Love in Afghanistan by Charles Randolph-Wright (review)

Arena Stage’s world premiere of its resident playwright Charles Randolph-Wright’s Love in Afghanistan interrogates the relationship between Afghanistan and the United States through the portrayal of a young couple, Roya and Duke. Duke (Khris Davis), a hip-hop star, visits the Bagram Air Force Base in Kabul to give a concert with the hope of promoting his upcoming album. He meets his assigned interpreter Roya (Melis Aker), who works with her father Sayeed (Joseph Kamal) as a resident interpreter on the base.

I was fortunate to attend two performances of Love in Afghanistan: the second preview on October 12th and a later performance on November 16th, a day before the closing. During the preview period, Randolph-Wright revised the script and performance and director Lucie Tiberghien tweaked transitions and adjusted light and sound cues. One of the more striking changes was the addition of Duke’s hip-hop performance to woo Roya, using a poem by Rumi. The scene emphasized the different worlds occupied by each character, as well as the play’s underlying concern with how art might bridge this gap.

Although the relationship that develops between the young couple is important, the central conflict concerns Roya’s determination to improve the lot of women in Afghanistan. In stark contrast, Duke sees Afghanistan as an adventure and place for self-promotion. The preview of Love in Afghanistan occurred around the time of the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize nomination of Malala Yousafzai, a 16-year-old Pakistani activist and survivor of an attack by the Taliban in 2012. This coincidence added a symbolical meaning to the character of Roya, who, like Malala, continues to fight for human rights, liberation, and education for women in the Middle East.

To underscore the difficulties that face women in Afghanistan and to explain how Roya has achieved her position as a translator, Randolph-Wright presents the character as having been raised as a “Bacha Posh.” The practice, in which a family makes the decision to raise a girl as if she were a boy, was also depicted in Siddiq Barmak’s 2003 film Osama. According to a 2010 New York Times article on Bacha Posh, which Randolph-Wright discovered during his dramaturgical research, the practice has been used in Afghanistan across class, education, ethnicity, and geography in recent decades.

From age 5, Roya was dressed and treated as a boy so that she might obtain an education otherwise unavailable to girls in Afghanistan. She has gained a male’s privilege to freely walk around the city, to visit her family and friends off-base, and to frequent teahouses. The juxtaposition between Roya’s Bacha Posh upbringing and her current occupation as a translator is dramaturgically enticing: having learned to switch between two genders, she is able to juggle two languages. Most importantly, Roya uses her fluid position to improve the condition of other Afghan women’s lives. She disguises herself as a man in order to conduct secret meetings with other women and to collect funds from male relatives. Unlike the young girl in Osama who is harshly punished at school after her identity is discovered, Roya survives both personal and institutional persecution.

Roya’s freedom to move beyond the strictures of Afghan society also functions as a dramaturgical trigger that instigates the major incident of the play: a suicide-bomber detonates herself at the teahouse where a disguised Roya secretly takes Duke. Duke and Roya are not hurt in the bombing, but it inspires an investigation by military intelligence; it also prompts Duke’s mother, Desiree (Dawn Ursula),

Joseph Kamal (Sayeed), Melis Aker (Roya), Dawn Ursula (Desiree), and Khris Davis (Duke) in Love in Afghanistan.

(Photo: Teresa Wood.)

Khris Davis (Duke) and Melis Aker (Roya) in Love in Afghanistan.

(Photo: Teresa Wood.)

to come to Afghanistan to take him to Dubai...