Review: Amm(i)gone: a Muslim Mom, a Gay Son, and Greek Tragedy

The breakneck pace of change in the 21^st century has turned us all into taffy, stretched between the old world and the one struggling to be born. No one feels that strain quite like the children of immigrants, whose mastery of the customs and philosophies of this country frequently puts distance between them and the parents who chose to raise them here.

Adil Mansoor feels the stretch, and he has created a solo show about it. Amm(i)gone, a co-production of PlayCo, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, and Kelly Strayhorn Theater is now making its off-Broadway debut at the Flea Theater. The title is a portmanteau of the Urdu word for mother and Sophocles’ drama Antigone. Written, performed, and co-directed by Mansoor, it juxtaposes Greek myth and modern Pakistani-American drama for a theatrical lecture that is brainy yet surprisingly moving.

Mansoor offers audiences a primer on his family history, which begins with the arranged marriage that brought his mother from Karachi to Chicago, with 3-month-old Adil in tow. We learn of Adil’s early encounters with the pageantry of Islam, his lonely childhood, and his eventual blossoming through a high school drama program. We also hear about the divorce that thrust Adil into the role of co-parent to his younger siblings, and the plan that would have seen him enter his own arranged marriage, something he refused to entertain after falling in love with another man.

“Everybody does that,” Adil’s father told him when Adil came out of the closet. “We just don’t talk about it.” Certainly, Adil’s mother has never acknowledged his long-term partner as anything more than a roommate. But in the West, where being queer is a political identity, you do talk about it—especially if you make your living in the theater.

The stage seems to offer a venue for reconciliation between Adil and his increasingly religious mother when she takes an interest in Antigone, and Adil suggests they work on an Urdu translation together. The story of a woman whose religious convictions move her to defy the state and bury the body of her recently murdered brother, Antigone clearly speaks to both mother and son—but could their collaboration also lead to acceptance? And, more importantly, can dramaturgy ever be the basis of a genuinely compelling theatrical experience?

I would say that Amm(i)gone has the trappings of a TED Talk, but it’s a little too highbrow for that, with Mansoor comparing three different translations of the Sophocles drama. Then there’s the segment he refers to as the “Judith Butler corner,” in which we hear the overrated academic’s musings on the mythic Theban princess and her greatest crime, which the studied poststructuralist will be unsurprised to learn is language. Viewers might suspect they have strayed into a Theater Studies class at NYU, and Mansoor’s kindly, dorky-teacher vibe does nothing to dissuade us.

And yet Mansoor cleverly weaves the personal into the cerebral. By praying for her gay son’s soul, is Mom not exhibiting the kind of care Antigone showed for Polyneices? Can you still love someone you think is completely wrong? A later scene, performed in confessional dimness with Mansoor facing upstage, has him speaking aloud what he would tell his mother if he ever talked to her openly about his sexuality; honest and heartfelt, it produced quite a few sniffles the night I attended.

Mansoor and co-director Lyam B. Gabel deftly navigate these tonal shifts, which are partially facilitated by Joseph Amodei and Davine Byon’s media design. A scene from Antigone plays on the upstage screen, and a wisp of a family photo flash across it, like a scarf blown in the wind. Xotchil Musser’s set evokes an Islamic daycare, with heavy rugs and blocks featuring beautiful latticework. Musser’s moody lighting gorgeously transforms this space with a hundred lanterns. Through Aaron Landgraf’s sound design, we hear Mom’s voice in recorded phone calls, in which she frequently lapses into Urdu, with Adil always answering in English. We can feel the giggly intimacy of their relationship even if we intellectually discern the cultural gulf between them.

Mansoor is attempting something difficult: an interfaith dialogue between the Islam of his mother and the queerness that defines a big part of his adult life, which is itself a kind of secular religion. (What is “born this way” but a statement of faith for which we still have no concrete proof?) On the neutral territory of pagan Athens and with great empathy, he inches toward a greater understanding of her immigrant’s story which, with its willful defiance of fate and aching regret about the consequences, has all the hallmarks of Greek tragedy. Mansoor leaves as an open question whether his and her myths can ever be reconciled.