At the beginning of “The Survival,” as she’s about to go on her third date with a man she met in a bar, Achan (Janet Kilonzo) tells her best friend that she thinks she’s found the one she’s been waiting for her whole life.
“He listens, is gentle and kind. He pays all the bills when we go out…He hasn’t asked for nude pics and or forced himself on me. “
“That’s different, alright!” her friend (Ash Mayers) replies. “And you are sure he is a man?”
Sure enough, there’s a catch, which Ashan only learns about after she gets pregnant. Oyat is gay; he and his lover Ethan were searching for a woman to have their child.
“We needed a family,” Ethan (Tyler Bey), explains. “This was the only way to keep safe from the law.”
“I could go to prison just knowing about you two,” Achan says in a panic.
“The Survival” is not set in some dystopian homophobic future. It’s set in Uganda, in the present day, written by a Uganda playwright Ahciro P. Olwoch, who was in effect forced out of her country.
“If you’re a landlord, and you have somebody that’s living in your house, and they’re homosexual and you don’t report it, you could be sentence from four to eight years.”
Olwoch was explaining this in the talk back yesterday after the first performance of “The Survival,” part of the sixth annual Criminal Queerness Festival, presented through June 29 at PAC NYC, in a theater right next to the one presenting a queer version of “Cats.”
Since 2019, the Criminal Queerness Festival, a project of National Queer Theater, has produced playwrights from Syria, Venezuela, Uganda, Kenya, Iraq, China, Pakistan, Tanzania, Egypt, Mexico, India, Lebanon, and Poland – countries in which queer artists are treated like criminals, which is how the festival gets its name.
“The Survival” is one of the three plays that are part of this year’s festival.
“She He Me” by Raphaël Amahl Khouri, is billed as the first Arab transgender play, dramatising the true stories of three Arab characters who challenge gender norms.
In “Waafrika 123” by Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko, a famine that strikes the small Kenyan village of Luoland is blamed on the queer couple who live amongst them, an American lesbian who fell in love with a trans man whose father the tribe’s Chief.
Plays like “The Survival” offer “an incredible story of resilience,” Adam Odsess-Rubin, the artistic director of the National Queer Theater, pointed out — and he meant not just the resilience of the characters, but of the playwrights.
If the homophobia they face is draconian, the point of the festival, he says, “is not to say ‘oh things are so bad over there; in America, we have it so great,’ because we know that we have a lot of issues in America. We have an election coming up that could will have a huge impact on the queer community.”
Later, I asked him how he finds the show for the festival:
“Finding shows for the Criminal Queerness Festival is a complex process. This outreach is both wide (social media, eblasts, press) but also deep, forging relationships with international and immigrant artists over many years. A few people, like NYU professor Catherine Coray, have been incredibly helpful at referring artists to us. Sometimes we find new artists through other CQF artists. And once we identify a potential festival artist, then the conversation becomes really nuanced. Would you feel safe participating in this festival? Do you need to be anonymous? Are there ways you’d want to un-censor your work? How do you think your work would translate to an American audience? There’s a lot to consider. And many countries don’t have formal playwriting programs in universities, which is why we started the Criminal Queerness Studio with instructor Achiro P. Olwoch earlier this year. It’s a 7-week free playwriting course taught on Zoom for queer artists around the world to nurture their work, and build community.”
In this context, it’s easy to see why, at the start of the week leading to next Sunday’s Pride Parade, the artistic director of the National Queer Theater says: “Pride is not a celebration. Pride is a protest.”
