Tony Mirrcandani rules in KC Rep’s The Who & the What
%{[ data-embed-type=”image” data-embed-id=”57150c0289121ca96b9563c0″ data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%
%{[ data-embed-type=”image” data-embed-id=”57150c0289121ca96b9563bf” data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%
A strong cast, led by Tony Mirrcandani, finds tenderness in the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s production of a thorny new comedy. The Who & the What, playwright Ayad Akhtar’s latest, follows an immigrant family negotiating Islamic tradition and religious deference in a culture where little remains sacred.
Central to the conflict is the ambition of eldest daughter Zarina (Rania Salem Manganaro), an Ivy League–educated writer who, much to her younger sister’s chagrin, has yet to marry. Zarina’s attention lies elsewhere — specifically, with her new manuscript, a dangerous novel painting the prophet Muhammad as a flawed human with base instincts. Zarina hides the book’s true subject from her father and her sister, telling them only that it concerns “gender politics.” The truth, we suspect, will out.
Crucial to the script’s success is that Zarina’s family is neither stodgy nor severe. The father, Afzal (Tony Mirrcandani), is a warm and lovable widower who never urged his girls to wear the veil. He even subsidized Zarina’s MFA with proceeds from his successful taxi company. Younger sister Mahwish (Kat Nejat) doesn’t exactly share Zarina’s feminism, and she has made certain capitulations to the purity ideal (such as limiting herself to anal sex so that she’ll appear a virgin on her wedding night).
Still, some traditions remain. For all of Afzal’s teddy-bear softness, his law, as the patriarch, is inviolable. He demands that Zarina marry a Muslim man and creates an online dating profile for her to audition potential suitors. His finest catch is Eli (Rusty Sneary), a white imam who shares Zarina’s curiosity.
When Zarina and Eli meet, the play’s comedic warmth fans into incendiary drama. Familial love holds firm, however, amid the weighty political and religious themes.
Director Eric Rosen draws exceptional performances from his small cast, but Mirrcandani is the anchor. It’s almost impossible to describe a performance like Mirrcandani’s without risking hyperbole. He is supremely confident in his own skin; each line is present and fully imagined in his care, each emotion at his command. When the actor gestures casually toward a bird in a tree, we see it, we hear it, we count its feathers. (It doesn’t hurt that Mirrcandani’s voice is Paul Robeson–rich, with a full-bodied resonance that wraps around you like a hug.)
Manganaro and Nejat make strong impressions as Zarina and Mahwish. Audiences might be on Zarina’s side politically, but she’s also stubborn, inflammatory and not a little arrogant. Manganaro softens her by letting anxieties and insecurities come out through the body, building patterns of nervous tics and gestures. Sneary has a tendency to get breathy in serious scenes (the actor’s equivalent of Poet Voice), but here he burrows through to the marrow, yielding some of his strongest, most affecting work. His first date with Zarina, in particular, is full of surprises.
Clever design work keeps the production lean and focused. Jack Magaw has constructed a handsome and functional set whose intricately patterned façade masks quadrants with sliding platforms to speed scene transitions. It’s part Islamic tile design and part Hollywood Squares. Paul Toben’s lights are restrained and effective, and costumer Alison Heryer captures individual style with carefully chosen street clothes.
Rosen makes full use of the playing areas for the script’s climax, a taut, full-cast scene that airs the family’s secrets. The play’s divergent perspectives clash as Afzal’s disgust for his daughter’s blasphemy and disrespect meets Zarina’s insistence that pointing out the prophet’s moral failings is an act of reverence. “Contradictions only make him more human,” she argues, “which only makes him more extraordinary.”
It’s hard to resist comparing The Who & the What with Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, a play staged in March at the Unicorn Theatre, about a writer whose work fractures family ties. Akhtar succeeds where Baitz stalled, however, by treating his characters as Zarina does hers: as humans rife with contradictions, not as political mouthpieces.
Religion might be the catalyst for conflict, but the stakes here are more emotional than spiritual. As bitter as Afzal’s disappointment is, his greatest objection seems to be to Zarina’s disregard for her own safety. Less radical criticisms have met with violence, after all.
There’s nothing slick or showy about the The Who & the What‘s resolution, and that’s as it should be. This isn’t a smug idea play, and its religious conflicts, while particular to Islam, feel universal. Disappointing our parents is a cherished American pastime. If we’re lucky, they’ll find a way to love us anyway.
