Artist Z Bell sang the song of Azhar Ahmed and turned the experience of Patrick Morrison into poetry. “The American Dream don’t shine at night,” Bell said. “The American Dream doesn’t teach you what’s right.” Ayse Coskun, on a park bench, talked about what it is to miss home even as you create new ones. Ismael Al Hraaki talked about the help he got in arriving from Syria via Jordan. “I want to show all these people it wasn’t a waste of time taking care of me,” he said. He wants to become a docfor and help take care of people right back.
These and many more stories made up The New Haven Play Project, the first production in Long Wharf’s “emergent” fall season, called One City Many Stages.
Like theaters across the country, Long Wharf can’t open its traditional space due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Its leadership also felt the need to respond to the strong demand for social justice in our current political moment.
“We felt like this was an opportunity to show up for the community,” said Jacob G. Padrón, the theater’s artistic director. “We want to respond to what’s happening in the world around us, and we want to center resilience…. We want to be there for our neighbors.”
This year’s installment of the New Haven Play Project — unveiled on Friday night, but available now on Long Wharf’s YouTube channel — was created in partnership with Sanctuary Kitchen, Storytellers New Haven, and the Muslim Coalition of CT. Directed by Sharece M. Sellem, the hour-long film replicates the intimate storytelling that characterized past productions and translates it more than effectively to the small screen. The stories the subjects tell allow a glimpse, sometimes funny and sometimes tragic, into the realities immigrants face in adjusting to and living in a new country, and the memories that people carry with them no matter where they go.
Two decades ago Ayse Coskun was granted a visa to study in the United States from Ankara. She happened to be flying to the U.S., however, on September 11, 2001. Her plane had three hours left in its flight when it was rerouted, first to Canada, then to Frankfurt. The passengers saw the collapse of the towers on TV only when they got off the plane. “And the passengers, the people around me, started screaming and crying.” Coskun said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such shock, disbelief, and fear in my life.”
They spent the night in a hotel and were told the next day that Al-Qaeda had claimed responsibility. “There was one older Turkish woman in the crowd, and I saw her slowly sliding her headscarf down, and tie it around her neck, because obviously she was scared,” Coskun said. The airline gave them three choices. They could return home, wait indefinitely in Frankfurt for permission to fly to the U.S., and wait to make a decision. “We were also given one phone call,” Coskun said.
She called her mother. Coskun didn’t want to go to the U.S.; she didn’t know what to do. Her mother said, “if God protected you here in your hometown, he will protect you wherever you go. Don’t be afraid.”
“All of a sudden, everything changed,” Coskun said. All the fear and uncertainty “lifted, and I was free.”
She made it to Houston three days later and started working in a laboratory doing AIDS research. “Every day I was learning something new. I was ecstatic,” she said. She worked 60 to 65 hours a week and studied English on the side. She learned cultural nuances “so I would be understood properly and could understand,” she said. “It took me eight years to learn that the word ‘interesting’ could mean so many things.”
She studied people’s facial expressions, the way they walked. And in the aftermath of 9/11, as a Muslim, she started doing interfaith work, building cultural bridges, with people from all walks of life.
“You can connect with anyone if you are really willing to do that,” she said. “I think I built a family in Houston. I built a home brick by brick…. with the courage I got from my mother.” She pointed to the pictures of her family she keeps with her. “It is impossible not to miss them,” she said.
After seven years in Houston, she got a job in New Haven. The moment she was leaving Houston, she felt the same as she’d felt leaving Turkey. “I was leaving so many knowns” and “embarking on a new journey,” she said.
Now she has been in New Haven for 12 years. “This is my home. I have beautiful people here,” she said. If she were to leave, “the same burning feeling in my heart will return.” The Turkish word for that, she explained, was gurbet, the sense of being a migrant and an exile, of being homesick while moving on. “But I think I am up for even more challenges,” she said.
With acting by Aaliyah Pearson, Claudette Beamon told her story about growing up in Jamaica, where people talked about the opportunities that lay in wait for those who emigrated to the United States. “I was beyond ecstatic” when she was told she could come, Beamon said. She landed in Bridgeport; it was winter and everyone was bundled up, hurrying past one another. It was the beginning of letting go of myths about what America was like. She worked four jobs sometimes while getting through college, and learned to fight with roaches in her apartment. She finished college, and went back for more education.
“The streets are not lined with gold,” she said, but “this country allowed me to live out my dreams.”
Thabisa Rich talked about the “biggest scare of my life,” which she experienced in her hometown of Elizabeth, in South Africa. Her grandfather had died and the family were preparing for his funeral. She was hosting and “trying to stay strong,” she said. As she was sleeping, “I heard sounds and voices,” she said. She thought she was dreaming at first, but then realized it was people in her house. She got up and found her aunt with her hands on her head, screaming and crying. Her brother, she said, was “hanging” — from a belt or a rope, she couldn’t say. She grabbed his legs. Someone else cut him down. She had never felt so helpless.
Her brother had had — and, she said, continues to have — a rough life. But “that moment made me realize that everybody is hanging from a thread,” she said, “an invisible thread that nobody else can see.” Sometimes we don’t even see it, she said, “even though it’s around our necks.”
“You are worthy of a second chance,” she said.
Aida Monsoor told the story of making the hajj to Mecca in 2008 with her family. Her children then were 11 and 13. She described going to the Kaaba with her son, Yusuf. Set in the corner of the Kaaba is the Black Stone, set into place by Muhammad. Yusuf wanted to try to kiss the Black Stone. Aida agreed.
“Then I saw the crowd,” she said. It seemed impossible to get too close; the crowd was too dense. A policeman stationed nearby spotted them. He “came down from his perch,” Monsoor said, and said “where are you from?” Monsoor explained they were from America. “He smiled and picked up Yusuf,” Monsoor said, and took him to the Black Stone. Yusuf leaned in and kissed it, “and then he has this huge smile on his face.”
“To really understand his smile you have to really know Yusuf,” she explained. He loves history and knew the story of the Black Stone. Taking him on the hajj cultivated a love of history and God, and a sense of belonging. And maybe he will take his own children someday, Monsoor said, “and continue this legacy.”
Fatema arrived at JFK airport from Syria via Jordan. She was told she and her family were going to Indiana. But an hour went by, and another, and another. They waited 7 hours. They found a man who could translate for them, asking the authorities many questions. “We were worried and very tired,” she said.
She learned that they were reassigned because the then-governor of Indiana had refused to allow Syrian immigrants into the state. “I did not expect that someone would violate my dignity once I was in the United States,” she said. She was told they were being placed in New Haven instead. There, Governor Dannel Malloy greeted them and told them they were safe. She got an apartment, and has now been living here for four years.
“I am lucky to live in New Haven,” she said. “I am happy, confident, and safe.”
“I hope that tonight is a bit of a preview of what’s to come this year,” Padrón had said in his introduction. “We have a lot in store. Some of it we know, some of it we don’t. But One City Many Stages gives us an opportunity to really be a partner and really show up.” He asked viewers to stay tuned for the theater’s upcoming new works festival and other “site-specific” work.
“Given all that is happening, rather that you coming to Long Wharf Theatre, we’re going to go to you, and that’s how we are trying to imagine the path forward,” Padrón said. “We have to throw out the status quo. We have to reimagine what theater can do. We have to reimagine the power and the importance of storytelling, and that’s the journey that we’re on together.”
“Long Wharf Theatre is your theater company,” he said.
