Headscarf and the Angry Bitch by Zehra Fazal

Remaining Performances:
Jul 17th at 8:30 p.m.
Jul 18th at 3:30 p.m.

They say: “Join Zed Headscarf on a tongue-in-cheek romp through faith and growing up Muslim in America. Featuring hits like ‘The Only Thing I’ll Do Five Times a Day is You’ and ‘I Lost My Virginity During Ramadan.’ This beef ain’t halal!”

Mike’s take: The future of American-Islamic relations could hinge on this one-woman show. Before Muslim folk-rocker Zed Headscarf (Zehra Fazal) got involved, America’s most memorable depictions of Islam were a.) Lil Kim sporting a hijab and not much else on the cover of One World and b.) that episode of Southpark wherein the boys travel to Afghanistan to return a mail-order goat to its starving family. (And to kill Osama bin Laden, who, in the words of Cartman, “has a small penis.”) No wonder those pious clerics up and declared America’s objectification of women and obsession with dick jokes as deserving of–dare I say it?–jihad! Zed Headscarf, infidel-licking lesbian though she be, really could change all that.

After strummbling through a spotlit ballad about the displeasures of navigating airport security in Muslim garb, Headscarf introduces herself to her fake/real audience as the new employee of a generic-sounding Islamic cultural group whose job it is to talk up the Good Kitab on a tri-county lecture circuit (her first!). Lesson no. 1 is that Fazal, who disappears offstage after her introduction and returns with a dusty Koran that she blows off to nervous laughter, has no intentions of skirting the controversy that defined her 2007 show, My Friend Hitler.

Lesson no. 2 introduces the tension that Fazal whips out whenever Headscarf’s Inside Islam jokes fall flat: Haraam vs. Halal, the bizarre dichotomy that continues to frame the experiences of so many Muslim-American women.

Headscarf defines haraam as something bad, sinful, or unclean, and contextualizes it thusly: “Dude, it wasn’t kosher when you gave my mom a rimjob–that was haraam.” She defines halal as something appropriate, or prepared in accordance with Islamic law, though in all fairness, it’s really just a catch-all for the fun things that would make a jihadist happy if only he could get his mind–and mouth–around a fuzzy navel. (The use-it-in-a-sentence example for halal is much better when Headscarf says it.)

The show is broken up into lectures, at the end of which Headscarf invites her audience to return to the next lecture, and the stage goes dark. When the lights come up seconds later, Headscarf has the look of well, a Muslim woman who has just been scolded by her imam for talking about how much she loves eating pussy. The pattern of apology, diversion, song, and escalation to obscenity provides an easy and enjoyable sense of structure. Due to the close quarters of the Warehouse and my propensity for sweating, however, I can say that 55 minutes may have been 10 minutes too long for me. It’s tight in there, after all, and an hour is just long enough to recognize, applaud, and then tire of Fazal’s affinity for repetition.

Fans of dramatic one-person shows be warned: Headscarf and the Angry Bitch borrows liberally from narrative standup comedy, and much less so from, uh, people who do really serious one-person plays–almost to the point that I forgot I was watching theatre. If she could only trim some of the dead weight from her script and learn how to play that acoustic guitar that she’s always wailing on, Fazal and her show–dark and stormy social commentary included–wouldn’t be out of place on Comedy Central. Like Maria Bamford without the pugs or Zach Galifianakis without the leotard.

See it if: You want to hear someone sing about Pakistani papas bemoaning their daughter’s sexual orientation to the tune of Smooth Criminal.

Skip it if: You are a terrorist.

So…what’s turning you on?  What’s turning you off?  What’s turning you around in circles?  Good God, please, tell us!

Before I go on, let me clarify a few things. As Tammy, the main character and documentary subject of the play, Marietta Elaine Hedges is quite remarkable. She gives an emotionally draining and extremely passionate performance. The play’s content is also dense, well-developed, and rife with conflict. The whole experience is very disturbing, and I left the theater unsettled, as I gather was the playwright’s intention.

But on the whole, I found The Warrior dramatically unsatisfying. I don’t expect to like or enjoy plays about the Iraq War. But I do expect a play to be a play, and in the various Iraq pieces I have seen, there seems to be a trend towards politically virulent, dramatically unsound playwriting.

At the moment, there are 3 works that come to mind besides The Warrior: Tim Robbins’ Embedded, Tony Kushner’s Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall be Unhappy, and Craig Lucas’ Prayer For My Enemy. I’m not going to compose a critical essay about all these plays here, but as I mull them over in the context of just having seen Gilhooley’s work (granted it’s been several years since I saw the first two), I am tempted to pose the following statement: it is über-difficult, even for talented theater-makers, to dramatize our disgusting debacle in Iraq.

All of these plays employ hackneyed devices to elicit anger and exposition: awkward tirades, disembodied voices, overextended phone calls (I’m of the opinion that prolonged use of a phone by a single character is one of the cheapest and most disappointing stage tricks, no matter how talented the actor), and purple language, to name a few. The most obvious similarity, however, is the overarching tendency to tell about the conflict rather than show it, and I mean this in regards to both the war and the inner struggles of the characters. I can understand the aversion to depicting combat on stage, for reasons of practicality and propriety. But take, for example, The Warrior, in which Tammy tells us at length about the awful disintegration of her marriage. She goes so far as to enact some of the episodes with puppets–which I admit was powerful, if not unnerving–but I would prefer to bear direct witness to the drama rather than a 75-minute reaction to the ghosts of a previous drama. I realize that Tammy is locked in a cell-like room, and that this is in some way a representation of her troubled mind; however, we do not need to leave the room in order to see, rather than merely hear about, the episodes that have so influenced her psyche.

Listen, I have no real answers here, only the seeds of a much vaster discussion. There are some things, at some points in time, that simply defy art, and right now the Iraq War may be one of them. Maybe it’s too soon, too real, too damn disappointing and frustrating. I have never attempted to write a play about Iraq, but I imagine that a lot of feelings flare as one sets out to do so. Perhaps those feelings are so strong–and, because of our historical proximity to the catastrophe, so fresh, so raw–that they obscure many of the normal necessities of the craft. This leads to characters that are less character and more author’s mouthpiece. I would like to see an Iraq play that embeds the pain of this war in the action of another drama, that weaves the atrocities into the subtext, and that doesn’t grate the audience’s emotions so severely. I know that we are dealing with war, and that there is nothing pretty or “well-made” about it. But I think that a play with some of the rigorous dramatic elements I just described–not to mention a little more subtlety–would be more powerful, and perhaps move me to more deliberate action, than the ones I’ve seen. Is there such a play (perhaps it is in this year’s fringe–I have not seen A Report of Gunfire, for example)? Does anyone think I am completely off-base here?

But my notes also contain, ah, other stuff. Lookit: if the bf doesn’t wanna join me when I review something, I tend to go alone. And when I do, I do what everyone who sits alone in a theater has done since Seven Against Thebes was packing them in.

No. Not that. There’s zoning. Also: ew.

No: I eavesdrop the hell out of you.

Here’s some of the pearls of – let’s be generous and call it wisdom – overheard during Fringe.

“No, we’ve never been to Fringe before. We’re from Annandale.”
Matronly sort at Cat-Headed Baby, blithely asserting a cause-and-effect relationship where one doesn’t necessarily exist.

“I dunno. Do they grab you and make you come on stage? I hate that. It’s like, dude, I’m paying you to watch you.”
Skeptical teen perusing fliers at Fort Fringe, expressing his conviction that “audience participation” is oxymoronic in nature.

“…Antonin Scalia’s favorite restaurant…”
I’ve overheard this phrase, or a variation thereof, every time I get within 20 feet of Fort Fringe. I imagine Fringe staffers hear it on the hour. Please stop.

“Did you get that thing where she was in the shower?”
Furrow-browed young woman leaving Born Normal, confessing her slow-on-the-uptakeness in re: one of the show’s more abstract jokes. If you’re reading this: It took me a while to get that, too, but I think she’s talking about sperm. Or crabs, possibly. No, probably sperm.

“Are you seeing the arms on that guy? [Grunt.]”
A slightly tipsy admirer of the male form, shamelessly objectifying one particular Dizzy Miss Lizzie castmember.

“Well, I haven’t had any of my patients die unless it was just their time.”
Nothing to do with Fringe, really, except that we overheard it over a post-Born Normal Guinness at the Fox, and, seriously: WHAT? Listen, Dr. Calvinist: My time, schmy time – I get wheeled into your ER with a sucking chest wound, I need to see a little more hustle from you.

Got any more?

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 19 @ 3pm
Friday, July 25 @ 7pm
Saturday, July 26 @ 8pm

They say: “You probably know that Abe Lincoln was the 16th US president, but did you know he was a joke teller? See Abe tell his amusing anecdotes and relate some of his historical decision-making moments before your very eyes, moments before he leaves for Ford’s Theatre to meet his fate.”

Suzyn’s take: I’m fairly new to theatrical reviewing, but I’m certain it’s never a good thing when a reviewer of a comedy act has “Fozzie Bear” underlined multiple times in her notebook. Regrettably, this is the case for my notes on Scott Renz’s “Abraham Lincoln: A One-Man Show.” From the first minutes of the show, when Renz told a joke about how a lady with a feathered hat who fell down reminded him of a duck because she had “feathers on her head and was down on her behind,” I was exchanging what-the-fuck looks with everyone else in the room under the age of forty.

The old people, however, laughed consistently throughout the entire show.

I was sitting in front of a cranky-sounding couple in perhaps their late fifties. Moments before the show, the husband had looked around the performance space, which is essentially a room with chairs and benches, and observed:

“We could turn our sub-basement into a theatre.”

His wife blandly responded “They’d have a heck of a walk from the metro.”

To me, that was funnier than anything that happened during the actual show, but sure enough as the lights came up the lady was saying how she wished she could remember all of those jokes to tell her grandkids.

Some grandkids out there just seriously dodged a bullet.

For the entire show Renz stands center-stage in his Lincoln hat, telling joke after joke, pausing after each to wait for the audience to laugh. The jokes have no connection to each other. The experience is exactly like being around my husband’s joke-telling great uncle from Clemson, South Carolina. To Renz’s credit, almost all of his jokes reference something Lincoln might actually have joked about, from P.T. Barnum to Temperance Committees to General Ulysses S. Grant. According to the autobiographical sketch Renz handed out, he gives talks to elementary school classes as Abe Lincoln and I totally believe he’s good at that. Lack of research isn’t the issue here—it’s lack of funny.

Renz ends with a passionate recitation of the Gettysburg address, which is tactically extremely clever as it is impossible not to applaud wildly at the Gettysburg address. But it also undermined the pass I wanted to give him on the lameness of his comedy. I get that not everybody has what I consider a sophisticated sense of humor, and yes, a solid third of the audience had a wonderful time, and I so want to say that’s enough. After all, there aren’t a lot of Fringe shows to which you can safely bring Grandma or little Stephanie, and this is one of them. Still, as the Gettysburg Address reminded me, Abe Lincoln was a really, really awesome human being. He kept America from tearing itself apart, he wrote words about justice that still resonate with us today, he worked to free a people from slavery and in the end, his actions cost him his life.

Abraham Lincoln deserves better than this show, and so do you.

See it if: You’re somebody’s goofy uncle, you like anecdotal humor or you’ve got a friend or relative who matches one of those descriptions and you’d like to share the Fringe festival with that person.

Skip it if: None of the above applies, especially if you’re David Herbert Donald.

Metro: In the State of Mind
The Baldacchino

Remaining Performances:
July 11 @ 9:30 PM
July 12 @ 3:00 PM
July 13 @ 2:00 PM
July 18 @ 7:00 PM
July 19 @ 7:30 PM
July 20 @ 1:00 PM

They say: “poetic non sequiturs …. punctuate illusive conformity …. minimalist … sounds effect … existential expression … on the platform into tangents. Through Dance With Improv Over Music From Concrete To State Of Mind. PERCEPTION WILL TRANSPORT YOU IN YOUR OWN REALITY.”

Chris’s take: In Zurich in 1917, a now-famous ensemble of Dadaists, among them Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara gave a performance in which everything went wrong. The lightening and thunder happened at the wrong times, the backdrops were mixed up, and so forth. Nevertheless the performers “gave the absolute impression that this was a special effect of the production,” and Tzara later wrote that the performance determined the entire direction of the Dada theater. Not bad for a train wreck.

And then there’s METRO: In the State of Mind, playing at the Baldacchino at Fort Fringe through July 20.

Neither a play nor a dance, the performance is an attempt to evoke the DC Metro. As the event begins, performers wind their way into the space: first, a pair of teenaged girls in school uniforms; then a sweating Marine repeating “I see the enemy everywhere” over and over; then a long-haired rock dude, sort of a live-action version of Otto from The Simpsons. The stage gradually accumulates still more characters, including a couple one might at first take for Fringe latecomers awkwardly taking their seats, but who turn out to be part of the show.

To say the performance has a plot would be to overstate the facts, but what is discernable is that everyone talks on their cell phones (they must all have Verizon!), there is a long train delay, leaving the passengers restless, and a father boards the train with his twelve-year-old daughter, who seemingly gets off the train when she’s not supposed to. As the piece progresses, the atmosphere grows more nightmarish, as a man wearing orange tape dispensers around his waist belts out “Happy Days are Here Again” with a booming operatic voice.

But I am giving this piece too much credit. It’s not at all clear that much of anything came off as was intended. Toward the end, a character best interpreted as the train conductor moved into the audience to talk to the stage manager, and I overheard them talking about sound tech problems. Is this part of the show, like the late-arriving couple? Soon the performance ended without the slightest inkling of resolution. We in the audience sat awkwardly, wondering if something else was going to happen–that couple was sitting house left, as if waiting for the other performers to return to the stage. Finally, someone was brave enough to clap. We applauded. The train conductor came out to explain apologetically that the director had been in the hospital, and they’d burned a new CD today but it hadn’t worked. Things had gone wrong. The other performers, presumably mortified by the collapse, never retook the stage to make a curtain call.

We the audience filtered out, and behind me I heard someone draw out the word “terr-i-ble.” The stated runtime is 50 minutes, whereas this performance clocked in at just 35. Whether the 50-minute version is worth the watch, I cannot say, but the 35-minute version was a mess in more ways that I can describe.

See it if: You’re one of those people for whom hope springs eternal.

Skip it if: You have a low threshold for production screw-ups.

Because:

(a) it’s the last performance, and I wanna see it

(b) it gives me an extra 40 minutes to read the new Harry Potter, which I just bought. At an indie bookstore, natch.