Full Run

We ran the whole play tonight!  Much to everybody’s relief, we discovered that it is not, in fact, an incoherent disaster when it’s strung together in the right order.  In fact, you might say it was great.

Tonight the part of Fadil the puppet was played by a blue oven mitt.  Adi’s puppet-voice alters depending on what he’s using, and the blue of the oven mitt brought out a touch of Grover.  You remember Grover, don’t you, boys and girls?  Fadil is extremely cute.

Nate’s bad Arabic was great tonight (though Lucy reminds him to go faster).  The problem we face with the play is: Quentin (Nate) and Hassan (Adi) speak Arabic in the play, but since the audience has to be able to understand it, it’s “translated” into English.  Hassan’s Arabic is represented by a fairly idiomatic English with direct translations of some frequently-occurring Arabic phrases.  (“God willing” for “Inshaallah,” for example.)  But, if they’re speaking English, how can we let the audience see how bad Quentin’s Arabic is?  My solution as a playwright was to write his lines in bad English.  “Bad English” comes in a lot of flavors, depending on what a person’s native language is.  In my experience, for example, English tenses are often difficult for Chinese speakers.  But Arabic tenses are simple, and an American would probably have more trouble with plurals than with tenses; unfortunately, as Becca points out, messing up English plurals makes Quentin sound like a moron.  So we try to strike a balance -- Quentin, when he speaks Arabic, has a small vocabulary and a stilted way of talking.  When he shifts back into English, he’s very colloquial, and says things like “I’m probably just, like, stuck in my undergrad slang.”  Nate helps the effect by pausing to search for “Arabic” words, and speaking fluently in “real” English.

Showing Off, Showing Space

    I mention to Adi that the name of Hassan’s puppet, Fadil, is spelled in Arabic with a dod (ص), or emphatic D.  Adi, who speaks Arabic much better than I do, rolls his eyes and says, “Oh, you enjoyed telling me that, didn’t you?”  I blush, embarrassed to be caught out showing off, and he reassures me that he’s just giving me a hard time, but he’s right; I am a show-off.  Ah well.  Dammit, people; I did a lot of research!  I can’t put all of it in the play, and it has to go somewhere.  So usually it comes spilling out of my mouth.  In truth, though: I think it’s all fascinating, from the list of items banned from import into Gaza to the relationship of Israel to the life and death of Yiddish, and I naively suppose that everybody wants to hear about it.

    Lucy directs Nate and Adi in a scene where Quentin and Hassan stand together in Hassan’s house.  She tells Nate to expand the borders of the house.  Initially, I find this kind of mysterious; earlier in the scene, we’d indicated that half the stage represented Jakob’s house in Tel Aviv.  But as Nate walks, or rather trots with Quentin’s puppyish enthusiasm, across the space, and Adi, with Hassan’s patience, strolls after him, I see what she means -- it’s like the effect in film where a split-screen slides away to leave a whole picture of a single place.  God, I’m glad they put up with me.