The early scenes of the new Broadway play “Kite Runner” are spoken primarily in Dari, the Persian Afghan dialect, but the action clearly represents an American art form.
“This town isn’t big enough for us two!” Shouts 12-year-old Amir to his best friend Hassan. The two boys pretending to be cowboys love Western American drama, especially “Rio Bravo” with John Wayne. After the standoff, Hassan charges Amir, who trips him and Hassan trips and falls. They wrestle, roll, and laugh—fortunately they are unaware of the dark forces that tear them apart immediately.
The place is Kabul, the year is 1973, and the two actors who play the boys are actually adults.One of them, Amir Arison, 44, a recent veteran stage actor Leaving NBC’s hit series “Blacklist” After nine seasons, portray Amir as a boy and an adult.
The show, scheduled to preview on July 6th at the Hayes Theater, is based on Khaled Hosseini’s popular 2003 novel of the same name. It’s the story of Amir, a privileged Pashtun boy who grew up with his father, my Hazara son, Hassan. After a timid act as a child, Amir looks back on most of his play and spends to atone for not coming to the help of his best friend.
By playing Amir as both a child and an adult, Alison jumps between playing his childhood memories and talking about them from the present. He never leaves the stage.
That may be a daunting part, but Alison, who clenched his teeth on the Off-Broadway stage before appearing as an FBI counterterrorism expert in about 160 episodes of the “Blacklist,” agrees. is.
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Still, while having lunch recently, he said that this role was the greatest challenge in his professional and personal life. “In the theater, you cut a vein,” he said. “You give your voice, your body, your heart and your soul.”
Matthew Spangler, who adapted the story to the stage, describes its role as follows:
Report from Afghanistan
Casting director Laura Stanczyk and cultural consultant Humaira Gilzai ensured that Afghan actors would be auditioned (and they were easy to do), but Amir’s role was ultimately Israeli. I went to Alison, an American. He grew up in Florida, the son of an Israeli immigrant. His mother was born in a Holocaust survivor refugee camp.
In March, when Alison landed at Amir’s audition, his first call was Ghilji, The family fled Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. He didn’t know she belonged to the show, but he used to work with her twice. Once was the role of a Pakistani army colonel on the west coast of JT Rogers’ Blood and Gifts. To his accent.
Allison is a chameleon, Gilzai said: he plays Afghanistan, Arabs, and Americans, “transforming into what you need to be him.”
“The Kite Runner” was first staged at San Jose State University in 2007. There Spangler teaches performance research. Its first professional production took place in 2009 and has been performed in multiple countries since then.Broadway production and director GilescroftIs based on a version run at the Nottingham Playhouse in 2013 and at the Wyndham’s Theater in the West End three years later. (play “”Most of the time, it works at the level of a childish parable and is a satisfying schematic, but it’s frustratingly simplified, “Stephen Dalton wrote. Hollywood Reporter Review.. )
The book was published two years after the expulsion of the Taliban from the 9.11 attack and the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan, and has attracted millions of readers around the world. Now, almost a year after the United States withdraws from Afghanistan and the Taliban regains power, the play arrives on Broadway.
Hosseini’s story gave the reader a rare internal perspective on Afghanistan and the intricacies of life there, but as Allison pointed out, immigration, power, redemption, and a universal relationship between father and son. I also have a theme.
“The story of immigrants never disappears,” director Croft said in an interview. “Most of us have it somewhere. Somewhere in our background, someone is better or safer, even if we don’t experience it ourselves. You would have traveled to get to the place you think, so we’ll bring it. “
So is Hosseini, whose family sought political asylum in the United States in 1980 after Soviet troops invaded the United States. “I have a vision and I feel strongly about what’s happening in Afghanistan,” he told The Times last year. (In “Kite Runner,” Amir and his father also fled Afghanistan, first to Pakistan and then to the United States.)
Along with Allison, the cast has deep Middle Eastern and South Asian roots. Ajita GanizadaPainted Amir’s wife Solaya, and Salar NaderPlaying tabla on stage throughout the show, both are Afghanistan.
“It’s really encouraging to see how devoted they are to the delegation,” cultural consultant Ghilji said of the cast members. “I think they really, really, really want to get it right because their culture isn’t so much communicated.”
Still, putting non-Afghanistan in a central role was not a light choice.
“What rocked it for me was that he had the inherent warmth, generosity and fragility, all of which are the qualities of the character,” Croft said of Allison’s casting. rice field.
In leading the cast and creative team, Ghilji guided the actor through Dali’s pronunciation, including characters and town names. Dialects are scattered throughout the script.
An actor recently asked Ghilji about body language in Afghanistan. What should he do if he loses in the competition? She advised her to make a thumbs-up move, Middle East insult.. (I replaced it with another gesture later, so the translation doesn’t lose its meaning.)
This work was Gilzai’s first involvement as a consultant, and she worked closely with Spangler and Croft to reassess the text. In an important scene in Act II, Asef (Amir Malakuru), whose neighborhood bully became a member of the Taliban, curses Amir when he returns from the United States to Afghanistan.
“But not all America is bad,” Asef tells him. “Who taught me how to use the Stinger missile? Your CIA”
This line was born from a conversation between Ghilji, Spangler and Croft and was added to this production. It recognizes the role that US foreign policy has played in the militarization of various groups in Afghanistan.
In the final episode of “Blacklist”, Allison’s eccentric character, Alam Moitabai Told his colleague He is planning to leave the FBI and move to New York. In New York, you’ll see the “Broadway Show” in particular. (The episode left a vacant room for him to return.)
On Twitter, the actor explained to fans that he was a big fan of Hosseini’s novels, had his first play in his second year, and couldn’t abandon his lifelong dream of appearing on Broadway.
His role is “the most non-heroic hero I’ve ever seen,” he said in an interview, but he personally makes sense of it in a way he didn’t expect. I came to see it as a thing.
At the beginning of the second act, Amir and his father were hidden in a fuel truck and fled from Afghanistan to neighboring Pakistan. Soviet soldiers stop the truck, and father and son do not know if they will live or die.
“I lost it because I thought about my grandparents the other day. That’s what happened to my grandparents,” Alison said. “I’m not Afghanistan, but that’s another way I can connect.
“So I hope — and I think every audience should take what they want,” he added.
