A light in the heart of darkness
John Dillon's production of Ariel Dorfman's Reader at the AUC is an empowering experience, writes Nehad Selaiha
Take a deep breath and jump right in; the rewards are countless. This is my advice to anyone who goes to see the Egyptian premiere of Ariel Dorfman's Reader at the Falaki Centre Mainstage Theatre. Tolerate the sense of vertigo that grips you as you slowly sink into Dorfman's subterranean watery regions and do not regret not having fortified yourself beforehand with a stiff drink; you will soon be seeing double. You will feel terror as well, and profound sorrow and pain; but in the murky depths of this stunning imaginative tour de force, this conundrum of a play, you will also find, despite the human wreckage surrounding you, wit, beauty, compassion and a new source of courage.
Reader presents a disintegrating world which, despite its rigorous insistence on everyone observing the rules, the borders and barriers laid down by those in power, has completely lost its spatio-temporal boundaries and moral bearings -- a world of splintered narratives and shifting images in which reality and fiction conflate and no story or identity can be ascertained or validated. The initial narrative is set in motion in the first scene by a mysterious, nameless 'Man' who grows more sinister as the play unfolds and emerges at the end as an incarnation of the inhuman spirit of dictatorship and its omnipotent, omnipresent iron fist. Like a magician, he conjures up, with the gesture of a hand, the office of a censor, Don Alfonso Morales, in some unspecified Latin American police state. We watch the censor at work, banning, releasing or "snip-snapping" the manuscripts of prospective authors. We soon learn that his wife had died young, leaving him a son, Enrique, and that he has an affair with his secretary, Jacqueline. The dramatic focus of the scene, however, is Coming Together, a "preposterous futuristic novel", according to Morales, which would be better called "coming apart". Morales's suggested title seems prophetic; the novel which Enrique had given his father, claiming it was by a friend, drives a wedge between them. The father suspects his son of having written it himself to ruin him by modelling the hero on him and implying that he had helped put his wife in "a Readjustment Centre" to cure her contumacy.
As the showdown between father and son builds to a climax, and just as Enrique is about to declare that he has proof and ask his father why he did it, what fear had driven him to it, the mysterious Man suddenly materialises, as if out of nowhere, standing behind the chair he had proudly displayed and carefully measured at the beginning. Now, however, a young woman sits in it, bound and gagged. Who is she? Don Alfonso's wife? Or the fictional one in the novel? But before we get an answer to this, or any of the questions raised earlier about the identity of the author of the subversive manuscript, the truth of the father's guilt and his motives and the nature of Enrique's proof, Dorfman tantalizingly interrupts the scene as the telephone rings. The lights go down and when they come up again we discover we have been catapulted to a different country and a future point in time. And yet, the same actors appear in the same roles, though with different names: Morales becomes Daniel Lucas, also a censor, but minus the limp, Jacqueline becomes Irene, Enrique becomes Nick. More disorienting still is the fact that the situation, the web of relationships, the offensive novel, though under a different title, Turns, and the skeleton in the cupboard are the same. Even the system of government, pronouncedly a democracy, is equally repressive, though its forms of censorship are more subtle and sophisticated. Even the dialogue carries distinct echoes of the previous scene and seems a replay with variations.
Casting about for a way to end this confusion, one is tempted to read the second scene as a dramatisation of the "futuristic" novel Morales is reading. Or is it the other way round? Was the first scene a dramatic projection enacting part of the novel "set far away, long ago" that Daniel Lucas is now reading? As the play progresses neither explanation works: the nameless Man haunts both narratives; Enrique and Nick coalesce in Malko, the author of the objectionable text which can be at once Coming Together and Turns; the gagged young woman of the first scene is alternately identified as the betrayed wife of both censors and also as Sonia, Malko's wife, which makes you wonder if the story of this young, rebellious writer who is forced to recant at the end is not, perhaps, a projection of both censors in their youth when they still had what Don Alfonso calls "the writing fever".
As the characters surface from the darkness and eerily fade and dissolve into each other, as times and places merge, what we call reality seems to slip away; you experience something akin to delirium and the kind of anxiety and bewilderment we only know in dreams. You try to fix your gaze. "What country friends is this?" you remember Viola asking in Twelfth Night. But here, in Dorfman's fluid world, there are no shores and no answers and nothing can be resolved on the realistic level. It is not a question of mistaken identities -- though the phrase is trotted out twice in the play, in a pathetic bid for self-reassurance; nothing as simple as that. Dorfman takes a familiar comic convention and carries it to lurid extremes, to the edge of madness. The only stable thing, the only fixed point of reference that remains in his whirling, swirling galaxy of images and reflections is a desperate commitment to love, freedom, human dignity and compassion, and a passionate faith in the value of resistance. But Dorfman's faith is never facile or sentimental; it is always tempered with a sad recognition of the voracious capacity of human nature to inflict pain on others in the name of security and self-preservation.
In his forward to The Resistance Trilogy, which brought together Reader, Windows, and Death and the Maiden in one volume, Dorfman explains his choice of title. To have called the book "The Repression Trilogy or the Violence Trilogy or the Trilogy of Abuse and Suffering", he says, "would have been to miss what I hold to be most central to my writing: that it tries to place, hopes to place, in the very middle of history those who do not accept life as it has been established and narrated, the wager that the official version of reality handed down from above will always be contested by somebody, no matter what the cost to their bodies and sanity. It is their rebellion, our rebellion, which sets in motion the crisis which is at the heart of each play." In the trilogy all the rebels are women. Why? "Because", as Dorfman explains, "women tend to be the least powerful, the most marginal, members of society; when they do revolt, they do so with a determination, fury and dignity which cracks the world open, which compels authority to reveal itself in all its arbitrary ugliness. But women have also fascinated me because -- and this may be why I have gravitated towards them as a detonating factor over and over -- their very lack of influence makes their insurrection extremely precarious. In order to prevail they need to convince the men who hold power to change their conduct, they need to invade that masculine world and throw it into chaos, they need their version and view and gaze to be validated and verified and accepted. The plays do not, therefore, merely tell the story of the women who set history upside-down, but also of the men whose history is being directly challenged." Just before the end of Reader the Director of Moral Resources, the institution which decides what everyone reads, sees and hears, and who has efficiently liquidated all the female characters in the play, furiously exclaims: "These women, my God. Tanya, Sonia, Jacqueline, Irene. It's like a fucking merry-go-round!"
The four women in Reader do indeed throw the masculine world into chaos; but neither their stories, nor those of the men they challenge can be coherently summarised. It is one of those plays where meaning has to be sought in the structure. In an Afterword to the text, published in the Trilogy, Dorfman explains how it came into being -- how a simple short story, intended as "a sort of prankish revenge against the censors who, in Chile, were banning ...(his)... work and that of other writers", was slowly transmuted over the years into a complex play which explores through its very form "depths and dilemmas ... beyond ... (his)...original idea" and the ways in which art intersects with human rights
"By forcing the protagonist to face the splits and cracks of his inner world"' he says, "I also was inevitably probing ...the questions of identity and trust in a world such as ours and asking myself and the audience about the fountains of creativity itself, the role of art in our times. And so the play ended up wondering how stories can be told at the end of this millennium, not only in societies that are miserable enough to suffer dictators, but also in more affluent lands ... , in other words, how reality itself is constructed for us and by us and without us, how can we tell what is true and what is false if we do not simultaneously question power, if we have lost our capacity to separate good from evil."
Like the other two plays in the Trilogy Reader is a mystery with no solution. "The ambiguity of the final solutions in each play", Dorfman goes on to say, "is directly related to the freedom I have wanted my readers and spectators to experience, the certainty that the story on that stage has not yet, in fact, ended, that how it really ends will depend on how we, who are also watching, act out our own lives. And the writer's confidence in the imaginary and its strength to transform the spectator is paralleled inside the dramatic world itself by the ferocious pull of the imagination on the protagonists, male and female, the way in which they are cornered, they have cornered themselves, into conceiving another alternative, a different possibility for humanity." The intensity of Dorfman's political awareness is matched by his keen attention to aesthetic issues and technical matters. As a writer who was forced into exile by the Chilean military coup of 1973 and has since committed himself to give voice to all the victims of terror and place them in full view of the world, he constantly has to grapple with the dilemma of "how to write about matters that have extraordinary documentary weight without being subjected to the grinding jaws of a 'realism' that is often unwilling to depict the complexity of what is truly happening ... how to tell a story that was historical inasmuch as it derived from the suffering of real human beings but that simultaneously had to obey aesthetic and literary laws of representation that demanded freedom from that immediate history", to quote his Afterword to Windows dated October, 1997.
On 30 September, 2003, Dorfman published an article in The Nation entitled "Lessons of a Catastrophe". In it, the disastrous attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September, 2001 were reflected in the mirror of the equally disastrous bombing of the presidential palace in Santiago by the Chilean air force, with the help of the US in order to overthrow the constitutional government of Salvador Allende. Under General Pinochet's regime, "many otherwise normal, decent human beings in my land", Dorfman writes, "allowed their liberty -- and that of their persecuted fellow countrymen -- to be stolen in the name of security, in the name of fighting terror".
In the US, after 11 September, also in "the sacred name of security and as part of an endless and stage-managed war against terrorism, defined in a multitude of ever- shifting and vague forms, a number of civil liberties of American citizens have been perilously curtailed, not to mention the rights of non-Americans inside the borders of the United State," he warns. "The situation abroad is even worse," he adds; "the war against terror is used to excuse an attrition of liberty in democratic and authoritarian societies the world over." Though the US has not become a police state as yet, it will do well to heed the lesson of the Chilean tragedy to avoid "similar political disasters in the future."
Was it a disturbing, nebulous awareness of this insidious erosion of civil liberties all over the world that prompted American director John Dillon to embark on a production of Reader as soon as he arrived in Cairo on 3 November as the Department of Performing and Visual Arts' 2003-04 Distinguished Visiting Professor?
"He cast the play before he got his first good night's sleep," Frank Bradley, the head of the department writes in the play's programme. But whatever the cause of the urgency it was a magnificent choice. The production had a tremendous liberating effect and everyone who has suffered the rigours of censorship here was delighted to finally see a censor hoist with his own petard. Ironically, though, the kisses in the text were cut out and body contact kept to a minimum, just as the Director of Moral Resources instructs Enrique and Jacqueline during the wedding ceremony he stages near the end as he rewrites the story of Don Alfonso Morales/Daniel Lucas. It was as if he had been following the rehearsals all along, censoring Dillon in the name of public morality, and was perhaps sitting among us in the auditorium. On the level of text and performance censorship became a pervasive, oppressive reality that no one could elude.
To cast a woman as the Director was an ingenious touch and truer to life than Dorfman's rigorous division of his characters into female victims and male oppressors. In patriarchal societies, where women are often denied their rights and fobbed off with the notion, fed to them from childhood by teachers, preachers and parents, that they are the guardians of morality and tradition, you will often find that women are the worst enemies of women and that some of the most ardent supporters of the oppressive symbols of authority come from their ranks. Yara Atef's performance of the part was an exquisite blend of sardonic suavity and diabolical sadism. Ratko Ivekovic was at his best and dexterously juggled the parts of the two censors without slips or hitches -- a splendid feat; his face, gait and intonation sensitively reflected in every muscle and tone the different mental states of both characters as their inner worlds began to split and collapse, pushing them to the brink of insanity. Indeed, the whole cast was carefully picked and meticulously trained. Dalia El-Guindi as Jacqueline/Irene, Lama El-Hatow as Tanya/Sonia, Asser Yassin as Enrique, Nick and Malko and Hany Seif as the Man gave convincing, well controlled and orchestrated performances and Jeanne Arnold's costumes and Stancil Campbell's lighting provided them with an intelligently supportive, protective visual frame.
The set, by Scott Wedlin, was another remarkable feature of this production. A row of tilted door-frames in the centre led to the back, creating the effect of a deep tunnel, while a set of panels on wheels, manipulated by the Man's black-clad, forbidding assistants (Diana Brauch, Dalia Kholeif, Vanessa Korany, Yosra El-Lozy, Wael Mohassed, and Shaymaa Shoukry) -- an innovative departure from the author's stage- directions -- served to construct the different locations. At certain points they were wheeled round in circles at great speed, creating a strong sensation of giddiness, and at others they vividly expressed the instability and fragility of the world the characters inhabit. At the end the six assistants join the Man and the Director at the back, forming a gruesome black wall which menacingly advances from the shadows towards the remaining victims, Daniel and Nick, to crush them. This is theatrically more effective than just having two men attack them, as in the text. As father and son shout out their defiance of fear in the face of this approaching terror, the lights black out. The defiant cries continue to ring in the darkness for seconds then stop; but we carry their message with us as we leave the theatre. They are "voices from beyond the dark", to borrow the title of a new work by Dorfman, and their message says: To break the wall of silence is not easy. First, you have to overcome fear. As their liberator says in his preface to Voices: "There is always fear at the beginning of every voyage, fear and its malignant twin, violence, at the beginning of every voyage into courage."
