Discovering oneself in front of an audience
Solo show helps actor confront feelings about his heritage
Never mind the shock to the system of swapping life in Tehran for Paris. Mani Soleymanlou couldn’t get over the transition from Toronto to Montreal.
All of it — Tehran, Montreal, Ottawa (and a dash of Paris) — gets explored in One, the 30-yearold actor and writer’s solo show which attempts to answer what, for Soleymanlou, is one of the trickiest questions he’s been asked: Where are you from?
“How do I explain myself?” he asks. “Other than the fact that I’m the sum of all these different cities and cultures?
“How do you say, ‘Well I’m this and that?’ ”
The inspiration for One came for Soleymanlou from his experiences when he relocated from Ottawa to Montreal several years ago.
He found himself repeating the answers to the same questions over and over.
“Where I came from,” he says. “Describing my last name, and justifying my accent, and being like this kind of description of myself, which I hadn’t been before.
“That kind of pushed me to questions myself,” he adds. “Why am I all of a sudden so (much) more different here in Montreal than I was (living) a couple hours away from it?”
For Soleymanlou, whose family emigrated to Paris from Tehran when he was four — he spent Christmas and summer holidays in Iran growing up — to find himself suddenly self-identified as an Iranian again felt . . . strange.
“I thought about that a lot,” he says. “‘Where are you from? Are you Arab?’ No, I’m Iranian. ‘What’s the difference? You don’t speak Arabic?’ No, I don’t speak Arabic, I speak Persian.”
“And that’s when I decided to write this piece,” he says, “to talk about it once and for all.”
And as much as Montreal’s reaction to him created a dramatic conflict inside himself, Montreal’s theatre community also provided the opportunity to respond.
“There was a theatre in Montreal that invited me to do a one night kind of I-could-do-whatever-piece-of-theatre-I-wanted,” he says.
“It was on Monday nights, called Discovery Mondays, and it was for Quebecois artists from a diverse background.”
Except that Soleymanlou, upon prying open his emotional vault of memories of his Iranian childhood, discovered an aspiring playwright’s worst nightmare: an empty vault.
“I went there,” he says, “and talked about Iran, and talked about the country, and what I thought about it — and (I) realized I couldn’t, because I didn’t know much about it.”
It turned out that the writing of his (non) memories of Iran coincided with the demonstrations of 2009 following the Iranian election, bringing tens of thousands of young Iranians — under 30s make up 70 per cent of the country’s population — around Soleymanlou out into the streets to protest.
“This thing (2009 street protests) made me realize, there’s a huge distance myself and Iranians in Iran,” he says.
Soleymanlou was forced to confront his own feeling that while people in Montreal didn’t quite view him as authentically Canadian on some level, he viewed himself as completely inauthentic as an Iranian.
“They’re actually fighting for their country,” he says. “they are fighting for the right to be able to call themselves Iranians, and to live in a society which belongs to them.”
“And for me,” he continues, “at the same age, to say that I’m Iranian here (in Canada) — I hardly believe it myself.
“When you see them in the streets, they look like me, they’re as hairy as me, but it’s not me.”
And if the experience of writing and performing One has helped Soleymanlou clear up one thing, it’s what he wants to write about next.
“I’m looking forward to writing a play that the main character is not me,” he says.
“That point where you actually tell a story from scratch, and you can talk about anything, right?”