Reviewed by Amanda L. Andrei
Translated play scripts live in the intersection of world literature and performance, where a published text can be enjoyed by a solo reader, used as a resource in a classroom, and performed by a theater company. These plays are also unique among translated literature, as the translators are not merely bringing forth an author’s voice, but translating each character’s voice and considering how the subsequent text can come to life on the page as well as the bodies of the actors and audience in a live performance.
These three new exciting releases from Playwrights Canada Press showcase the diversity of new plays and playwrights in Canada, offering more insight into diasporas and communities within North America. Each book offers English-speaking readers a chance to visit various cultures, witnessing and connecting with deep and complex histories, conflicts, and generations.
WINTER OF 88
Originally written in Farsi and first directed by the playwright in 1997, Winter of 88 by Mohammad Yaghoubi (co-translated by him and Nazanin Malekan into English) is an auto-fictional drama weaving together a night in an apartment in Tehran towards the end of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) with meta-theatrical conversations between the playwright and his wife sharing their memories of the war. In the apartment narrative, 27-year-old Nahid unpacks boxes with her mother and teenage brother in their new home. What might seem like typical family drama (especially with the family’s squabbling over rooms and why Nahid’s husband left her) turns into anything but, as Nahid’s brother runs out of the apartment and Iraqi missiles plummet into the city. Most intriguing in this narrative is the meta-theatricality that intrudes upon the apartment narrative: characters speaking their thoughts, rewinds in time, and a particularly humorous moment of prop switching a flask of alcohol. These moments give us insight not only into the playwright’s creative process, but how an artist processes memory and history. These elements create a connective tissue with the other major arc of the story—that of the voiceovers of a playwright (based on Yaghoubi) discussing with his wife the events of the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war, which often leads to ruptures between storylines:
Sound of explosion.
NASRIN: Yaa khodaa! Please protect us.
WOMAN’S VOICE: They attacked only two or three times the first day.
MAN’S VOICE: I know.
WOMAN’S VOICE: Why have you written “sound of explosion” many times then?
MAN’S VOICE: Reality is not important to me.
WOMAN’S VOICE: I think it would be better if you write it based on reality.
MAN’S VOICE: Thank you for your dramaturgy.
Winter of 88 clearly shows Yaghoubi not only wrestling with war, history, and survival, but with his relationships as an artist in the shaping of these forces’ emotional impacts on society and individuals and as a spouse dealing with personal memories beyond his own. The afterwords (both in Farsi and English), placed in the middle of the book between the original and translation, offer the reader an experience that a theatergoer might rarely have, that of reading lines cut from the original script and reflecting on the author’s process on creating the story.
THE ENCHANTED LOOM
Suvendrini Lena’s The Enchanted Loom, originally written in English and translated into Tamil by Dushy Gnanapragasam, juxtaposes medical realism and liminal dream space in a family drama centered on Thangan: a Tamil father, husband, and former journalist suffering from brain damage and epileptic seizures due to military torture during the Sri Lankan civil war. Living now as a refugee with his wife, son, and daughter in Canada, Thangan struggles with reconciling memories of his lost son (presumably fighting in the war), connecting intimately with his wife, and maintaining dignity over his deteriorating body. Originating from the playwright’s scientific research as part of her neurology residency at the University of Toronto, the play is an ambitious portrait of the fragility of the brain and mind, intergenerational trauma due to war and displacement, and the disconnect between doctor and patient language registers and communication.
At times, the play feels that it could use centering or sharpening its language and themes. For instance, the medical language, while fascinating, has the potential to weigh down an audience and can lose the feeling of high stakes, though on the page it comes across more quickly than it might in real-time. In another example, a poignant connection around nations as home is apt for debate and decision-making, such as when one doctor characterizes Thangan as “A man without a country. A man with a wound for a home.” An intriguing, debating sentiment, which would benefit from the characters delving into and problematizing the complications around characterizing a country as a home, how a refugee country compares to a war-torn country of origin, and if nations even make suitable homes. And if a wound causes a dream that causes a hallucination that causes a reconciliation, can that be a type of home? While the scope of the play is epic, the characters tend to approach massive topics and then move on, leaving an audience wanting more from this otherwise complex, passionate family.
The Tamil translation runs alongside the English beautifully, giving readers from the Tamil community an opportunity to compare Lena’s original on the left page and Gnanapragasam’s version on the right page. For the non-Tamil reader, it creates a fascinating rhythm–for example, when one English scene ends, the Tamil scene continues on the righthand pages, and the pages create a reverent silence and allow the Tamil words to take up space. The book also contains an informative introduction on the theatre of genocide, written by Sharryn Aiken and R. Cheran, and additional notes on neuroanatomy, memory, and epilepsy from the playwright, making this an excellent text for readers interested in intersections of drama, narrative medicine, social justice, and diaspora.
WILDFIRE & THE SHOE
Written by David Paquet and translated from French to English by Leanna Brodie, Wildfire & The Shoe are two sharply hilarious absurdist plays dealing with cyclical family sins and caretaking for complicated relatives. Wildfire introduces us to three triplet sisters in seemingly heart-warming domestic tasks—coaxing a baby to talk, calling each other on the phone, rescuing burnt cookies—but who speak so acerbically and with a veneer of madness, that the play instantly thrusts us into a strange, off-kilter world of a family with an enigmatic fate.
Likewise, The Shoe also begins with an ordinary situation, a mother bringing her child to the dentist, but the child’s ensuing tantrum is described by both the mother and the stage directions as choreography: “the Hissy Deluxe,” “The Epileptic King Kong,” and the “Electric Chair Boogie.” It gets weirder. The receptionist coos over an unidentified pet’s ugliness while offering the mother and child a Coke and martini as the dentist arrives to the appointment “partially mummified.” These stage images are striking and strange, the bantering language adding a layer of bizarre humor to otherwise unhinged characters.
Brodie’s translation deftly transmits Paquet’s darkly ludicrous voice while maintaining his poetic speech and intense characters. From the last act of Wildfire, a character describes a dangerous erotic encounter amidst a tour-de-force monologue, as this excerpt shows:
I consume you consume me we consummate.
Spit each other out.
So alive slaves to saliva.
I feel you and you feel I.
We feel, we grasp, we clasp, we write.
We go down deep.
In an interview with Brodie, she mentions that this entire monologue, the climax of the play, represented a turn in language, from focusing on character to extremely compressed poetry. As a translator, she reflects on the process: “It’s about finding the character’s language, the French language, but also David’s language. No other writer would have written it in that same way, and I want to accurately represent it – and not just accurately, but also passionately and beautifully.” As the seemingly ordinary characters from both of these plays cope with their strange worlds in visceral, fervent ways, the English text emphatically carries their emotional force and poetic sonority.
Amanda L. Andrei is a playwright, literary translator, and theater critic residing in LA by way of Virginia/Washington DC. She writes epic, irreverent plays that center the concealed, wounded places of history from the perspectives of diasporic Filipina women, and she co-translates from Romanian into English with her father. www.amandalandrei.com