‘The Who and the What’ is a father-daughter battle
Who & the What," Ayad Akhtar's thorny comedy about a Muslim-American father and his adult daughters, has a surprising precursor from TV history.
"I think Archie Bunker is an antecedent for Afzal in a lot of ways, and to some extent consciously," Akhtar said, likening the "All in the Family" patriarch to the father in his play. "I remember how much my dad loved Archie Bunker," the playwright said, recalling his family laughing at the TV show's "lovable defense of reactionary patriarchy."
The Milwaukee Repertory Theater begins performing the comedy Sept. 27, continuing its relationship with the play- wright, a Brookfield Central High School graduate who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2013 for "Disgraced," which the Rep performed last season.
Like his novel "American Dervish," "The Who & the What" burrows into a Muslim-American family, exposing its conflicts and secrets. All four characters in the play are Muslims, yet its tussle between an immigrant father and his children would be familiar to readers of Chaim Potok, for example, a Jewish-American writer Akhtar has often cited as an early inspiration.
In fact, Afzal may remind theatergoers of Tevye, the patriarch of "Fiddler of the Roof," who loves his daughters but wants to exercise veto power over their marital choices.
From a nuts-and-bolts point of view, Akhtar said, he's written a play in which the antagonist is trying to steal the play from the protagonist, mirroring the dilemma of his elder daughter Zarina's life: Does it belong to her, or her father?
Afzal has built up a successful Atlanta taxi company, partly through persistent advertising (a la David Gruber). He's also a widower and a traditionalist who wants so desperately to marry Zarina off to the right kind of Muslim that he creates an online dating profile and impersonates her.
He doesn't know that the brilliant but unhappy Zarina has been writing a provocative novel about the Prophet Mu" The
hammad, fueled by her investigation of verses from the Qur’an’s Thirty-Third Surah, which some point to as requiring faithful women to wear a veil. When Afzal discovers this, their conflict turns explosive.
“Everyone’s always making a big deal about women in Islam,” says Zarina’s younger sister, Mahwish, early in the play. “We’re just fine.”
Maybe so, but the more conventional Mahwish is clinging to a dubious definition of virginity to appease her future inlaws. Meanwhile, Afzal and Zarina exchange heated words about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born feminist and author of "Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now."
In a phone interview from New York, where Akhtar is helping prepare a production of his most recent play, "Junk," the playwright credited an ad for "Kiss Me, Kate" with stimulating the writing of "The Who & the What." Seeing that ad got him thinking about why people keep adapting Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew," with its problematic gender politics about a strong-willed woman who must be broken. He realized, as a first-generation Pakistani-American, "If I did an adaptation, the gender politics would make perfect sense."
Dissenting opinion
Like "Disgraced," the provocative "The Who & the What" likely will anger and offend some people.
While acknowledging that Akhtar's play is a comedy, Janan Najeeb worries that audiences will leave performances misunderstanding the Prophet Muhammad and how faithful women experience Islam.
Najeeb, president of the Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition, believes the comedy underlines stereotypes at a time when Islamophobes are hard at work promoting stereotypical views of Muslims.
"When Ayad Akhtar chooses to make his Muslim characters in all of his plays as all landing on the 'dysfunctional spectrum,' " we need to ask why, Najeeb wrote in an email message. "Is this really how he sees it or is he capitalizing on stereotypes for self-promotion?"
Najeeb, who notes that she does not believe in censoring the arts, laments that Akhtar's plays are probably the only ones Milwaukee audiences will see with "any content about Islam," and that they don't accurately represent the Muslim experience.
Cast members and the director of "The Who & the What" visited the Islamic Research Center library, where they borrowed books and DVDs and Najeeb shared her thoughts on what was accurate, not accurate and cherry-picked in the play.
While that discussion was wonderful, Najeeb said, "the vast majority" of people attending the play will not be exposed to that information.
She encourages readers to seek out what she believes are more historically accurate depictions of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam, such as the PBS films "Life of Muhammad" and "Islam: Empire of Faith," and the documentary "Women in Islam," produced by Discover Islam.
The Rep has scheduled pre-show talks, talk-backs and several post-show panel discussions curated by the Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition on such subjects as “Muslim Women Speak Out!” and “Depictions and Perceptions of Prophet Muhammad.” Also, after this production ends, the Islamic Society of Milwaukee is holding Open Mosque Days on Nov. 11 in Brookfield and Milwaukee. For information on these events, visit goo.gl/uhSb9V.
Bringing 'Junk' to Broadway
Thanks in part to the Pulitzer, Akhtar has become famous as a playwright about contemporary MuslimAmerican life; "Disgraced" has been one of the most-performed new plays in the United States over the past two seasons, with more than two dozen productions.
But "Junk," which begins preview performances Oct. 5 at Lincoln Center Theater in New York, reminds us that Akhtar has a longstanding dramatic interest in big capitalism and the big disruptions caused by the unchecked pursuit of wealth.
Set in Wall Street in the 1980s, this 17character drama pits old money against corporate raiders who use junk bonds as their battering rams.
"What’s most impressive about 'Junk' is the brilliant way Akhtar crunches the social, political and economic data of this greedy new world, a precursor to the way we live today," Los Angeles Times critic Charles McNulty wrote in his glowing review of a 2016 California production.
With the Broadway production of "Junk" approaching, The New York Times published an extensive profile of Akhtar recently, with multiple compliments for the playwright's mental bandwidth: "Mr. Akhtar's fast-twitch intellect can quickly access a range of subjects — from the Green Bay Packers to Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War to his enthusiasm for ABC's 'The Bachelor' and Ibsen's 'Hedda Gabler,' his favorite play."
Reporter Michael Sokolove also took note of Akhtar's "uniform": In any given rehearsal, he's often wearing a flannel shirt. "His description of my flannel shirts as being my uniform has given me pause. It's made me wonder maybe I shouldn't wear so many flannel shirts," Akhtar said during our phone interview. He was wearing a flannel shirt at the time.
The Times profile featured a prominent photo of Akhtar on the section front. "Delighted and astonished" as he was by the whole thing, Akhtar only wishes one of his greatest fans had seen it — his mother, who died earlier this year.
"She was a big fan of anybody who wrote anything nice about me," Akhtar said.
She probably got more pleasure out of all the wonderful things that have happened for Akhtar over the past seven years than anybody could have, he said.