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written and directed by Mani Soleymanlou

Orange Noyée, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto

November 27-December 1, 2013

“De quel milieu culturel suis-je issu?”

The solo play about cultural identity is one of the more common subgroups of solo play in Canada because Canada has become a nation of immigrants.  More than half the population of Toronto was born outside Canada.  Over the years we have seen solo plays that portray characters, usually the actor, as torn between two cultures.  Among others, plays have asked what it means to be a white male Jamaican-Canadian (Jamaica Man by John Blackwood), a gay male Italian-Canadian (Making Love with Espresso by Lorenzo Pagnotta), a gay male Ghanaian-Canadian (Obaaberima by Tawiah M’carthy), an Indian-Canadian woman (Fish Eyes by Anita Majumdar), a Chilean-Canadian woman (Chile Con Carne by Carmen Aguirre), a male Jewish Canadian (Three-Ring Circus by Daniel Thau-Eleff) and a male Iranian-Canadian (Mahmoud by Tara Grammy) played by a woman. 

Now Mani Soleymanlou, an actor born in Tehran, brought up in Paris, Ottawa and Toronto and resident in Quebec brings us his autobiographical solo show Un (One).  It premiered last year in Montreal in French, had its Toronto premiere this year at SummerWorks in English and now plays as part of the season of the Théâtre français de Toronto in French with English surtitles.  The main difficulty of the cultural identity solo show is how to find universality in the specifics of the life of the actor/subject.

Un ranks with Obaaberima as one of the most successful manifestations of this kind of show partially because Soleymanlou has been an immigrant several times – an Iranian in France, a Franco-Iranian in Ontario and a Franco-Iranian-Ontarian in Quebec.  The question he has is what this accumulation of identities adds up to.  Does it add up to one identity or many?  If it is many, how does that affect his point of view?                

Soleymanlou deals with the problem of the cultural identity play up front.  His primary point of departure is when he is asked to participate in one of the “Discovery Mondays” in Montreal where students at the National Theatre School who are recent immigrants, give a presentation about their cultural background.  (Soleymanlou does not miss the irony that in Quebec he is considered a “recent immigrant” even though he has been living in Canada for thirteen years.)

Given his peripatetic upbringing, he finds he can’t say what his “true” background is.  In every place he has lived he has been regarded as an outsider, especially, he points out, in Quebec.  He knows what he will be expected to say – something about the history and literature of Persia – but he knows nothing about it and even buys a book to bone up on what is presumed to be his own heritage.  Having been brought up by non-practicing Muslims, he knows he can’t speak with authority about Islam.  He tells us his memories of childhood visits to his relatives in a peaceful Iran, but he knows that the Iran of those visits is far removed from the Iran of today. 

He gives an instructive survey of Iran’s recent history – the Anglo-American led coup d’état in 1953 that overthrew the popular prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and installed the Shah Reza Pahlavi because Mosaddegh had nationalized Iran’s oil industry, the 1978 Iranian Revolution against the Shah led by Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 in which up to a million Iranians were killed and the 2005 presidential elections in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner despite the majority of the popular vote going to his rival.

The major point of this history and his imagining of the lives of his contemporaries “Il” and “Elle” back in Iran is to illustrate to us and to himself that his life in Canada has cut him off from the major historical events since the Iranian Revolution that have made Iranians in Iran very different people from the person he is who has grown up in such security.  The internet which he regards as a waste of time has become a weapon for young Iranians who use it to post videos of daily outrages so all the outside world will know.         

Ultimately he feels that he is the sum of all his past identities without feeling linked to any one more than the others.  He senses that this leaves a void in him that people with a less complex past do not have, but he feels that this void is not a bad thing since it impels him to question the world around him.

Soleymanlou’s set consists simply of 35 modern chairs neatly arranged in a symmetrical rectangular lattice of seven by five as if it were the waiting room at a government office or the seating for an formal meeting.  Just by delivering his lines while seated in one of the chairs, Soleymanlou emphasizes that he is just one person of many as well as, more specifically, one Iranian who is present with us unlike all those of his generation who are back in Iran or dead.  Later with the aid of Erwann Bernard’s clever lighting, Soleymanlou turns this array into the plane taking his family to visit Tehran and, gradually destroys the pattern as he describes the upheavals in Iran he has seen only in internet videos and the upheaval in himself in trying to cope with his non-participation in the struggles of his contemporaries.

Soleymanlou takes some odd risks in the first half of the 70-minute piece.  His recital of his past in straightforward chronological order of events with little commentary risks making his interesting life seem as boring as possible.  Only in the second half when he envisions the difference between himself and those living in Iran now does the piece increase in movement and drama climaxing in an amazing final monologue in which Soleymanlou mixes the three languages of his background in an emotional outburst of defiance.  The very beginning of the play, where Soleymanlou restarts the action several times as if he and the stage manager were not quite prepared is meant to highlight the play as a play, but doesn’t really work and should be omitted.  We can tell pretty well from the nature of the “set” that we are seeing a play.

Once he gets going, Soleymanlou shows himself to be a dynamic storyteller and a wry social satirist with incisive remarks about all the places he has lived.  He is also a comic as in a great sequence where he criticizes the blind obedience the Ayatollah Khomeini demanded by playing Little Peggy March’s 1963 hit “I Will Follow Him”.  Soleymanlou’s message that lack of a single identity is energizing rather than debilitating is quite unlike the usual conclusion of cultural identity plays and presents a possibility that Canadians in general could usefully explore to resolve the perennial question of the nature of the Canadian national identity.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Mani Soleymanlouin Un. ©2012 Orange Noyée.

For tickets, visit http://theatrefrancais.com.