Review - Hatef**k

Last Saturday, I had a two-show day.  I don't do them very often anymore, I'm just getting too old.  But I saw two really good and thought-provoking plays, so I'm glad I dragged my sorry self out of my apartment.  I also had a delightful cocktail in-between shows, so...woo hoo!

My matinee performance was Hatef**k, by Rehana Lew Mirza.  I know Rehana slightly and like her very much.  I've seen one or two of her previous plays and I very much enjoy her characters and the way she tells a story.  I think we need Rehana's stories now more than ever and she gives us much to think about in her new play.  More on that in a bit.

At the start of the play, we can hear a party going in the other (unseen) room and we see a beautiful young woman wandering around an apartment's living room, looking at the books and various awards that are displayed there.  An extremely handsome young man comes into the room and asks if he can help her.  We discover that we are in the young man's apartment - he is a famous novelist.  The young woman is a professor at a nearby university.  She has come to the party, ostensibly to consider adding the young man's work on to her syllabus, but we come to discover that she's there for entirely different reasons altogether.

photo credit: Joan Marcus

The novelist, Imran, is a mainstream best-selling writer of thrillers that all feature Muslim terrorists as characters.  The professor, Layla, accuses Imran of using ugly stereotypes to be famous.  I should probably also mention here that both Imran and Layla are Muslim.  Layla is offended that Imran doesn't use his talent and his platform to lift Muslim stories and Imran is glad to be famous and thinks his fame is enough to ennoble Muslim voices.  At the end of the first scene, they start a contentious sexual relationship that deepens and grows more painful as their arguments grow more personal and painful.  The shifts in the power dynamic were terrifically depicted and at times I was rooting for one, or the other, or both, or neither character, depending on what I was learning at that moment.

I thought Hatef**k was so smart and really compelling.  There were so many things that were said in the play that piqued my interest and hit me hard.  Ideas of representation and identity - personal and sexual and religious and cultural - were fascinating.  Ideas of gender and opportunity, through a different lens than I usually see, were also terrifically interesting to me. I will admit that there were times when the play got a little too didactic for me, but I also completely admit that could be just be how I received it.  I found the scenes where the two characters were engaging in intellectual arguments at the same time as sharing character development were more interesting to me than the scenes where the characters were mainly explaining their arguments to me, if that even makes sense.  The actors were extremely beguiling, and, if I can be shallow for a moment, incredibly beautiful to look at.  Their story was one I haven't seen on stage before and yet at times I wasn't completely committed to them because the intellectualism took me out of the emotion.  That probably doesn't make sense either.  I also thought a few questions that were raised weren't answered - not that that's a problem in theater, necessarily, but I was kind of reminded of Chekhov's adage that if there's a gun onstage, someone had better use it by the end of the night.  Not that this play has guns, but there are ideas and/or questions that aren't completely answered which left me the tiniest bit unsatisfied.  Unless I just missed their answers, which, of course, would be on me.

Ultimately, even with my quibbles, I highly recommend Hatef**k because it's a story that needs telling, because ideas of how art should be shared with the world are interesting to me, and the contrasts between religion and faith are always compelling.  Plus, Rehana is a fantastic storyteller who writes gorgeous dialogue for fascinating characters.  On a side note, I saw the play a few days after the heartbreaking massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand.  After the play ended and the actors took their curtain call, they stayed on stage to speak to the audience a bit longer.  They dedicated the rest of the run of the show to the victims of the massacre and pointed us to an insert in our program from the playwright.  The insert beautifully articulates why this play is necessary at this very moment and why Rehana Lew Mirza's voice should be amplified.  I hope you'll listen.