Drifting toward understanding in ‘We Swim’
The aunt and nephew’s conversations unfold like a cooling balm you’d despaired of discovering.
Is it really still possible to talk with someone with whom you couldn’t disagree more profoundly, challenging but without compromising deeply held principles, each side keeping the faith that the other is a good person trying his or her best, each side still loving the other? Can American theater really still beget a political play that represents opposing sides fairly, in good faith, such that audience members of different political stripes might all recognize themselves in the characters?
The magic of Golden Thread Productions’ “We Swim, We Talk, We Go to War” is that it answers both questions with an understated but insistent affirmative and wholly earns that hopeful outlook — even in our divisive, cynical times.
Mona Mansour’s world premiere, which opened Monday, Nov. 26, at the Potrero Stage, attempts and achieves still another almost impossible feat, which is to forge a one-of-a-kind structure and set of dramaturgical rules. The play begins with house lights up, as She (Sarah Nina Hayon), the halfLebanese aunt, reads audience responses on note cards to the question of which American wars happened during your lifetime. She thinks she’s being a good liberal, just reading aloud answers and then projecting related newspaper articles without editorializing or forcing her views about the immorality of war on anyone.
He (Joshua ChessinYudin), her quarterLebanese nephew, who’s just joined the U.S. Army from an ROTC scholarship, expresses skepticism of the whole endeavor. At first, both the audience-participation gimmick and his protestation of it foist theater’s version of doublethink on us: Actors and audience alike know everything is scripted, but we have to collectively grit our teeth and pretend it’s not.
But soon, Mansour introduces new rules. There are narrators of sorts, an Arab (Adam El Sharkawi) and an American (Tre’Vonne Bell), who can transport She and He to the Pacific Ocean, where they drift too far from shore on a foggy day. (They cleverly render the buoyancy of swimming by drifting about the stage on backless, swiveling desk chairs on casters.) Then She and He can whisk themselves away, maybe to a yacht docked in Jbeil, Lebanon, or to a market stall in Beirut, or inside a nightmare, or into a conversation with a veteran (Bell) who’s already served overseas.
Each time the play, directed by Evren Odcikin, steps out of and then back inside a frame it’s established, it feels like the only possible move the show could make. This is what’s required, the play seems to say, to genuinely explore whether it’s possible to fight a war justly: We must let time and space constraints dissolve before we can peel back layers upon layers of assumptions, lodged deep in unconscious memory.
Mansour’s disarmingly naturalistic dialogue helps make these seismic structural shifts work. Over and over again, you might find yourself thinking, “Wow, this is how people actually talk” — not to stoke drama for some playwright’s convenience, but to hedge, to test boundaries, to pursue what they want, and then to placate, to retreat, to regret.
Hayon delivers an astonishing performance as She, mining from pauses a whole range of mannerisms that deflect, demur and vamp, that try to disguise when she doesn’t have a direct answer to a simple question from He. In one instance, it’s like her hands are trying to pinch out tangible words from the empty, silent space in front of her mouth. In another, she sputters as if her sputtering were an infallible argument and impossible for anyone to not understand.
She’s even more powerful in more serious moments, such as when He tells her he’s finally been deployed. Her face quietly shatters and melts, like an egg breaking, its yolk dripping down.
By the end of the play, no one’s mind has been changed — but that doesn’t mean that there’s been no change. When He says that being in the Army “makes me the best version of myself,” the play has shown us that version of both of them, through their impassioned yet loving debates. If it’s possible for them, maybe it’s possible for the rest of us.