By Cynthia Citron
BURBANK, California– “All theater is a character telling a story—as if he were sitting around a campfire.”
Playwright Wendy Graf is sitting at a table at a cafe in Burbank as she quotes iconic director Gordon Davidson. “And so what I’ve done is create a story especially for Anna.” To which Anna Khaja, sitting at the same table, responds, “You don’t choose the story, the story chooses you.”
The “story” they’re talking about is Graf’s new play, No Word in Guyanese for Me, which begins its world premiere run at the Sidewalk Studio Theatre in Burbank on May 14. “It’s a solo play, not a one-woman play,” Khaja says. Graf adds, “You would swear there are a whole lot of other people on the stage with her.”
In No Word Khaja plays Hanna, a Muslim girl, born in Guyana, on the northern coast of South America, who emigrates with her parents to a small Guyana community in Queens, New York. Now, at 24, she is telling about her life in flashbacks.
It has been difficult, she reveals in the play, primarily because she is gay. That fact has made her an “outsider,” no matter where she lives. “I don’t know any gay Muslims,” Khaja says in an aside. “Irshad Manji,” Graf responds, citing the Ugandan-Canadian author, journalist and political activist who freely acknowledges she is both a Muslim and a lesbian.
“The play is about a young woman searching for her identity and trying to reconcile her family, her faith and her sexuality,” Graf continues. “It takes great courage because she has to navigate all alone and give up aspects of her life that she loves. The question becomes, ‘How many sacrifices is she willing to make in order to claim who she is?’”
Both Graf and Khaja have had experiences as “outsiders.” Khaja, an only child, born in northern California to a Pakistani father and an Irish mother, says she always felt like an outsider. “People were always asking me if I was Ethiopian,” she says.
She also notes that Castro Valley, where she grew up, was the western headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan. But on the plus side, she says, “Rachel Maddow was our class valedictorian. She was way ahead of the curve even then!””
Her father, she notes, “didn’t belong in Pakistan. He was a beautiful outsider. Untypical. He raised me without a single drop of sexism and he never told me I should be an engineer or a doctor.” “She was raised like a boy,” Graf puts in. “And she’s even good at math!”
Graf, too, has had her moments as an outsider. “In my life, I was slightly outside the flow every step of the way.” For example, “I was one of six cheerleaders at my high school—five girls with long blonde hair and me,” she says with a rueful smile, pointing to her head full of tight brown curls. “In my mind, I just didn’t look right. But then, theater people are all outsiders,” she adds. “And I would rather spend time with them than go to a PTA meeting.”
Both women have had the good fortune to marry men who share their passion for storytelling. Khaja’s husband is Chris Rossi, a screenwriter and director, whose most recent screenplay is Lives of the Saints which he is directing and in which Khaja will have a role. Graf is married to attorney Jerry Kaplan and together they have five children. (Okay, so he’s not in show business, but doesn’t being a lawyer involve acting?)
Khaja, who was a theater major at UCLA, comments, “Artists pay more attention to human experience than most people.” If she had a second life, she says, “I would be a photographer. I see my world through the lens of a camera and I believe the purpose of my being is to be creative. I see everything from that context.”
As a successful theater artist, however, Khaja won the 2009-10 Ovation Award for Lead Actress in a Play for her solo performance in Shaheed: The Dream and Death of Benazir Bhutto which she wrote, starred in, and co-produced. The play was also nominated for Ovation’s Best Production of the Year.
In addition, she originated the role of the Iraqi mother in the U.S. premiere of Canadian playwright Judith Thompson’s Palace of the End. In that production she delivered a 45-minute monologue, won the LA Weekly Award for Solo Performance and was nominated for a Lead Actress Ovation Award.
Anita Khanzadian, who is directing No Word in Guyanese for Me, is also a multiple-award winner, having won the LA Drama Critics Circle Award for direction of Death of a Salesman and for co-directing Counselor-at-Law. She also received Drama-Logue Awards for Counselor-at-Law, The Root and Marathons.
Award-winning playwright Graf, who started out studying Sociology at UCLA, turned to writing for the stage despite the skepticism of her mother. At each new play her mother would ask, “Are you in it?” and then register blankly when Graf would answer, “No, mom, I wrote it.”
Working from her own background, Graf has written a number of plays with Jewish themes: Lessons, Leipzig, The Book of Esther and last year’s acclaimed Behind the Gates. This last play chronicles the journey of a young woman toward ultra-Orthodox Judaism. “I was struck by the similarities between Orthodox Judaism and Islamic fundamentalism,” she says. “They come from the same place and their themes are the same.
“For example,” she says, “did you know that Muslims cover their mirrors and sit in mourning for the dead for nine days—just like Jews sitting Shiva?”
She also notes that both religions incorporate strong condemnation of homosexuality. “In the Arab world, homosexuals are jailed, or even put to death,” she says. “And in Iran the state will pay for a sex-change operation for a gay man but that’s the only ‘support’ they will give him. Islam’s view is similar to that of Judaism with its rigidity and rules and twisting of God’s word.” (In Orthodox Judaism, homosexuality is seen as a test proffered by God, and the gay person’s obligation is to overcome this “aberration”—or at least ignore it.)
“I was touched by both these stories (Behind the Gates and No Word in Guyanese for Me),” she concludes. “I think everyone has a right to his own God.”
No Word in Guyanese for Me, produced by Hatikvah Productions, opens May 14; plays Fri.- Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 5 pm; through June 12. Tickets: $15. Sidewalk Studio Theatre, 4150 W. Riverside Dr., Burbank; 800.838.3006 or www.brownpapertickets.com
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Citron is Los Angeles bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World