and one Palestinian, whose lives become intertwined during Israel's War of Independence in 1948 and again 20 years later after the Six-Day War.

When the Palestinian couple flee their home during the 1948 Battle of Haifa, they become separated from their newborn son and presume he was killed. He wasn't-the Jewish couple found him and raised him as their own. Nearly 20 years later, the Palestinian couple are able to return to their original home, where they discover that their son survived. The two couples become caught up in forces larger than themselves as they attempt to deal with the agonizing situation.

"My Hebrew is bar mitzvah Hebrew," Southerland said during a recent phone interview, "but the story, the emotion, the universality captured me like nothing else. It is tied up in the politics of the Six-Day War, but the message is about ownership-how do we define our claim on an individual, on property, on a country? It applies to America, where we have so much multiculturalism and cross-cultural adoption. It asks the question: Is this child a Palestinian because he was born of Palestinian parents, or is he Israeli and Jewish like the people who raised him? It has a broad application to what is going on in our culture."

Returning to Chicago, he decided to try to create a new adaptation of the story that would have more history than politics in it and thought of Evanston playwright M.E.H. Lewis, whose plays have been produced all over the country and who often writes about cultural clashes and explore themes of how individuals become the victims of decisions made by political entities. Among her works is "Secret Language," a play about issues of race in Evanston and Rogers Park that she wrote for a Next Theatre outreach program in 2008.

Lewis, speaking on a conference call along with Southerland, said she read the novella of "Return to Haifa and "found it incredibly moving and compelling. I read it multiple times, then it put it away and haven't looked at it since. I tell it in my own way, with the same plot points but without slavishly trying to recreate" the book.

While the novella told the story from the point of view of the child's Palestinian father, Lewis says she changed that for the play. "The main characters are the two women, the two mothers. For me it's a story about the child and these two families, these two women, their homes, their child, which happens to be the same child," she says. Her goal was to "tell a very intimate personal story, and make sure every single person in the story is somebody you can sympathize with. The people are not politicians, they are just people caught in unfortunate circumstances."

Before writing the play, Lewis "did hours and hours of devastating research that gave me horrible nightmares, then I went back and layered in the details. Telling a story through very specific details is how it becomes universal and familiar." Southerland, who directs the Next production, says he was acutely aware of the history and politics involved. "It's my first step out into this world, and we've written a different play" from the original, he says. "I'm incredibly aware of how it will play in my own Jewish community as well as in the Arab community. (The characters) are at the mercy of larger forces. They are victims in a situation they did not make. It's about two couples in crisis and the event that binds them together, and it is based on hundreds of people's stories," he says. Southerland came to Next Theatre after a decade as the founding artistic director of Boston Theatre Works in that city. "Return to Haifa" will mark a first for the 29-year-old Next since it pairs a local playwright with a resident director to produce a world premiere play. "The beauty of it, what attracted me to it in my premier season (of choosing plays) is that the core message is that we are all victims of politics, of fighting," Southerland says. "It ultimately subtly lays the blame at the feet of the British. It doesn't take a political stance. It's a humanist play. It has good Arabs and bad Arabs, good Jews and bad Jews. It supports and understands everyone's point of view. 'You're right and you're right, and now we have to make peace.'"

He adds that Jewish audiences need not fear that the play espouses a point of view they might find offensive. "It's definitely intended to appeal to the broad Jewish community," he says.

Beyond the current production, Next Theatre has received a grant that will allow Southerland to travel to Israel to set up cultural exchanges with theaters there and build relationships with companies in both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. "Return to Haifa" marks the launch of that project.

For her part, Lewis says that the work "is definitely not a polemic. That doesn't make good theater. If somebody wants it to be a polemic, they might be offended."

"Return to Haifa" opens Monday, Feb. 8 and continues through Sunday, March 7 at Next Theatre Company, Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes St., Evanston. For performance times and tickets, $25-$40, call (847) 475-1875, ext. 2 or visit www.nexttheatre.org.