Shakespeare in Kabul (book)

American theater is in crisis, audiences have not returned in numbers since Covid. And how do we engage the new, young audience?

Theaters are closing. Those that remain are sticking to the familiar titles. New Broadway shows are based on IP, well known movies and books.

And yet, we believe in the unique elements of live stage performance. It is an art form which may not thrive in late-stage Capitalism, but we imagine it will outlast the apocalypse. See Station Eleven. See Mister Burns.

There is something compelling about the story of a production coming together, whether it is a hard-won success or a famous flop and there seems to be a special place, as always, for Shakespeare.

Most recently, I have been reading Shakespeare In Kabul by Stephen Landrigan and Qais Akbar Omar. In 2005, shortly after the Taliban was driven from power by American forces, an American playwright (Landrigan) and a French director, Corrine Jaber, decided to bring Western theatrical tradition to Afghanistan. And inspired by the rich Afghan tradition of poetry, Jaber decided it must be Shakespeare.

The narrative begins with Landrigan, but fortunately soon turns to Omar, a native of Kabul, who performed as interpreter for the company, and whose creative input would prove not only transformative but vital.

Cultural sensitivity is a thing, and having decided to produce a play by William Shakespeare in a nation invaded by foreign factions and traumatized by a fundamentalist regime for over thirty years, then choice of title was fraught with potential pitfalls.

Fortunately, they had begun the search for potential performers before choosing what they were even going to play, because their Afghan counterparts were those who insisted it must be a comedy, that their people had endured too much tragedy. The director was hoping to engage women in the performance, and perhaps the best opportunity in Shakespeare for an equal number of roles for women, is Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Labour’s is a challenging play in that it would seem that Shakespeare composed it with a very specific audience in mind. B-plots include the ethnically insensitive depiction of an amorous Spanish nobleman and the nonsensical yet pretentious ramblings of a philosopher. These are diversions, however, from the main story – a king has decided on behalf of his best friends that in order to become great men they must commit to a period of fasting, small sleep, intensive study and the complete absence of women.

Then some women show up. Not just any women: a princess and her own band of friends, charming, intelligent, and witty, and like the boys, four in number. Comedy happens. And this was just what these artists were seeking in Afghanistan in 2005.

Christine Castro & David Ellis
"Love's Labour's Lost"
Cleveland Shakespeare Festival (2000)

You can quite handily edit the text down down to these eight – and the two servants between them – and be left with an entirely satisfying, romantic evening. The Cleveland Shakespeare Festival did just this in 2000, Eric Schmiedl directing.

“They’ve tamed 'Love’s Labour’s Lost', the most problematic of Shakespeare’s comedies … through sleight of hand, with sets and props no more extensive than sunglasses and scarves [CSF] have paired it down to ninety minutes of pure enchantment.” - Cleveland Scene

In this instance, Schmiedl punctuated the romantic interplay with brief addresses chosen from popular fashion and advice magazines. These kinds of artistic choices can irritate purists – one local critic sniffed, “bar pick-up advice and dating-poll conclusions preface and diminish the perceptive beauty of Willie’s insights of the heart.”

But context is everything, and the summer of 2000 was still really the 1990s. And anyway, the Plain Dealer disagreed, calling the production, “a triumph of wit, ingenuity, and clarity.”

Reading Shakespeare In Kabul (a book which was later expanded with the title A Night in the Emperor's Garden) occasionally reminded me of Salesman In Beijing, Arthur Miller’s own account of when he was invited to direct Death of a Salesman in Beijing. In his telling, Miller is remarkably disinterested in Chinese traditions of performance, insisting his team cleave to American theatrical conventions, even as they were speaking in Mandarin.

Jaber, to her credit, wanted very much for the play to feel familiar to the intended audience. Translated into Dari, names and locations were changed to bring the story into a majestic Afghani past.

Even so, there was an issue with the “Muscovites.” Labour’s hilarity reaches its climax when the young men decide to play a kind of prank on the women, disguising themselves Russians. Reaching this part of the rehearsal process, the acting company flew into open revolt, which was shocking to the Westerners. Surely, the Afghans would love this opportunity to mock their former oppressors, and could not understand why their actors felt this was in the very worst taste.

And this is the part I love. And this is why I love to produce the works of William Shakespeare. No, let me take that a step further – this is why I love creating live theatrical productions:

Leila Hamgam, Breshna Bahar,
Marina Gulbahari, Sabar Sahar
"Love's Labour's Lost"
Kabul, Afghanistan (2005)

The French director chose to remove herself from the conflict, from the rehearsal, to – as I understand it – bring down the temperature of the situation. Left alone with the very unhappy actors, Omar – the translator – suggested the men disguise themselves as Indians. Indian culture and in particular Indian “Bollywood” films are wildly popular in Afghanistan, something the Western producers could not have appreciated.

As a result, the performance culminated with the King and his men dressing like characters from their favorite films, singing and dancing and making fools of themselves to impress and delight the women to the sheer and absolute joy of every crowd for which they performed.

The story still ends as Shakespeare conceived of it, the festivities abruptly concluding with the news of the death of the princess’s father. She must go, to mourn, and to ascend the throne, with a promise to return in one year if the men will remain true.

There is much more to the story. The freedoms promised when international forces drove the Taliban from power in 2001 were all too short lived. And one theatrical production seems like such a small thing. I guess that’s why we continue making them.

See also: 

Love's Labour's Lost (2016)

"Love's" in the Time of COVID-19

Sources:
"Back From the Beach, Two summer offerings lure us from shore to show" by Keith Joseph, Cleveland Scene (7/6/2000)
"The Bard’s Version of ‘Friends’" by Linda Eisenstein, The Plain Dealer (7/1/2000)
"Dumbed Down, Cleveland Shakespeare Festival mauls two of the Bard’s comedies" by James Damico, The Free Times (7/5/2000)

Salesman In Beijing (book)

In 1983, only a few short years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the playwright Arthur Miller was invited to direct a production of Salesman in Beijing. He produced a book of his director's diary, which I picked up recently as a gift for a colleague.

Between getting it from eBay and wrapping it for presentation, I read the first chapter and promptly found another copy online for myself.

This was an odd thing to do for one significant reason -- I am tired of reading Arthur Miller talk about the works of Arthur Miller. As an undergrad I took a semester-long seminar with Al Kaufman on Miller, where I first dug deep into the works of this most-praiseworthy of American playwrights and was disappointed not only to discover that all of his plays feel pretty much the same (Crucible as one stand out exception) but that he spent an awful lot of time writing about what his writing means.

Didn't you say it in the play? Then why do you need to keep explaining it in The New Yorker?

However, this book is really about directing, and not about writing. His obstacles appear enormous, the most obvious that he has accepted the role of directing a play through a translator -- he speaks no Mandarin, his actors do not speak English. In addition, Salesman depicts a world which he does not believe his company (actors and designers) will be able to comprehend, that of Capitalist America.

But also too and on top of that the fact that the world of Salesman never existed in the first place. People do not actually talk like people talk in Arthur Miller plays. No one.

To his continuing credit, rehearsal day after rehearsal day, Miller reaches to explain his characters' incomprehensible motivations by asking open-ended questions about basic human nature. When one of his actors questions why a character like Charley is kind to Willy, who to them appears, at first, a consummate loser and somewhat deranged, Miller asks if the actor knows anyone they do not respect, but still likes. Of course they do, everyone does. At that time in China, however, such realistic human nature was not something they would choose to perform on a stage. It was not the stories they chose to tell, and so acting it was a challenge to be overcome, and Miller's script is full of those.

In his personal reflections, Miller learns as much about how his actors contribute to his work as his work contributes to their larger understanding of a world which had been closed to them for four decades.

He does have this grandfatherly racist way of describing the eyes of certain members of his company. As a writer, one who records what he sees, using, you know, words, I might have hoped that a man who fancies himself such a deep appreciator of human character could find some other way to look into the face of his Asian actors without saying that their eyes -----.* They don't actually do that, any more than anyone else's. His ignorance disappoints and knocks you back a bit. "Someone please ask grampa to stop talking."

By the end of the book (which concludes just as you would expect, after all the pitfalls and setbacks, opening night is perfect) I remain less convinced that Salesman is a transcendent work which addresses the universal longings and love of all humanity, and more convinced than ever that it is the medium -- live theater performance -- that can bring all peoples together to reveal our beautiful commonality.

*Update 10/5/2025: And here, in 2013, I had actually written the word. Some one ask grampa to stop talking, indeed.