Theatre in Review: Amm(i)gone (The Flea Theatre)

	Adil Mansoor. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

In Amm(i)gone, the Pakistani-American teacher and theatre artist Adil Mansoor tries to get closer to his mother by collaborating on an Urdu translation of a classic Greek tragedy. Please note that it is not Medea.

Indeed, Mansoor is too tenderhearted for such homicidal shenanigans. Instead, he chooses Antigone for what he sees as the play's intriguing intersection of the political and spiritual. (Antigone defies her uncle Creon's regime, on pain of death, to bury his brother's corpse, thereby obtaining for him an entry into the afterlife.) As he puts it, "We will filter this Greek tragedy through our own lenses -- her as a hijabi Muslim, myself as a queer kid who grew up Muslim." Those are some lenses, and it is the conjunction of mother and son's clashing sensibilities that gives Amm(i)gone its heartbreaking reality.

Despite their surface friendliness, time has driven apart Mansoor and his mother. Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, he was an adored, indulged child, his mother's best friend, noted for his ability to master long passages of Quranic scripture. After his parents divorced, he became a substitute patriarch, helping to raise his younger brother and sister. Only after attending college in Pittsburgh did he begin to act on his feelings for men. More or less simultaneously, his mother became more observant, taking the hijab and enrolling in a long-distance study program with a school in Pakistan to become an accredited specialist in Quranic Arabic, "learning how to contextualize contemporary issues, questions, challenges within the Quran." Still, despite her expertise, her son poses a challenge that she declines to meet.

"There is so much about my life my mom struggles to understand," says Mansoor, who is nothing if not empathetic. "And one of the ways I've learned to co-exist with my mom is to disappear parts of myself." He's not kidding: For the last seventeen years, he has lived with his partner, Luke. But to Mansoor's mother, Luke is a roommate. One reason they haven't married is that Mansoor can't imagine inviting his mother to the wedding. He adds, "My mom prays for me, sunset to sunrise, to return to Allah, to return to Islam, to save me in the afterlife. And it makes me feel like I've already died. I don't know how to be alive with my mom."

This, of course, is a classic gay dilemma, given extra poignancy because of the seemingly insuperable religious differences. (It's worth noting that when Mansoor came out to his late father, he was told, "Everybody does that. We just don't talk about it." As he notes, this is the stuff of another play.) Of course, his mother knows what's up, thanks to several Internet listings noting that Mansoor "centers queer people of color and their stories." He also learns from his sister that a buttinski uncle's hobby involved googling information about the family's younger generation and happily spreading any potentially upsetting news. This is not just a piquant detail: In a way, attending Amm(i)gone makes one party to Mansoor's coming out to his mother. Just wait until the reviews for this production start rolling in; his uncle will have plenty to Google about.

Mansoor's unresolvable dilemma is the soul of drama; working on the Antigone translation and sharing their thoughts, he and his mother find a new intimacy that only casts in a starker light the many things they cannot say. Time and again, one's heart goes out to him: He deeply respects his mother's piety even as it leaves him wounded and feeling abandoned. Listening to recorded conversations with her (she gave permission), one gets a sense of them constantly circling each other, looking for a way forward yet unable to make a decisive move. As powerful as these passages are, they also give Amm(i)gone its curiously unfinished quality: As the piece reaches its conclusion, the Antigone translation remains incomplete, and the all-important conversation waits, perhaps forever, to be had. We end up pretty much where we started.

Still, Mansoor is likable and undoubtedly brave, and it's easy to imagine that Amm(i)gone will mean a great deal to others living through similar situations; it may even spark a necessary family conversation or two. Acting as his own director in collaboration with Lyam B. Gabel, Mansoor oversees a production that suggests the flavor of a childhood among immigrants. Xotchil Musser's attractive scenic concept features intricate, lovely carved Arabic screens. Musser's solid lighting includes a radiant final moment involving lanterns spread throughout the house. If the upstage video screen is too blatantly inserted into the set, the video by Joseph Amodei and Davine Byon is filled with good things, including home videos from Mansoor's youth and footage from various stage and film adaptations of Antigone. In an especially creative touch, a scarf-like shape passes over images from these productions, superimposing photos of the boy Mansoor on them. Aaron Landgraf's sound design includes several appropriate musical selections in addition to clear transmissions of recorded conversations with Mansoor's mother and sister.

The video design provides the production with its most haunting touch. As proof of their former intimacy, Mansoor produces several photos of himself as a boy held by his mother. Out of respect for her later decision to wear religious garb, he has enlisted a friend to cover his mother with pieces of embroidery. The effect is eerie, a child embraced by a parent who is strangely absent, almost a ghost in her own home. It's a perfect summation of the impasse these two well-meaning people have reached, and I hope and pray they someday find a way around it. --David Barbour