(MENAFN- Arab Times) W york june 13 (agencies): in a sun-splashed rehearsal room recently at lincoln center the knives were out for ayad akhtar's new play. its four-person cast and director were running through 'the who & the what' and it was agonizing start-and-stop stuff. virtually every line was picked apart. the most surprising thing was that the person with the sharpest knife was akhtar himself the author of 'american dervish' and the newly crowned pulitzer prize drama winner. an actor stopped a scene to say he thought another character actually wouldn't do something in the script. 'we'll see. we could cut it' akhtar replied genially.
at another point the playwright took a line cut from an earlier moment and resurrected it welding it into another scene. he also sliced four lines from a character explaining 'we've heard that 400 times already' and later stopped the run-through to admit that the sequence he wrote wasn't working. 'guys i'm sorry' he said. 'thank you for rolling with it.' most playwrights wouldn't be so keen to wield a scalpel to their own work but akhtar one of theater's most vibrant exciting young writers is not precious about it. 'i don't experience it in my body until actors are doing it' he says. 'their human flow is something i can only know fully when they start doing it. they give me feedback through the doing. sometimes they give me feedback from the inside that i can't even know.' akhtar a pakistani-american has found rich material in the fault lines between east and west and his new play is no exception. 'the who & the what' centers on a pakistani-american writer whose potentially shocking novel about women and islam threatens to tear her family apart. it's a thought-provoking work one that smashes together references to 'big love' and david letterman. it comes on the 25th anniversary of death threats made against salman rushdie. 'this play would start riots in some countries even though it's a very loving play ultimately and in an odd way very respectful' akhtar says. 'so many muslims will not agree with what i'm doing and others will.'
the play marks the fourth time the playwright has collaborated with director kimberly senior and the pair have become fast friends who now share a secret language and push each other.
tremendous
'both of us have this tremendous fear of making boring theater' senior says. 'every decision we're making is about keeping tension alive and keeping the action of the play moving forward.'
akhtar 43 is these days like his plays ? moving ever forward. in addition to 'the who & the what' which opens this month at lincoln center theater he's reworking his play 'the invisible hand' for the new york theater workshop this fall which is when his play 'disgraced' hits broadway. this winter he's due in berlin to finish writing another book. oh and there's a play about wall street he's just finished.
'i'm very monastic in a way. i feel very very responsible to this' he says. 'i waited so long to connect to myself as a writer that i can't think of anything i'd rather be doing anyway.'
a graduate of brown and columbia universities with degrees in theater and film akhtar is the son of doctors who grew up outside milwaukee. drama and friction were part of his everyday life.
'i grew up in a punjabi house. everyone's yelling at each other all the time' he says laughing. 'it's like the southern italians of north india.'
his nonstop output is the product of a profound moment about eight years ago when he was forced to re-examine his identity a move triggered by the aftereffects of 9/11. up until then he'd been trying to remake himself like all americans by avoiding looking back. 'i was myself psychologically not at home with my own identity' he says. 'it became increasingly clear to me that there was a question of 'why am i trying to do this? what am i ashamed of? what do i want to be?'' soon ideas began pouring out of him ? plays books screenplays. 'bam! like that' he says. 'it's been eight years. i'm only halfway through all the ideas that came up in a very short period of time.'
then he smiles. 'i understand what i'm doing now.'
online: http://www.lct.org also:
new york: jake gyllenhaal is headed to broadway. the actor best known for his big screen roles in films like 'donnie darko' 'brokeback mountain' and prisoners' will star in the broadway transfer of nick payne's hit west end play 'constellations.' the show will open for previews at manhattan theater club's samuel j. friedman theatre on dec 16 and then begin a limited engagement on jan 13 of next year. the show won great acclaim in the uk earning an olivier award for best play thanks to the performances of sally hawkins and rafe spall. beautiful in its complexity the film is about a relationship set against the multi-verses of quantum theory. the play reunites gyllenhaal payne and director michael longhurst who collaborated on gyllenhaal's american stage debut 'if there is i haven't found it yet.'
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