“Three days after 9/11, a drama unfolds on the other side of the world.”
In Bangalore, India in 2001, playwright Anand Rao offered a ride in his car to a family of strangers stranded on the sidewalk late at night. The events that followed, which he describes as “quiet and uneventful . . . but volatile and uncommon in hindsight,” inspired him to write A Muslim in the Midst, a new play about class, religion, and the struggle to find common ground.His play, which has received readings and appeared in festivals across the United States, will make its Brooklyn debut this month, opening Brave New World Repertory Theatre’s 2018-19 season. Producing Artistic Director Claire Beckman will direct.
Beckman decided to produce A Muslim in the Midst after attending a staged reading in February 2017. Rao’s play brought back her own memories of 9/11 (Beckman was in Brooklyn at the time; she saw the second tower fall from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade) and the spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes immediately afterwards. “It was tragic on so many levels,” Beckman writes. “For years, I have wrestled with making sense of the two parallel tragedies” — terrorism and Islamophobia — “connected but at odds with one another.”
Her words echo Rao’s. “It is set three days after 9/11,” he told the Yale Council on Middle East Studies, “because I believe many generations from now we will look back on [the events of that day] as one of the defining moments of modern history. Not just for America but for the whole world.”
Beckman agrees, writing that “9/11 remains, without a doubt, the most significant global event of my lifetime.” She feels that the “geographic distance” between the setting of A Muslim in the Midst and Brave New World’s performance venue in New York will provide the artists and audiences with “a way in” to the story of that day.
“What steps can we take in our daily lives to question more and judge less?”
A Muslim in the Midst by Anand Rao, directed by Claire Beckman. Featuring Nachiketh Anand, Onkar Singh Dhindsa, Noreen Quadir, Salma Shaw, and Vishal Vaidya. Production runs November 1 to November 16, 2018 at the Actors Fund Arts Center, 160 Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn. For more information, please visit www.bravenewworldrep.org and www.amusliminthemidst.com.
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