Omar, Leila and their child are counting down the days.

Developed in consultation with people living in conflict zones, the play was first supported by Melbourne Theatre Company before its sell-out extended season at La Mama Theatre in Carlton.

Now Samah Sabawi's critically-acclaimed THEM embarks on its second national tour, coming to HotHouse Theatre in Wodonga from August 30 to September 3.

It follows the lives of five young people and explores the difficult decisions they have to make in the days before a refugee boat sails from their shores to Europe.

Sabawi said THEM was a tragicomedy about love, honour and sacrifice in times of violence and war.

She wrote the first draft for the play in a hotel room in Finland in 2015.

"At the time, there were protests in the street of Helsinki by members of the far right who took the opportunity of marking Finland's national day to demand tighter immigration measures against what they viewed as the wave of invasion of asylum seekers into their country," she said.

"The divisive 'us' and 'them' dehumanizing discourse espoused in that protest is also prevalent in many western liberal nations including here in Australia where during the last several years, I've witnessed the rise of similar rhetoric."

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An award-winning Palestinian playwright, Sabawi, and her family were exiled in the aftermath of the Six Day War in 1967.

Her experience connects her with the cast who hail from other countries impacted by political turmoil.

The ensemble includes Abdulrahman Hammoud, Taj Aldeeb, Mehran Tajbakhsh, Claudia Greenstone, Meena Shamaly and Adeeb Razzouk.

"I sat down and started imagining what life would have been like for the asylum seekers before they boarded the boats," Sabawi said.

"I was already familiar with the impact of war on ordinary people, especially on women and children in Palestine and in Syria, but when I started writing, my characters refused to be bound to a specific region. This is because people react to war and violence almost in the same way, the same bravery, the same heroism, the same brutal need to survive.

"From here the title of the play was born. Simply THEM."

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