Curtis Brown Photography
The photo is of Adil Mansoor when he was a child, in Pakistan. The scene was a family celebration, and a relative, on a lark, dressed the boy in a fine women’s gown. The adult Mansoor regards the picture from a few feet — and a few decades — away.
He notes the irony that this photograph perhaps best represents the fullness of who he is, as a queer South Asian man, proud of who he is and where he’s from. The irony lies in the fact that he has perhaps never been able to fully be who he is since that moment. Especially for his mother.
The complex bond between mother and son is the central tension in Adil Mansoor’s Amm(i)gone, a funny, charming, and often tender one-person show co-directed by Mansoor and Lyam B. Gabel, produced by the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with Kelly Strayhorn Theatre, and running now as the final show in Long Wharf Theatre’s 2023 – 24 season, through June 23, at the Theater and Performance Studies Black Box at Yale University.
In its fleet 80-minute running time, Mansoor details the progress he and his mother — referred to as Ammi — are making in creating an Urdu-language version of the Sophocles play Antigone, and along the way, peels back the years of personal and family history to examine what happens when the love between a parent and child is in danger of being lost in translation.
Over the course of the play, we learn why. Ammi, born and raised in Karachi, is devoutly Muslim, and has only become more so with each passing year. Mansoor, born in Karachi but raised in the United States, has always known he’s queer and now lives with his partner Luke in Pittsburgh. In the hands of a typical drama, this setup would set mother and son up on a collision course for a major conflict, in which each character must choose between their family or their beliefs.
But Amm(i)gone isn’t a drama; it’s a document of real lives, being lived. Ammi doesn’t want to renounce her son, even if the way he lives his life doesn’t fit within the beliefs she holds close. And Mansoor doesn’t want to cut off ties with his mother or his culture. He sees how his love of theater was a natural outgrowth of his childhood study of the Qur’an. And he isn’t ashamed of who he is or where he’s from. Most important, as human beings, mother and son love and respect each other, like and appreciate each other, depend on each other.
So Amm(i)gone forgoes the fireworks and takes a more fine-grained approach. This is entirely a strength. In Mansoor’s detailing of the way both he and Ammi negotiate the tricky terrain they find themselves in, he creates a nuanced and aching portrait of two people who simply don’t want to let each other go, even when that means both of them must withhold large parts of themselves from one another, and both know there are certain things they can’t say, things they can’t do, if they want to go on. The project of translating Antigone thus provides a suitable frame for the play’s action and an effective counterpoint. Antigone is about a woman willing to die for her beliefs, and a state willing to punish her. If true reconciliation and acceptance is off the table, Ammi and Mansoor seek tolerance and balance, and will work to maintain it, knowing how tenuous it could be.
That the exploration of these themes is entertaining is due in large part to Mansoor’s script and performance. Mansoor’s monologue is peppered with jokes that Mansoor easily lands. Throughout, Mansoor keeps the tone light. He is engaging, sincere, wearing his vulnerabilities with knowing familiarity. It keeps the situation from ever feeling tragic, which makes its sharper points an extra pinch. Amplifying the monologue and its themes are overhead projections and recorded conversations between Mansoor and Ammi, and between Mansoor and a sibling, that offer further insight into what makes the family work (media design by Joseph Amodei and Davine Byon, sound design by Aaron Landgraf).
The set, designed by Xotchil Musser, offers another angle. Much of it is composed of large, ornate blocks that give the sense of being puzzle pieces, out of place. It echoes the quiet yet keen sense of heartbreak behind Mansoor’s and his mother’s willingness to keep their relationship alive. Somewhere buried in their struggle is the sense that it’s not them, but the world they live in that keeps them from connecting more fully. In a better, more tolerant world, all the pieces might fit.
Amm(i)gone runs at the Theater and Performance Studies Black Box at Yale University, 53 Wall St., through June 23. Visit Long Wharf Theatre’s website for tickets and more information.