There is a moment of mystery near the end of “Public Obscenities,” which was a finalist last year for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama: Choton, the queer Bengali American PhD student from California who is visiting his relatives in Kolkata, makes a shocking discovery about his grandfather, much revered and long deceased.
At least that’s how it seemed to me when I saw a production of Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s play at SoHo Rep in 2023. But I wasn’t sure….until I read the script.
“Public Obscenities” is one of the seven plays whose scripts are being published in “What This Place Makes Me: Contemporary Plays On Immigration” (Restless Books, 496 pages), a new anthology selected by Isaiah Stavchansky, who writes in an Editor’s Note: “The playwrights have diverse origins – Lebanon, Korea, Nigeria, India, Mexico, Poland – but what unifies their work is the way they shed light on immigrants’ challenges and dreams.”
Having seen five of these plays, which were all produced within the past decade in New York, I knew them to be well-crafted dramas, too nuanced and intimate to be dismissively labeled as issue plays. They are also worthwhile reads. In his note, the editor makes the case that it’s important to read these particular plays, and plays like them, but also that there’s value in treating theater as literature. ”The act of reading plays offers a distinct opportunity to peer into the minds of playwrghts.”
In his introduction, Luis Valdez, the 84-year-old founder of El Teatro Campesino, and no slouch as a playwright himself (Zoot Suit), offers another reason (perhaps inadvertently) why these plays should be in print. “In this compendium of dramatic works, we are gloriously regaled with an array of scenes in Arabic, Nigerian, Ibibio, Bengali, Korean and Spanish counterposed with translations but not all with staged supertitles, as if English is the ‘foreign’ language here.”
The advantage of being able to read the script is evident from the first play in the collection, “The Hour of Feeling” by Mona Mansour, which focuses in several ways on language. It is the first of the five plays I happened to see, first at its world premiere production in the (late and lamented) Humana Festival in Louisville in 2012. It was then produced ten years later as part of “The Vagrant Trilogy” at the Public Theater. It’s the first play in the trilogy, which ends with “Urge for Going,” about a family living in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, focusing on a teenager named Jamila. “The Hour of Feeling” goes back four decades earlier, to 1967, to tell the story of Jamila’s parents, Adham and Abir, their courtship, and then, on the eve of the Six Day War (aka the third Arab–Israeli War), a trip to London, where Adham, a scholar, has been invited to deliver a lecture on William Wordsworth. Adham envisions a future in England. But the only English Abir speaks are movie titles, and those barely. (“Tosir Widloh,” she says – which Adham eventually understands to be “To Sir With Love.”) Abir no longer sees a future with Adham. Mansour’s play is threaded with the poet’s words, both in English and translated into Arabic.
“Sojourners,” is also part of a series – in this case the first of a nine-play cycle by first generation Nigerian-American Mfoniso Udofia that follows a Nigerian family in America and Africa through 40 years and four generations. This first play, which takes place in Houston, Texas in 1978, illustrates the ambivalence, resistance, resignation involved in adjusting to two cultures. A man visits the hospital room of a woman he just recently met who’s given birth to the child of her absent husband. The visitor, named Disciple, offers the woman, Abasiama, flowers and a teddy bear. “…Stuffed animals. They are American symbols of comfort,” Disciple explains to the new mother. But he has second thoughts about his gift. “I should have brought good food or fine cloth. Doll? What for?”
Martyna Majok, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of “Cost of Living” is our foremost dramatist of working class immigrants in such works as “Ironbound” and “queens”. Her contribution to the anthology is “Sanctuary City,” which focuses on two intelligent characters “born in other countries and brought to America young,” who have challenging lives, who care for one another, but have trouble giving each other the care they need. The city of Newark where they live may have a policy of refusing to cooperate with the federal government’s enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws, but the place offers less refuge than heartbreak for the characters over the course of the five years in which the play takes place, because of their immigration status.
The three other plays in What This Place Makes Me are:
“Coleman ’72,” by Charlie Oh, about a Korean American family that takes a cross-country road trip in 1972
“Wolf Play” by Hansol Jung, abou at 6-year-old orphan who thinks he’s a wolf (and is played by a puppet), who is the process of being shuttled from his first adoptive parents, who no longer want him because they’ve given birth to another child.
“A river, its mouths” by Jesus I. Valles (who is best-known in New York for the production at the Flea of his Bathhouse.pptx), is a surrealistic play featuring five mouths (playing many parts) and a depressed, Mexican-American law school drop-out returning home to a border town menaced by a Customs and Border Patrol, and distracted by the “Rio Grande mermaid” and the haunting presence of the river.
