Whereas tragedies are stories of subtraction, comedies depict a process of addition. In a tragedy there are fewer characters at the end of the story than at its beginning. All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, A View from the Bridge, all end with the passing of protagonists. At the close of Hamlet’s final act, the court at Elsinore is ravaged by elimination. And even when death is not a literal end, the tragic sense speaks to us of life’s inevitable loss.
Comedy, as tragedy’s opposite number, offers a depiction of life in the key of hope. This is why comedies so often end with marriage, a fulfillment that is more than a trope, an image of union and continuity, the archetypal precondition for the promise of new life.
It may seem strange to some for a play about the place of women in Islam to end comedically. For what, indeed, is funny about the troubling gender politics that obtain in so many quarters of the Muslim world? These would perhaps be the rightful subject of biting satire but certainly not of heartfelt comedy. But that is exactly what I hoped to bring off with The Who & The What.
I started this play as a dialogue with another comedy. The Bard’s Taming of the Shrew had always beguiled me, driven by a tension that seemed obsolete to the plights of modern men and women but speaking eloquently to my own experience of gender relations as a Pakistani American. One evening, in a New York cab, I reencountered Shrew in the form of an ad for Kiss Me, Kate. It was the spark that ignited the kindling I had been gathering for years. I had long been circling around the idea of a story in which a bright young Pakistani American woman attempts to separate from her father, with her deep filial piety, the circumstance of her mother’s death, and her own existential anxieties all working against her. She has found a way to proceed with the inner work incumbent on anyone wishing to individuate, but only by channeling her defiance, longing, and outrage into the writing of a book.
That book is no laughing matter: She is penning a humanizing, historically revisionist novel depicting an episode from the Prophet’s life, the circumstances around the so-called revelation of the veil. Her procedure is literary, but her challenge is something more than artistic. For her father’s religious devotion is part of the yoke she must throw off. Her book is, among other things, her instrument of rebellion.
For some time I had been preoccupied with the Prophet as a literary figure, his representation a construction that mirrored tropes from the Old and New Testaments. But any challenge to the received portrait we Muslims have of the Prophet is certainly not yet as primary a matter as the conflict that the challenge itself represents, a conflict familiar to us from the Rushdie affair and other similar controversies, and hardly the subject of comedy.
And yet, my long-standing preoccupation with the representation of the Prophet only came alive for me with the promise of a story about it rendered, as comedy is, in the key of hope. I have often felt that any good narrative idea is actually a convergence of three or four ideas, and in this case one of them was—decidedly—the notion of a story of addition, not subtraction.
So were these characters born and, as characters tend to do, they proved to have their own intentions. And yet, through their many unexpected reversals and revelations, one thing was constant: an abiding love between them that kept this story on comedic footing even as it turned darker and more unforgiving. A story about addition, then, but never without subtraction on its mind, one that completes with the comedic trope of a baby, but a baby whose arrival only seems to promise further dissonance ahead.
Perhaps this is as it must be, a tension embodying and expressing the inevitable loss that even the most redeeming act of self-creation occasions. Indeed, one of the perplexities of writing this play was the long process of coming to understand the fight at the heart of it: not just that of a daughter with her father, but that of my love for and my battle with my heritage, my family, my tradition.
Can we belong and yet be separate? Is the process of individuation fundamentally one of loss or gain? These are the questions the play is asking, and its comedic form more than hints at a response. For indeed, art seldom provides anything like answers, and yet, sometimes form is answer enough.
Ayad Akhtar
Los Angeles
June 2014