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All-American Girl
Reviewed by Myron Meisel
InterACT Theatre Company at the Lounge Theatre
Through July 26
RECOMMENDED:
Why the devil do we do the things we do? And what kind of answers are genuinely responsive and illuminating to that question of “Why?” Easier to examine the confounding deeds of other people and endeavor to find clues in the motivations we attribute to (or project upon) them for insights into our murkily intricate webs of rationalization and justification.
Recently Steven Leigh Morris was lamenting a paucity of imaginative leaps among the plethora of solo shows at the recent Hollywood Fringe. Yet in its immediate aftermath, InterACT Theatre Company proffers the world premiere Wendy Graf’s one-hander, The All-American Girl, which shuns the least hint of evident autobiography for instead a considerable act of empathy with the evolution of a recognizably ordinary, even banal, young woman into a terrorist capable of unthinkable atrocities.
Graf constructs an opening scene of relentless suspense, as a modest, well-spoken woman sheds her hijab to disguise herself in quotidian mufti and deliver a bomb to blow up the statues of Washington and Lafayette in upper Manhattan, then flashes back 17 years to present a seven-year old Katie (Jeanne Syquia at the performance caught, alternating with the equally gifted Annika Marks), growing up in the close-in suburb of Watertown, MA, demanding a tough stylization for an actor to attempt.
Katie may be a sensitive and intelligent child, though not distinctively so, with a inbred urge to help others less fortunate, and preternaturally disabused of her later teenaged good intentions to tutor underprivileged kids to read by inflexible and unsympathetic bureaucrats. Attending college at Fordham, she is repulsed by her shallow, coarse and unhygenic dormmates, yet captivated by a champion campus wrestler, a Muslim from Mumbai (where religious intolerance fomented by British colonialism that exploded in the twin genocides of the 1947 Partition persists, violently). Quickly pregnant and marrying young, rejection by her family pushes her quickly into conversion to Islam and radicalization against its all-too-real persecutors (by concentrating on South Asia, Graf avoids the complicating quagmire of treating with the Arab experience).
Graf jumps around the timeline of her narrative, assembling the jigsaw pieces in a more stimulating manner than straight chronology would allow. Even so, these gymnastics also underscore the conscious construction of the piece, and more particularly, its utter reliance on the torrent of monologues addressed to us by Katie. It’s a demanding problem conundrum for a playwright: how to fashion questions open-ended enough to avoid pat or packaged answers while meeting inescapably concocted dramaturgical demands.
This quandary is obscured, for the most part successfully, by the ministrations of a game and sometimes fearless lead, and Anita Khanzadian’s direction, including a design team that plays with artifice in simple, piquant inventions that tweak the sense of unadorned storytelling.
Syquia has mastered a means of maintaining her wide-eyed ingenuousness even as it morphs into a mask concealing her growing bitter outrage and white-hot anger at the incessant indignities and injustices of the world. In her hands, Katie becomes not so much a freak of moral aberration but herself a representative for the surfaces all of us, though most especially women, are constrained to hide our more forbidden drives and impulses.
Nevertheless, I remain leery of the task of accounting for human behavior with the applications of ideas to ascribe motives. We need to have far more respect in our art for the inexplicable. Graf plainly is aware of this, but her play, while intriguing and articulate, doesn’t make more than feints at cracking this central conundrum. At the opening night performance, the shocking ending was rendered even more ambiguous than intended by the failure of a final sound cue that announced the subsequent fates of some of the characters. This information would have made a huge difference in how anyone would relate to the denouement, and yet paradoxically, the lack of resolution inadvertently supplied by the loss of these final lines twisted the knife of bewilderment into perhaps a more liberating confusion.
InterACT Theatre Company at the Lounge Theatre, 6201 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd.; Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; through July 26. (818) 765-8732, www.InterACTla.org
Editor’s note: A representative for InterACT has informed Stage Raw that, contrary to what was initially represented to reviewer Myron Meisel, the missing voiceover at the opening night’s performance of All American Girl was not the result of a sound cue failure but a choice made by the production team. The sound cue has been restored for subsequent performances.
