Aftermath The documentary drama
"Aftermath" has now extended its run at New York Theatre Workshop
through October 18th. "Aftermath" tells the stories of eight Iraqi
refugees, essentially in their own words. Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank, who also directs, have agreed to answer questions
via e-mail between shows. Welcome to OpEdNews. Can you tell our readers where the idea for this play
came from?
The initial seed for "Aftermath" was hatched at New York Theater
Workshop's annual summer residency at Dartmouth College. Jessica was there
working on another play, "Liberty City"--one day at breakfast, she and
NYTW's artistic director, Jim Nicola, were talking about the fact that there
hadn't been any work done in the contemporary American theater about either of
the wars that America is involved in, from the civilians' point of
view. There had been plays created from the soldiers' points of view
(though perhaps not enough), and from the points of view of the policy-makers,
but nothing that got at what it is to be a regular person who just happens to
live where the war is being played out.
We had
previously written the documentary play "The Exonerated," based on interviews we
conducted with exonerated death row inmates, and were searching for subject
matter for our next documentary play. After Jessica returned from
Dartmouth, we started talking about this as a potential
subject, and refined the idea. Meanwhile, we continued to talk with NYTW's
artistic staff about it, and by last June, NYTW secured a grant from the Ford
Foundation to send us to Jordan to do the interviews for the
piece. Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen
You
interviewed 35 refugees during the two weeks you were in Jordan. How did that go? Did you run into problems being Americans?
We walked into the interview process unsure about how people would interact
with us as Americans. We were open to whatever points of view people might
have; like a journalist would, we were just looking for the story, no matter
what that story might be. It would have been okay with us (and from our
point of view, part of the story) if people had been angry with us, cautious,
trepidatious, etc. But we found just the opposite.
Our interview subjects
were enormously welcoming, open and gracious. Hospitality is highly valued
in many Arab cultures, and we were quite moved to find that even despite the war
going on between America and Iraq, that hospitality was still expressed toward
us, in a heartfelt and authentic way, by the Iraqi civilians we met. The
individuals we met did not pre-judge us based simply on the fact that we are
American; they treated us as human beings first.
After 25 years under
Saddam, it seemed that there was a pervasive and visceral understanding, on the
part of Iraqi civilians, that there is a significant difference between the
policies of a government and the people of a country. This was enormously
moving and instructive to us, and we realized that the simple act of speaking to
each other, Iraqi civilian to American civilian, was an important part of the
play.
Before the war, Iraq was a largely middle-class and secular country.
We met many, many women who'd had high-powered careers as engineers, scientists,
working for NGOs and the like. We met artists, doctors, scientists,
journalists, etc. There was not nearly as much of a cultural gulf between
the lifestyles of Iraqis and the lifestyles of Americans as the mainstream media
would have us believe.
In "Aftermath," you let the refugees speak for themselves. Was that a risky choice?
It was the only choice. This kind of documentary theater
work, to us, is about the subjects telling their stories in their own
words. Our job is to shape the material, to give it dramatic structure,
to turn conversation into dialogue and interview material into a play.
But these are not our stories. They are the stories of the Iraqi
civilians who we spoke with, and our trying to insert ourselves into
the material would have seriously undercut the very nature of the
work.
The play contains a translator character, who is a composite of
several different translators we worked with in Jordan (the other
characters are not composites and are direct representations of
individuals we met). We allowed ourselves slightly more dramatic
license with the translator, simply because he was a composite and
serves as the bridge between the audience and the other characters, but
he speaks for himself as well--about the experience of being a
translator in Iraq and the particular struggles associated with trying
to bridge two worlds-- and is not a mouthpiece for our point of view.
Some people might see it as risky to give voice to Iraqis in their own
words, since there is cultural pressure on us as Americans to see them
as "other," dangerous, alien--but we don't see it that way. We
connected with each individual Iraqi we met on a deep and human level
and believe that when American audiences hear them speak for
themselves, they will connect with those stories on a human level as
well.
You consciously chose actors of Middle Eastern background for this play. Why was that so important to you ?
For several reasons. First of all, we realized as we went through
the interviews and the multiple steps of translation involved in the
process, that translation itself was an integral part of what the play
was about. So much of the chaos that's gone on in Iraq has to do with
failures of translation; the failure to reach across the linguistic and
cultural gulfs between our two cultures. In order to deal with the
question of translation in the play, that meant the script needed to
contain some Arabic. So first of all, we needed actors who had some
facility with the Arabic language.
Secondly, we believe that the trend of casting people of color
fairly interchangeably--when the material is as culturally specific as
this--is a fairly odious trend, one that glosses over real and
meaningful geographic and cultural differences. South Asian cultures
are not the same as Middle Eastern cultures are not the same as Latino
cultures, and with material as culturally specific as this play,
it
would be sloppy (not to mention problematic) of us to treat those
cultures as equivalent or interchangeable. It would have been
impossible to hire an entirely Iraqi-American cast--there
aren't enough actors in New York City of Iraqi descent--but the fact
that our cast all has family background from the basic geographic
region enables them to bring a sense of cultural specificity, rhythm,
language and gesture to the piece that we believe is an integral part
of the play.
That makes perfect sense to me. You're enjoying back-to-back successes with "The Exonerated" and "Aftermath." Did your wild success with "The Exonerated" open doors for you this time? Or did it put more pressure on you to succeed?
When we're doing this kind of work, we try not to put any
pressure on ourselves to "succeed" in the conventional sense--the
stories that the piece tells are so much more important than any kind
of illusory "career" type pressure we could put on ourselves. Our
responsibility is to the stories and to the people we've interviewed,
not to our own careers or to "success" in the professional world.
Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which exists for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election (more...)
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
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