Pera Palas (review)

Although first produced in 1997, Pera Palas is a remarkably apt commentary on the post-September 11, 2001 moment. Its subject, encounters between Anglophone and Turkish culture at three key points in the twentieth century, poses direct parallels with the current crisis around the West's relationship with Islam as well as a more general meditation on the interplay between modernity and tradition, attraction and appropriation, at stake in the quest-romance known as Orientalism. The Long Wharf Theater production, with a new cast but the original 1997 director, has been presented with supporting materials mindful of its current relevance. The program supplies a capsule history of Turkey since the heyday of the Ottoman Empire, along with atmospheric photos of the hotel that has witnessed so many assignations. As the script emphasizes throughout, the meeting of East and West has always taken place under the sign of eros, even while it figures the equally intransigent problems of understanding that afflict love relationships— both endogamous and exogamous, gay and straight. Turkish American playwright Sinan Ünel has interwoven the romantic histories of three generations with the story of the defunct empire's resurrection as a troubled but viable secular democracy, the only such society in the Islamic world. Equally concerned with gender politics and the politics of modernization, Pera Palas offers a dialectical critique of the self-deceptions and failures of imagination that characterize both its Turkish and its Anglophone characters.

The play opens with the 1994 visit of Turkish émigré Murat and his American lover Brian to the Pera Palas hotel in Istanbul. The venerable Pera, originally built to accommodate travelers on the Orient Express, provides a concrete expression of the tensions explored in the play: it is a fantasy of Eastern exoticism, designed explicitly for the West. As Brian revels in hedonism and Murat reflects on his return, the contemporary scenario yields to the entrance of Evelyn Crawley, a British journalist residing in Turkey during the fall of the empire and the ascent of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) from 1918 to 1924. A feminist and progressive, Crawley is nonetheless intrigued by her young Turkish friend Melek's invitation to stay in the harem she occupies with her mother, her stepmother (the pasha's second wife), and several concubines. Crawley sees this as a rare chance to know Ottoman life from the inside, while enlightening its women about their subjection. The progress of Crawley's disillusionment and the mutual betrayals parallel the introduction of a third set of characters: two young teachers at the American university in Istanbul during the early 1950s, when Turkey joined NATO. While Anne holds herself aloof from the natives, her younger sister Kathy begins a romance with Orhan, a promising Turkish engineer. Only gradually do these three stories begin to intersect, as when Kathy meets Orhan's mother, whose intellectual limitations he explains by noting that she was raised as a harem slave. At this point the alert listener will connect her name, Bedia, with that of the concubine who attends Evelyn Crawley. Similarly, Murat's parents remain anonymous until midway through the second act, when they are revealed as Kathy and Orhan, the worse for forty years of mutual disenchantment. The surprises engendered by these resurfacings dramatize the extraordinary transformation of Turkish society over the past eighty years.

The identifications are complicated by director Steven Williford's decision to cast his ten actors in two or more roles apiece, so that the story's reversals of fortune are underlined by the viewer's disorientation. The attractive young actors who portray Kathy and Orhan during their courtship—Kathleen Early and Brandon Demery—are replaced by the older, less glamorous Glynis Bell and Jonathan Hadary for the couple's reappearance in 1994. Jeremy Webb, who plays Brian in the mode of high camp, delivers a subtler performance as Cavid, the pasha's son who, although critical of Ottoman gender inequities, never adjusts to a modernization program that requires his...