Urge for Going. By Mona Mansour. Directed by Hal Brooks. Through April 17, Public LAB, The Public Theater, New York, NY.
Urge for Going, Mona Mansour’s new work in development, is a coming-of-age story built from the outside in. Her 90-minute play follows Jamila, a seventeen-year-old Palestinian preparing to take the Baccalaureate on the eve of her graduation from a UN school in Beirut, Lebanon. Surrounded by her two uncles, her parents, and her brain-damaged brother, Jul, in a Beirut refugee camp, her quest to take the test fights a family’s worth of dysfunction and several generations’ worth of dislocation, frustration, and regret. Mansour’s piece offers a refreshingly rich and detailed alternative to the increasingly tired theatrical image of the embattled Palestinian protagonist. Setting the piece in a refugee camp in 2003 Lebanon anchors her characters in a way that gives them a vibrant specificity. It also complicates questions of complicity and blame with regards to the plight of the Palestinian refugee.
Unfortunately, however, just as much of the play is spent in an instructional, explanatory mode, ultimately weakening both its political resonance and its dramatic structure. The play as it stands is hardly a piece of political or cultural propaganda. But one of the central concerns for the production team, as they continue to develop the work, must be how to ensure that a play that hopes to make the situation of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon readable to American audiences is also structurally and aesthetically sound. Some will find the piece moving; others will likely find it unremarkable. Ultimately, it is some of both.
In the dark, the adhan calls the skyline of a Beirut refugee camp to prayer. As the lights come up, hats go off to three designers: Jason Simms (set), Jenny Mannis (costumes), and Ryan Rumery (sound). Without overcomplicating things – or magnifying them – we find ourselves in and around Jamila and her family’s concrete home. You can almost smell the wafts of stagnant water when characters pass through the alley before the front door or hover over the sink. There’s so much detail to take in that you almost don’t notice the lesson beginning when the four adult characters, already on stage, start to speak. There’s time to catch up. What’s today’s discussion? Al nakba: “the catastrophe”; 1948.
An older, balding man with a protruding gut (Demosthenes Chrysan), who we later discover to be one of Jamila’s uncles, plays the central storyteller for this first historical interlude. His sister and brother-in-law don’t agree with how he’s telling it. They interrupt him; they correct him; they make excuses to us for him. His brother, Jamila’s father (Ramsey Faragallah), stays silent. The four of them alternate between familial jabbing and impassioned argument; voices go up and down, hands are flung about. The quirks of familial relationships and disagreements act as a modern spin on the traditional Arab storyteller, bringing this sixty-year-old, constantly lived history to life. “To life” is an interesting way of putting it, or rather a clichéd one. Mansour’s efforts to make interesting the history lesson of 1948 (and later on, 1967) highlight the fact that despite the best intentions of the playwright or the level of political devastation, explaining given circumstances through this sort of didactic exposition will always drag a little, no matter how straight in our seats we are compelled to sit.
Mansour and her production team are not alone in this urge to educate audiences about the situation for Palestinians in and outside of the West Bank, Jerusalem, or the Gaza Strip. A huge majority of plays or performances “about” Palestine or Palestinians performed outside of the Arab world (and at times even within it) take it upon themselves to explain to their audiences the impact of 1948 on individual lives, the effect of the Six Day War of 1967 on the collective Arab psyche, or the real economic plight of refugees. I cannot and do not wish to suggest that this instinct is wrong. Politically inclined Arab and Arab-American artists in the West take a difficult but admirable step when they commit themselves to a piece of political theatre on the Middle East. But the outward urge to convey (or convince) the audience of the need for political empathy by explaining the history of the creation of the state of Israel often limits artists structurally as well as affectively. Why do we need multi-voiced lectures on political history to understand Jamila’s longing for a better future? Why do we need to have our hand held through the migration patterns of a family history to understand why Jamila wants to pass the exam that will be her ticket to University and out of Lebanon? We don’t. And the compelling parts of Mansour’s play work splendidly, distinct from the didactic context that Jamila’s parents and uncles give in direct or indirect pedagogical addresses to the audience. It is the intimate and absorbing moments that succeed in invoking compassion for the lived Palestinian experience, not the balanced incantation of the data that is also recorded on the detailed map included in the program.
Mansour draws the relationship between Jamila (Tala Ashe) and her older brother Jul (Omid Abtahi) in a unique and moving way. The scenes between the two siblings are always set in the street in front of the family apartment. On busted lawn chairs, the two companions take turns telling their dreams for the future and past trials on an imagined talk-show that the other one hosts. Pencils and water bottles substitute for microphones as Jamila recounts her quick rise to stardom as a trauma psychologist cum dance move inventor and Jul struggles to remember the fight with a Lebanese soldier that left his frontal lobe permanently damaged, killing his hopes for medical school and the escape route Jamila now forges. Ashe and Abtahi’s acting, which is reasonably consistent throughout, is especially solid in these scenes.
Generational dynamics are significant implied and overt substructures of the piece. Throughout the play, Jamila butts heads with her father, a man whose injured pride, after having to refuse a fellowship opportunity in London in the wake of political escalations, has crippled him from actualizing even slight changes in his family’s living conditions. (In one especially strong scene, Hamzi, Jamila’s paunchy uncle, returns home late, his face bloodied and beaten for having tried to steal abandoned concrete blocks to patch the gaping holes in the apartment walls. “Is this the home of a scholar?!” he shouts, trying to shake his brother from his resignation, forcibly widening the hole in the crumbling concrete wall.) The dynamics between father and daughter are central in constructing both characters as believable and compelling individuals, living people in a political situation. And the contradiction of a father who, despite years of encouraging and training his young daughter, is now suddenly hesitant to see her disappointed as he was encapsulates the quandary of a refugee better than any explanation of the endless bureaucracy of paperwork.
But the contrast between generations is also made problematic in several questionable production choices. Jamila and Jul, both teens, speak in “standard” American English. Their speech rarely includes Arabisms and often includes contemporary American slang. Not contemporary Lebanese or Palestinian slang in English — the stuff that imitates American TV and cinema but is almost an accent of its own — no, Jamila and Jul’s speech is infused with “American-American” idioms, and their accents are immediately identifiable as specifically U.S. This distinction is important, because despite the fact that all these characters come from one family living for at least the past twenty-one years in the same home, in a neighborhood and a community isolated from the rest of Lebanon, the younger generation speaks just like “us,” while all four older actors affect an accent.
This is a strange choice, and two concerns come immediately to the fore. First, and most devastating, is the absence of Arab actors. As a result, the mixed accent attempts of Demosthenes Chrysan, Ramsey Faragallah, Ted Sod, and Jacqueline Antaramian, along with occasional emphatic hand gesturing, function as a sort of general “Mediterraneanizing” throughout the piece. In contrast to the compelling details of both set and costumes, this vague regionalizing is glaringly unspecific. Surprisingly, despite some of the actors’ declared shared heritage with the characters they play, pronunciation repeatedly slips between a “kh” and a hard “h” sound in the repeated term of endearment “habibti,” and there is a blatant inconsistency in the pronunciation of the name of the country in which they live (the Arabic “Libnan” vs. the English “Lebanon”). This aspect of the production may be disappointing to the Arab ear, but it is noticeable and distracting to the English one as well.
Secondly, the choice to cast the older generation with an accent and the younger one without one is a conspicuous attempt to Americanize this coming-of-age story. It is simply factually inaccurate to suggest that young Palestinian refugees speak so differently from their parents, and this production choice confuses some of the historical material Mansour has her characters convey to the audience. If the American dialect used by Jamila and Jul is unique to their generation, it implies that they got it not from home, but from another community into which they have assimilated. But assimilation, even socially, is often not an option for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, and certainly (we are told) not for this family. In other words, this production choice actually works to undermine the stakes that the playwright desperately tries to build in the audience-addressed orchestrations explaining regional politics and history.
I suspect the decision to aurally divide the generations functions as a shorthand to an explicitly American understanding of the adolescence of “foreigners,” what with the wacky family dynamics and complex cultural commitments to concepts like pride and loyalty. With this choice, the production team reveals its assumption that audiences will more likely identify with the play’s Arab protagonist if we believe that she, like others in the long history of immigrant youth pursuing the American Dream, is becoming less like “them” and more like “us.” I needn’t elaborate further on how problematic this perplexing decision thus becomes.
In the contemporary moment, however, it seems as though these questions of identity are almost inseparable from the depiction of Arab characters on Western stages. Indeed, my own somewhat anxious expressions regarding the believable or responsible portrayal of Arab “youth” stem from deeply personal reflections. Using pedagogical theatrical tools to relate politico-historical situations – at the expense of specific aesthetic and structural choices – to bring characters “to life” risks furthering the limiting stereotype of Arabs and Palestinians as permanent victims, or at the very least as permanent products of political or military violence. Beneficial as it may be to describe the very real plight of the Palestinian refugee to an American audience, circumstantial empathy may be just as dangerous. The shadow of NATO airstrikes on Libya suggests that the urge “to assist” an aspiring generation of Arabs may not be all that dissimilar from ignoring their basic humanity.
Furthermore, the continued presentation of Arabs on Western stages exclusively in the context of political upheaval, at the expense of unique and interesting creative choices, starves Arab-American audiences of vibrant characters with whom they may identify and conspire. Unwittingly suggesting to Arab-American youth than an expression of their cultural identity is impossible except through efforts to explain to New Yorkers (or Chicagoans or Miamians) the plight of Arabs or Muslims worldwide is damaging to the building of a vibrant, productive, and politically effective Arab diaspora. We must be encouraged to identify with a range of Arab identities and desires that are as colorful as the nations, ethnicities, and politics from which we hail. To be sure, Mansour’s piece showcases some commendable examples of this kind of work – seen most clearly in the well-written personal and familial conflict between her characters. Jamila’s anxiety about her exam and her endearing definitions of making it big, her father Adham’s brutal coldness to his daughter on the precipice of a major adolescent turning point, Jul’s awareness of the damage to his brain and his inability to correct it, all transmit a resounding political message – the reclaiming of Palestinian humanity – without explaining it.
As a wide-flung generation across the Arab world begins to prove it has found its voice and clamors for the right to achieve a political self-actualization denied for decades, artists and intellectuals in the Arab world and its diaspora will (one hopes) continue to be invested in exploring and defining the kind of worlds in which we want to live. Moreover, in urban centers and liberal circles, Western audiences are just as eager to consume and understand a politically responsible art. But overtly political artwork must be just as compelling as that which claims no political subject. To Mansour and her company, then, an urge to keep going.