An Ordinary Muslim opened late February at New York Theater Workshop. The play is directed by Jo Bonney and written by first time playwright Hammaad Chaudry. The New York Times calls it a “timely look at the traumas of dislocation among the children of Muslim immigrants in England.”
Vulture says this of the play: “Chaudry, a graduate of Columbia’s playwriting MFA where the play was his thesis project, worked under the mentorship of Tony Kushner to bring the story of the Bhattis to life, and the development process shows. The play feels solid, nurtured, strong-boned. It participates in a long Western tradition of Unhappy Family dramas, from Long Day’s Journey Into Night to August: Osage County, but its power comes from its playwright’s — and its central character’s — struggle with this very tradition, with the Western-ness they’ve been brought up in and encouraged to embrace (the Bhattis live in London; Chaudry grew up in Edinburgh). ‘A good Muslim is an invisible Muslim,’ snaps Azeem when his wife Saima (the excellent, understated Purva Bedi) mentions her desire to start wearing her hijab to work, ‘You go in wearing your headscarf … they’ll never accept you.'”
Vulture concludes with: “Chaudry is a young playwright, but his play has a sad wisdom to it, an aching sense of the cruel cycles of history and of families, and a deeply felt question at its heart: What’s to become of all this anger? Without a real home, where can one go to feel whole?”
Closing March 25, 2018
