Interview of Alice Abracen, Interviewer : Shah Jehan Ashrafi (Mauritius)

 

Interview of Alice Abracen
Interviewer : Shah Jehan Ashrafi (Mauritius)


I was enchanted by Alice Abracen’s enthusiasm during this exclusive interview carried out on Zoom. Alice Abracen is a young emerging, exuberant award-winning playwright.  She graduated from Harvard University with a BA in English and Religion and the National Theatre School of Canada. Her play The Covenant won the 2017 Canadian Jewish Playwriting Competition. She is also the co-founder of Theatre Ouest End. The Tour and What Rough Beast received their US premieres with Underlings Theatre Company.

            My article focuses on Abracen ‘s play What Rough Beast which was presented at the  National Theatre School of Canada, Montreal in 2018. This play is about the anarchy created by lack of communication and empathy. Hell breaks loose on the campus of a progressive college when a controversial Muslim professor is invited to speak. The students face chaos when friendship and understanding are put to test. However, the playwright does not forget to make the idea of mercy and compassion haunt the play as much as cruelty itself. This play is a space that wants to forge dialogue between the visible minority group, namely Muslims and the majority group of the Canadian society. The following answers from Alice Abracen to my questions throw light on the essence of What Rough Beast:

 

1.      Why do you write and what made you write your play What Rough Beast?

I tend to write from a place of moral uncertainty. When I find myself very worried about something or find myself kind of nestled uncomfortably between orthodoxies on a particular subject, I like to write my way out. It gives me a chance to explore and a chance to ask questions and reason why I’m so kind of uncomfortable and perplexed about a question or issue. With What Rough Beast, after the American elections, a lot of my friends were feeling very betrayed, some were surprised that Trump was elected. Some were caught completely off guard. I’m from a position quite extraordinarily privileged , I was also caught off guard. One of the things those people were wondering was how do I talk to relatives who voted for Trump and to people I am alienated from ideologically and morally even if they are in my own family and even if they are my own friends? And should I be talking to them? Should I be trying to convince them? Or is there this kind of unbreachable gap here? How do we attempt to forge dialogue and should we attempt to forge dialogue with those whose ideas we find hateful? Some people were blaming the failure of dialogue. Some were finding that dialogue as the ideal to forge community has always been too much vaunted and is actually very flawed because dialogue and communication actually privileged the oppressor and put people who are more vulnerable at risk. And I was not sure how to feel? I was torn between the ideas of dialogue and communication. Through empathy and in establishing ties, we can reach a mutual understanding. Dialogue had actually failed and was doing more harm than good. And maybe by affording too much leniency and toleration to really hateful ideas would actually pave the way through something truly destructive. That’s why I started writing What Rough Beast. Characters in What Rough Beast are torn between believing in ideas of dialogue and that they can forge some kind of communication and connection across political lines and together forge a path forward together or this idea that no by inviting people like the professor here, by reaching across that aisle we are actually enabling the oppression. The character of Michelle is someone who actually believes in dialogue in the play and Kevin is someone who believes that the professor is going to do a lot more harm than good. And the character of Rafi is ambiguously on board as he is not so crazy about the professor’s arrival. What he does think is that by introducing ourselves to people and by playing games, by hanging out and just kind of talking outside the political playground that’s how we make a path forward. Maybe he is right maybe he is not, but I know a lot of people think that way. So I started doing research and started talking to friends. I was looking for a way to examine this particular issue and one thing that I was reading a lot about were these protests that were happening on college campuses. And the college campus seems to be a bit of a microcosm of this issue. And whether or not we should invite these speakers is a very controversial issue. Should we make room for them. Where do we draw the line in terms of who  we make room for? That’s how I decided to explore to the eyes of the students. One thing I was excited about the setting is that all these people in this play are young people. They are in positions of power. They feel responsible for changing and shaping the fate of the world.  In campuses emotions are running very high and there are lots of ideals flying around and that’s the way I wanted to explore it through.

 

1.      How does your play treat elements of haunting at different levels?

Yeah, I think that there are lots of haunting elements in the play. The professor is just one of the many specters that kind of lurk on the play for instance. In early drafts we did meet the professor. And then when the play continued to be written I realized we don’t need to see the professor. Everything that we’ve learned about him, we’ve learned from other characters and their perspective of him. I wanted the audience to conjure their own professor, their own person that they kind of represent and where they might draw the line or where they might plant their feet whether one should or should not be invited. But he is a very haunting figure. He is never actually seen but his presence hangs over the play and what he represents hangs over the play. He could represent either the potential for dialogue or this boogie man who has so much potential to unleash violence depending on who you want to talk to and the ideas that he spouses in the minds of many characters haunt the play. He is this kind of specter which are the premises of nationalism that he does not necessarily espouse.  A lot of people embrace him as a figure and symbol ahead of it which is a great danger here. The play actually has two different versions one is American and one is Canadian. In the Canadian version it’s a bit more pronounced that one of the specters in the play is this unappetizing and ugly history of colonialism that we don’t like to acknowledge so much within Canada. I think we tend to see ourselves as a shadow of the US, the darkness I guess that could lurk within every society. And that darkness showed in the last elections although it was present for a very long time. Canada likes to see itself as the good counterpart compared to its neighbor. We’ve seen horrific scenes in our own country. We’ve seen them every day. We’ve seen specters of this racist past, present and future. The things that the professor represents are attempts to state for that and the other figures that are kind of haunting are both the victims and the perpetrators of that violence. I am certainly not the person to talk about that with authority , but we did research on the play and on the darkness that is very much haunting our Canadian history, the legacy of residential schools, the legacy of slavery, the violence of misogyny and xenophobia that raises its ugly head in cases like the polytechnic or the recent shooting a few years ago now at the mosque. I think one thing the play does look at is how those elements are present in Canada and how those elements haunt. One thing that is making them dangerous is the refusal to  face them and confront them.One of the key things in the play is how do we confront them? How do we address those things? Do we face them head on? Do we reach out to those who are staring to fall down into that rabbit hole of those beliefs? Do we reach them with compassion? Do we tempt to shame them? How do we approach these issues? How do we bring people back? And a lot of research was in what these different ideas were and how to reach across the aisle? Should we reach across the aisle? So there were people we spoke to. They work in preventing radicalization. They tend to espouse a model of reachable compassion. Isolation and alienation are what make people extremely vulnerable to radicalization, hatred and they make them become prey. We also spoke to people and folks and read articles that said don’t give up an inch keep these ideas under lockdown and shut down the websites and shut them down wherever they can. To those who advocated the compassionate approach and said we had to listen and reach out, people told them not to listen and hear these ideas out. All they do is cause further harm. And as a cast in different iterations we discussed from the ideas of eventual points of our characters and we let all this research inform the handling of the play.

 

 3. In the play local people also have their reasons to be afraid of the Other. They are also haunted by the idea of the Other. When people do not understand the Other, there has to be a problem somewhere. How do you read that in your own play?

        Well, I mean I definitely want to look at this idea of mercy and compassion. One of the things I wanted to look at in the play was that sometimes the idea of compassion can be harmful. That was something I was running into again and again in my research. But then this idea that without compassion and without ever extending empathy to each other how can we possibly begin to communicate and how can we begin to repair what is broken. How can we begin to convince each other of our humanity if we are not able to acknowledge the humanity in each other. There is definitely a kind of running thread of that throughout the play and from the earliest moments some of the characters were failing to see each other’s humanity. They see each other only as political opponents and rivals and don’t see the vulnerability in each other. And it’s also the case of the characters not willing to show the vulnerability in themselves because they believe that they will be met with no mercy and will receive none. With Kevin and  Michelle that was one of the major threat. The two of them started log ahead and crossed the professor and partly of that was because there was a deep sea that set apart. There is a real failure of communication and empathy and complete lack of willingness to kind of see the other’s humanity. Their relationship was in chaos in the entire play. At the end of the play for the first time there is also the idea that communication and empathy is a much more plausible idea when things are good and when things have been challenged. The willingness to communicate is completely obliterated in the second half of the play. Michelle says you can’t decide when to turn dialogue on and off. You don’t want to do it when it’s easy and it’s hard and of course she finds herself struggling to live up to that ideal and less but at the end of the play we find that they are beginning to understand each other and being able to see each other’s humanity. Michelle and kevin being able to kind of grant mercy to each other and at the same time the play is like asking when do we show mercy to each other? Rafi tries to show kindness and it doesn’t work. And the reason it doesn’t work is because he did call the cops. He did not have a choice, he had to see the safety of others first. In doing that he sort of sued himself. The characters are also haunted by what they see is their failures. They are very haunted by their responsibility. All of them feel a great responsibility to restore the safety of others and to forge this path toward a better world. Some of the characters feel more responsibility toward their family. Some of them feel more responsibility toward the global community. Sometimes the sense of responsibility comes into conflict. In the second half most of them are haunted by the feeling that they could have done better or they are haunted by the failure of what they truly believe they had to do. In the case of Kevin he doesn’t really know where he went wrong. Michelle is haunted as she feels that she might be responsible for her friend’s death. That feeling of guilt haunts both of them. There are different kinds of haunting in the play. There is also a kind of literal ghost in the play. I really wanted them to feel haunted in the second half of the play. They feel really haunted by responsibility and guilt and what do they do with it. Do they lean into guilt to deflect blame onto others? Or do they lean into it to assume greater responsibility and try to fix things? What do they do with that guilt and how they move forward?

 

4.      You mentioned the literal ghost in the play which is Rafi. In modern times it is quite difficult for a young writer to portray a ghost visually in her play. Why did you do that? How did you manage to place that ghost on stage?

That is interesting actually. This play was developed with a bunch of different people, with the dramaturges of the acting class and the directing class of the National theatre school which played a huge role in shaping the play and one of the thing is that we worked heavily in workshops with Rafi’s ghost. We tried with him barely present and barely speaking, but it did not work. His absence was glaring probably because he is one of the pure sources of levity in the play. He is pretty funny. He was no longer his character without his equipped hand and his trademark without the empathy and just being silent and watching. That was more horrifying. I did not want him to be just be a prop on stage. So we discussed he is both in person there with his own agenda and his own actions and he is a ghost of Michelle’s conscience and a projection of her. I was really interested in the idea of ghost. All the characters are types of ghosts yet they are never quite ghost. They are always present, active and haunting. And in the case of Rafi, he is Michelle’s closest friend and ally. She is used to having him in her corner and she is used to having her bolster her and encourage her. With him not being able to do anything anymore, she is brutally haunted. At the same time his haunting presence is a reminder that she failed him to his death in her mind. She kind of roped him back into the political activity that he wanted to leave. This brought him to his end and it is her fault if he is dead. I think many people feel this when you have lost someone you tend to see them everywhere and you tend to be haunted by them particularly if you feel any responsibility or guilt toward them. Rafi haunts the play. He both his own person who is determined to safeguard his friend and that’s why he is back. He is trying to gain some closure himself. However, he also haunts because he is someone who is betrayed and destroyed by what they allowed on campus. All of them feel that they could have done something better. All of them feel that they have a hand in his death. Alyssa also is haunted by him to a certain extent, but also haunted by her brother. Many question why Rafi comes back but why not Johnny. There were many reasons for that and one thing is that Marlyn is partly Johny’s ghost. She is the one who is kind of keeping his memory alive and his memory as a hero who is kind of resurrected. She is the one who is making sure that whatever he stood for is being commemorated and honoured. So Rafi stands to defend the ideals he stood for even when he is gone and they failed him. Marlyn is there to do the same for Johny. These are two forces that are kind of working against each other through the other characters in the second half of the play.

 

5.      What made you choose the title What Rough Beast for your play?

I borrowed the title from Yeast’s poem The Second Coming. I saw a post online quite a few times  after Trump’s elections which made me think about it when I was writing the play. The poem expresses this great uncertainty of the fear of looming chaos and the failure of communication, the breakdown of society, the best lack of conviction and the world being full of passionate intensity. It’s a vision of the apocalyptic that is kind of human born. The end of the poem has this horrifying image of the rough beast. The rough beast is the antichrist but I think one of the questions in the play is what the rough beast is? What is this chaos and terrible future that we fear and how do we prevent this from happening? People like Johny see it as the fall of White society. People like Kevin see it as White supremacy in power that grows as a horrific force gathering its followers and threatening to overwhelm. People like Michelle might see it as the complete breakdown of communication at the beginning of the play. There is a hole and we need to bridge the gap to the world that we will lead to. Everyone has his own version of the rough beast and everyone has a different way to prevent it. Yes the play is about anarchy but there is also hope haunting the play. One thing that we see in the second half of the play is the moments of cruelty but also of mercy. There is rejection of the horrific future when Alyssa turns her back on Marlyn. There is a kind of problem with the ideas that Marlyn is putting forward. Marlyn knows how to convince Alyssa to come over but Alyssa realizes things and says no because what the former brought to her brother was despicable. Kevin is lurching toward this path of self-destruction and in kind of final saving grace, he reaches out to Michelle. This is why he reaches her at the end of the play. There is a moment of kindness there. In those moments of reaching out and in those moments of vulnerability and acknowledging our failings, our fear and struggling to find the way forward together rather than pursuing this path of abject uncertainty that leaves no room for the other’s humanity and feelings. I think that’s what other characters in the play come to reject.

Shah Jehan Ashrafi