Behind the Burqa at Yale Rep

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by christopher grobe | Oct 24, 2007 9:53 am

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Posted to: Arts

A woman dressed in black undulates to the distinctive tones of the Turkish saz, smiling slightly. Behind her, video projections show disorienting close-ups of—what? Skin? Limbs? At times, she seems to retreat into the dance, to disappear into herself; at others, she catches the eye of her audience and holds it. The dance has begun to crescendo—when abruptly it ends. Loosing a dismissive “tsk!” the dancer quickly pivots around and hustles upstage, away from the audience.

This scene served as a wordless transition between two scenes in The Veiled Monologues, which began its five-day run at the Yale Rep’s New Theater Tuesday night. This incidental vignette captures well the complex tone of the play as a whole: intimate yet evasive, earnestly sexual yet wryly detached.

The Veiled Monologues, performed in English by Dutch actresses of Turkish origin, is director Adelheid Roosen’s answer to The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler’s frank exploration of female sexuality. While performing in a Dutch production of Ensler’s play, Roosen decided that Muslim women needed their own version of such a play. But this time, it would have a dual purpose. This play would serve not only the female Muslim community; it would also educate Western audiences about the experience of a female in Muslim culture. It would replace lazy assumptions about Islamic women with an understanding of the richer, messier truth of the matter.

Roosen criss-crossed Holland, interviewing Dutch Muslim woman about life and sexuality behind the veil. In some places she had to meet secretly with women outside their homes, while in others she was invited in for a family meal. Eventually, she had gathered upwards of 70 interviews, and she began to piece them together into a series of monologues for the stage.

The monologues themselves form a varied and arresting bunch. They run the gamut from intimate accounts of sexual discovery to heart-wrenching testimonies of sexual violence—from the hilarious satire of a too, too timid Western lover to the baffling and poignant story of a girl whose mother inspects her and (mistakenly) decides that the girl has lost her virginity.

Roosen’s actresses deliver the monologues with well-measured verve and pathos. They have an uncanny ability to layer anger, nostalgia, and pride into their discussions of the triumphs and injustices of being an Islamic female. But more important that each individual interpretation of a voice and the stories it tells is the palpable community that these actresses form among themselves—as an onstage audience for each other’s work and as Islamic women who have shared in the pleasure and outrage of which they speak. Though the stage, with its white carpeting and austere black furniture, resembles an ultramodern Western living room, this ensemble infuses with the atmosphere of a hamam (a Turkish bathhouse, described in more than one monologue as a site of female community and bodily openness).

As this contrast between cold Western decor and warm Islamic culture exemplifies Roosen’s effort to complicate simple distinctions between the two cultures. Instead of the West’s stereotypical permissiveness and the Islamic world’s stereotypical oppressiveness, Roosen often gives us exactly the opposite. In fact, the play begins with a striking monologue about a Dutch woman who converts to Islam and claims to enjoy greater sexual intimacy in her adopted culture. But The Veiled Monologues never descend into utter relativism; rather, they go just far enough to disorient the audience and force them to look afresh at the supposedly hard-and-fast delineations between cultures.

The constant stream of video images behind the stage, created by Titus Tiel Groenestege, greatly augment this effect of disorientation and fresh sight. Projected on a long, thin horizontal screen, Groenestege’s video images blend recognizable images—fingers stroking a cheek, a mouth open in a silent scream—with indecipherable bodily textures.

The videos continue in fluid sequence until, during the final monologue about a woman attempting to rekindle her and her husband’s romance, actress Nazmiye Oral removes her shirt and slowly begins to dance. At this point, the video cuts out—the elicit gaze gives way to confident, deliberate self-presentation.

As this final dance comes to an end, Oral, with a simple gesture, offers herself to her husband—and to us. It is a beautiful and deeply felt moment of vulnerability. In moments like this, The Veiled Monologues allows us to look not only behind the burqa, but also behind what John Keats once called “the veil of soul-making”.

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