From Ali Ababwa to Sammy Davis and Osama

TheTyee.ca

"Political engagement, especially from the left, is no longer cool," says Thomas de Zengotita in his November 2003 Harper's magazine essay, "Tune on, Tune in," about TV talkland. "The right has managed an astonishing cultural-political reversal; they turned us into the establishment and themselves into rebels."

He doesn't leave us there, though. Zengotita offers a solution; he describes his vision for what could be a progressive talk show. Nothing preachy, nothing too earnest. "The show will be ... meandering, sardonic, comic-but serious, too, angry and bitter. It will deal with politics, policy and historical context as well as with popular culture."

That's Ali and Ali, thought Vancouver playwright Marcus Youseff as he read de Zengotita's story. Youseff, along with NeWorld Theatre artistic director Camyar Chai (also of Vancouver) and Guillermo Verdecchia, a Governor General's Award-winning Toronto playwright, are the authors of The Adventures of Ali and Ali and the Axes of Evil, a political satire of the "war on terror". The play opened in Vancouver this week, and will run at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre until Saturday, February 14, before moving on to Toronto and Montreal.

The play's two antagonists are stateless refugees from the fictional Middle Eastern country of Agraba. They need to make a quick buck in Canada, so they decide, however unlikely, on a travelling cabaret show. "They did a quick scan of what brown people do in Canadian theatre and they said: 'Okay, you do a play about identity politics,'" explains Youseff.

The multi-culti theme lands them some federal funding, and Ali and Ali take their show on the road-with no intention of staying on message. While entertaining you, they'll hoping you'll buy them a meal, too. They're satirizing for their supper.

Though set for the stage, this script fits Zengotita's bill. It is sardonic and comic. It gets angry and bitter at times, and not just at the U.S. policy in the Middle East but at Canada's role there, at the media, at U.S. involvement in other parts of the world, at Canadian funding for the arts.

It does this with puppet shows set at the White House, where Bush wants to talk about his glasses fogging up, by having the Gap sponsor one level of terror alert (code: boot cut) and a skit in which Tony Blair loses his soap up his English bottom.

In an interview with Youseff and Chai, a.k.a. Ali and Ali, the two are never far away from their characters. They've worked together long enough to finish each other's thoughts. And like Ali and Ali, they can't go for long without a joke.

LM: There's Ali and there's Ali. How are they different? Where have I met these guys?

Youseff: I think it helps to know about the conception of the characters. About 10 years ago, Camyar and I were touring with the Theatre for Young People, and they-Ali and Ali-were a game that we played with each other.

Chai: Marcus and I, we don't really look alike. We have similarities, but we don't look alike. But so many people we knew would mistake us. They'd say, "Hey Marcus, how's your kid?"

"Well, actually, I'm not Marcus, I'm Camyar." And that was the first time I experienced what I had heard others say, that black people look alike or Chinese people all look alike. And that got us thinking about the place of the Middle Easterner in North America.

Youseff: It was playing out the stereotypes of bad Arab cliches, of bad Hollywood movies with bad Arabs. There was this tremendous release in acting them out.

I used to teach kids for a long time. And I remember there were classes of 10 year old girls, and all they wanted to do was act out ads. Commercials. And everybody at the schools would say, "No, you're not allowed to do that. It's bad. Advertising is bad for us." And I thought, What the hell? And we would do them, and they would be so full of joy. There's something about taking on whatever it was ads were to them. And when we would play those Ali and Ali games, that was the same feeling I would have. Let's take this on. Ha!

Chai: Ali Hakim, my character, came from the Persian character in Oklahoma, the Rogers and Hammerstein musical.

Youseff: And Ali Ababwa is in the Disney movie Aladdin. When Aladdin gets his wish, Ali Ababwa is the name of the Prince he becomes.

Chai: They're both kind of peddlers, hucksters, very slippery. So we re-appropriated them. But also, in the Middle East, there are so many different ethnic groups. For instance, I'm Iranian-Persian.

Youseff: Dirty Persian, I call him.

Chai: And Marcus's father is from Egypt, so his father is of Arabic heritage and he's a Christian, so he's an Egyptian Copt. Then within Arabs, there are all different peoples. And Persians are like, "We're different from Arabs," but when the Arabs invaded, of course we got all mixed up. So it's complicated, and we exploit that in the play. Ali and Ali: one is Persian Muslim, and the other is Arab and Christian.

LM: So the people who come to this play with a certain amount of understanding and knowledge are going to get...

Chai: Way more confused.

Youseff: One of the fabulous things about the play, is that, for the first 20 minutes, I'm blue for no explanation whatsoever. I'm blue and we're doing all these skits-da ta da! But then we tell the story of why I'm blue. We're conscious that the average theatre goer is not going to come in with a deep understanding of the various factions at work in the Middle East.

LM: Now you have to explain why you're blue.

Chai: It happened one night in Agraba, their home, this mythical country that is cobbled together from everything that's happened to middle eastern countries. With the aid of the U.S., the religious fundamentalists take over. There are the Sammis, who are a fictional sect of Muslims in Agraba who worship Sammy Davis Jr. And there are minority Christians there who are Copts. That's real. So the Sammy police persecute the Copts: they dip their heads in blue dye.

Youseff: The funny thing about this is that after my interview with another journalist, he went, "So that's real. The blue dye thing happened, right?" And I said, "Oh my God, are you kidding? We made that up." Now that is really exciting.

Chai: We have the mythical day when this dye thing happens, and we called it Coptellnacht. And we had this big discussion, are we crossing the line here?

LM: And that's what satire has to do. Still, you mention Shia Muslims and their belief system, and Sunnis who "believe in something else," in the same line as these imagined Sammis worshipping Sammy Davis Jr. What are the Muslims in the audience going to think? Who's is going to be angry and what are you expecting to hear?

Youseff: I went to the Canadian Arab Heritage festival to read from this play, and I was so scared that I was going to get killed and -not literally, but panned. But people laughed and laughed. They loved it. Toronto's Arab community was totally digging it. They got the joke.

LM: You tell so much of the story of the Middle East, of both events that go underreported and the emotional truth of what life is like there, so there's this implied criticism of the media.

Chai: I can't articulate what's happening, so I do this play.  We have a puppet show that is our take on what we think goes on between Bush and Rumsfield and what we think these guys are up to.... I'm interested in seeing the other side of them, the guy side. So we stick it to them, that way, but we do it to ourselves, too. Partly, rude jokes are in there because I'm kind of a rude guy myself, so I'm trying to be honest with the audience. If I'm going to criticize the media for misrepresenting these guys, I don't want to stand up there as the standard bearer of seriousness myself.

Youseff: There's a bright light and the media gets attracted to it. That's the media's job. And these characters are way outside the power, as far you can imagine. They are travelling around the world with $200 they got from the United Furniture Warehouse of Nations and some dog-eared UN identity cards. They're trying to do a show so they can make enough money so they can eat that night. That's something we can do, that the media can't.

LM: At the same time, some media try to do it. There are sources, books and journals and websites you used to put this play together. It's like the phone is ringing, and everyone has call display and when it reads "Here's a story about the Middle East, or Spies, Lies and the U.S. decision to enter Iraq," the average person decides not to pick up.

Chai: I don't want to say that people are stupid. But in North America, we don't have time to think. Our lives are jam packed and somewhere in there you try and get information. Take the Hutton inquiry that exonerated Tony Blair, and well, that's all the headlines said. There's a lot more to that story than just that. A lot of people don't get that, it's not that they're stupid. The "news" is just not the venue to take the time and look at all the details. Well, in the theatre, we can. You're there for two hours. We can take one point like that and spin it and look at it from different angles.

LM: Can we talk about the decision to put Osama in the play as a character?

Chai: At first, when we were writing this, I was genuinely scared. That was the climate.... We thought people would boo, and that people would walk out.

Youseff: And I love that now he's become kind of institution, in the way anything becomes an institution. So we treat him like an institution.

Chai: What's interesting is that I learned a lesson for myself, about the Osama hysteria. That I really got sucked into it....

LM: Some of the funniest satire focuses on funding, and how tough it is to secure funding for theatre in Canada, and the search for private money. Ali and Ali are sharp critics of everyone, like Pfizer, Dow Chemicals, GM. But I get the feeling they're not that picky about where the money comes from to support their show. If these companies came calling on NeWorld, would you take their money?

Chai: Absolutely, one of our donors is Imperial Tobacco. I can say that, right?

Youseff: Yes, we take money from Imperial Tobacco. [Cigarettes] kill lots of people. [To Chai;] We should put that joke about them back in. Why did we cut that?

Chai: I don't know.

Youseff: You were the lead on cutting it!

Chai: No I wasn't.

Youseff: You were so!

Chai: Well. I want to get money again from them next year. [Laughing.]

LM: The play makes me laugh my head off, especially seeing your live delivery in rehearsal. Reading the script, though, I felt depressed. There are lines that fly by, like when one Ali asks the audience, "How much do you want to donate to this cause? How many of my direct family members do you want to see die?" Later you talk about Al Queda needing an image change, a re-branding, just like the rest of these American organizations. Everything feels very messed up. I know that humourists are, by definition, angry.

Chai: Not me. I'm optimistic. I go back to that Mark Twain quote-and I work this in to the play-where he says: We laugh to keep from crying. Things that are happening, the things we talk about, are depressing. But I don't want to leave people feeling that there's no hope.

Youseff: I think there's a tension in the play in the laughter at things that are absurd, that do piss of us off because they're so ridiculous. But I don't think there's any point in getting depressed and going a-wahwahwah. But do I think that the vast number of people in the world live in circumstances that are way more challenging than we can imagine, in ways that are somewhat linked to our massive consumption of resources? Yes, I do. And we have to find ways to acknowledge that. The show is about laughter, and it's an attempt to acknowledge those things in a way that allows us to laugh and be human. Or give it up the bum to Tony Blair.

Chai: There was this experiment they did in the '60s about learned helplessness. They tied up these dogs and they would zap them and they couldn't get away. It was horrible. Then later they take the same dog and they didn't tie them up but they had some short obstacle to hop over to get to safety. But after they had been zapped, they wouldn't take off. It was learned helplessness. I feel like there's a learned helplessness in privileged society.

LM: You do a great job playing with the language and culture from the "war on terror." You have your twist on the embedded journalist, which I won't give away. I realized that so much new language has come out of the "war on terror," like "total information awareness," and "regime change" and "homeland." I'm already used to hearing so many of these terms that I forget they're new and invented.
 
Youseff: That's part of what the show's about. There's a barrage of styles and a barrage of information in the show. Take the Poindexter line. His name goes by and people will say, "Poindexter? What?" It's deliberate because it's the way we experience these things. How can you keep track of all of this shit? You can't. There's no way to make sense of this...

Chai: ...so-called "war on terror".

Youseff: This so-called "war on terror". Exactly.