Hammaad Chaudry
Playwright, ‘An Ordinary Muslim’
When
Chaudry was 19, he moved from Edinburgh, where he grew up the son of
Pakistani immigrants, to attend the University of Surrey, about an hour
outside London. He planned to be a lawyer.
But
after marching to protest the war in Iraq, Chaudry grew more interested
in political activism — and he found his law studies to be tedious and
unfulfilling.
He found his voice
elsewhere: writing plays. At the end of his first year at university, he
joined a writing program at the Royal Court Theater in London geared
toward young Muslim writers.
He would
eventually pursue a master’s degree at Columbia University, where
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Tony Kushner took Chaudry under his wing.
His
thesis play, “An Ordinary Muslim,” tells the story of Azeem Bhatti and
his wife, Saima Khan, as they navigate the complicated intersection of
their Pakistani heritage and contemporary British culture.
Much
in the same vein as Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer-winning “Disgraced,” set in
New York, Chaudry explores workplace prejudice, Islamophobia and what it
means to be a Muslim today — though his drama is firmly set in the
British milieu which he has left behind.
Kushner
directed two readings of “An Ordinary Muslim” in 2014 and helped
Chaudry develop it. In a big break for a relatively young writer, New
York Theater Workshop agreed to present the play, Chaudry’s professional
debut, directed by Jo Bonney, is scheduled to run through March 11.
Taking
a break from rehearsal, Chaudry, 30, spoke about the play’s origins and
what his family thinks about the show. These are excerpts from the
conversation.
Q: In one spirited scene,
Azeem expresses frustration that he is “too Muslim for some, not Muslim
enough for others.” This could be a tagline for the play.
A:
There are many, many interpretations of Islam. You’re seeing certain
expressions of Islam within certain communities become more dominant
than others. I think what Azeem is trying to get at is that there’s more
than one way of being a Muslim, and he doesn’t necessarily fall into
any of those dominant characteristics. In his mind, he’s perceived as
not Muslim enough if he doesn’t dress or talk a certain way.
On
the other hand, within the wider society — a secular society, Europe in
particular — he’s holding on to his faith. It’s not just a cultural
identity. There’s some theological basis, meaning he believes in the
divine, he’s abstaining from alcohol, he’s trying to pray and so forth.
Q: Is there a such thing as an ordinary Muslim?
A:
No, that’s the point of the play. Out of eight characters, seven are
Muslim. All seven are practicing. All seven express and embody a
different kind of Islam.
Q: Which character do you most relate to?
A: The white guy. No, I’m joking. All the characters contain pieces of me.
Q: How much of your own experience did you put into this play?
A:
I’d have to say it’s an amalgamation. Thematically, there’s a lot, in
terms of feeling this sense of not belonging here or there and trying to
straddle different worlds. In terms of the specific plot, that’s more
of families that I’ve seen, families in the community or things that
I’ve heard.
Q: What was Tony Kushner’s influence on the play?
A:
Tony was very, very generous. He understood what I was trying to get
at, but in terms of my craft, I wasn’t there. He provided me with tools
to go and make a mess and tear up a play. He gave me confidence in my
own voice.
Q: How did you go about casting?
A:
A few of the actors are from the original reading that Tony found.
Others we found over a three-year process. There was a commitment, on
behalf of everybody, to make sure everyone was South Asian.
Q: Is there a message that you’d like the audience to take away?
A:
No. Messages are for the Postal Service. Certain questions were
interesting to me. I explored them. I went on a discovery with them.
Once I made that discovery, I am sharing with the rest.
Q: Are you concerned with how your family will react to the play?
A:
No, I am not concerned. I think generally now the family is supportive.
Even if they don’t quite understand it, they’re supportive, and that’s
nice. My mom is just concerned with me getting married.
— SOPAN DEB
Rileigh McDonald
Actress, ‘Good for Otto’
About
halfway through a 12-hour rehearsal day, Rileigh McDonald was posing
for a photographer. A preternaturally poised 13-year-old, fine-boned and
an inch shy of 5 feet tall, she moved as directed from spot to spot in a
sunlight-flooded corner of the Pershing Square Signature Center, where
she is making her off-Broadway debut in the New Group production of
David Rabe’s play “Good for Otto,” opening March 8.
Then
McDonald sat down on a staircase, stretching her legs across — with her
thick-soled boots, a perfect fit. “Wow, I’m just wide enough,” she
said, pleased, and suddenly there it was: behind her professional
facade, a regular eighth-grader.
In “Good
for Otto,” an ensemble drama set in a mental health center, McDonald’s
character is a 12-year-old named Frannie with a tumultuous family life
and a tormented psyche. Rhea Perlman plays her foster mother, who is
hoping to adopt her, in a starry cast that also includes Ed Harris and
Amy Madigan.
Frannie is a challenging,
risky role, one that McDonald has researched partly by watching video of
a young girl with schizophrenia. She has also talked with some of her
mother’s friends who have gone through the adoption process, to learn
that social geography.
This is not the
first time McDonald has played a girl with a fearsome mind. In July
2015, she stepped into the shared title role in “Matilda the Musical” on
Broadway. She and her parents, Lana and Paul McDonald, had moved to New
York that spring so she could join the show, while her brother, then an
18-year-old high school senior, stayed behind in Ohio to graduate. She
vouched for his maturity. “We trusted him,” she said.
McDonald,
who intends to make a career as an actress, plans to spend her own high
school years at a performing arts school in New York. She’ll find out
soon which one. For now, she goes to a regular public school in the
Washington Heights section of Manhattan, where she lives.
But
she considers herself a Broadway kid, and many of her friends are, too —
the kind of young showbiz professionals who get it that she saw the
musical “Groundhog Day” eight times, including the first night that Bill
Murray was there.
In the 14-person cast
of “Good for Otto,” McDonald is the only child, but she said her
colleagues treat her as a peer. She seems perfectly at home in a world
where she has tutors instead of classes, and her own dressing room — a
world where, if the script changes, or the cast does, rolling with it is
part of the job.
Originally, Rosie
O’Donnell was set to play Nora, Frannie’s foster mother. When O’Donnell
pulled out of the production and Perlman replaced her, someone asked
McDonald if she knew who Perlman was.
“Of
course, I know,” McDonald said, recalling the exchange. “She was Mrs.
Wormwood in the ‘Matilda’ movie.” She paused for an instant, then tossed
in an older, more famous credit — a little something for the grown-ups:
“And ‘Cheers.'”
— LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
Andrew Burnap
Actor, ‘The Inheritance’
Until
New Year’s Day, Andrew Burnap had never left American soil. Next month,
he will star in a major new play on one of London’s most influential
stages, the Young Vic, directed by Stephen Daldry, the man behind “The
Crown.”
It’s a huge break for Burnap, 26, who graduated from Yale drama school only two years ago.
In
Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance,” a two-part examination of the legacy
of the AIDS crisis, he’ll share a stage with Vanessa Redgrave and Tony
Award winner John Benjamin Hickey. He turns 27 at the second preview.
“No big plans,” he said.
Centered on a group of gay men in New York today, “The Inheritance” asks what a generation owes to its forebears.
“It’s
about standing on the shoulders of giants,” Burnap said in the
rehearsal room, ice-blue eyes glinting beneath a breaking wave of blond
hair. He plays Harry Darling (“the best name I ever had”), a young
author adapting a best-selling memoir for the stage.
He
won the part after starring in another of Lopez’s plays, “The Legend of
Georgia McBride,” at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. Playing an
Elvis impersonator turned drag queen, Burnap impressed the playwright,
who called him “one of the most exciting young actors I’d ever
encountered.” Lopez added, “Onstage, he is pure electricity.”
The
son of two physician assistants in Kingstown, Rhode Island — a small
town in the smallest state — Burnap found moving to New York after Yale
“very, very difficult.” Arriving on the day of Donald Trump’s election,
he found New York downcast. “It was as if there was a massive citywide
funeral,” he recalled.
But he believes
that day — and that move — changed him as an actor. “My understanding of
privilege started to develop,” he explained. “So many voices have been
pushed to one side. We have to be telling those stories.”
Easier
said than done when you’ve got the looks of a Disney prince. (A New
York Times review of his lead role in “Troilus and Cressida,” for
Shakespeare in the Park, likened him to “a long-lost member of One
Direction”). But Burnap is adamant: “I’ve very little desire to play
famous leading man roles.”
Hence “The
Inheritance” — an “eye-opening” process, he said. “The history of gay
men isn’t taught,” Burnap said. “Looking at the numbers of men who died,
I had no idea.” It’s flipped his politics too: “Reagan was revered in
my household — a Republican ideal. It’s been hard to read about what his
administration did.”
Bingeing on London
theater has persuaded him that the scene here is “so much more political
than New York.” And he cites the bottom-end £10 ticket price for “The
Inheritance” with awe.
“It’s less
concerned with commercialism than with addressing the world as it
stands,” he said of his new scene. After a pause, thoughts from home
kick in: “Maybe someone will burn down my flat for saying that.”
— MATT TRUEMAN
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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