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Fallaci.
Fallaci. Written by Lawrence Wright, directed by Oskar Eustis. Performed by Berkeley Rep.
I'd never heard of Oriana Fallaci before I went to see this play in three acts, which surveys her life and work and her turn to Islamophobic "clash of civilizations" fundamentalist rhetoric beloved by neoconservatives after 9/11 and doesn't come up with any easy answers. I liked the play, but I also had issues with it.
Some of these can be attributed to it being a world premiere--though Fallaci's cancer is a leitmotif throughout, it's totally unclear what kind of cancer she had, which is confusing given that in the play as in life she blames Saddam Hussein burning the oil fields of Kuwait for her developing lung cancer. That was a minor note; more important was the fact that the foil character, a young Iranian-American journalist, feels at times more like a caricature than a real person. Particularly given the arc of her development in the play--ably symbolized by her sartorial transition from short skirt and sleeveless blouse to full-on chador in the final act--I had problems with this. (It doesn't help that the performance of the actress in question was, I thought, a bit wooden in the first act.) It seemed to me too pat, too easy (and I particularly didn't like the very final bit at the end, about Emilia) in a lot of ways that were questionable.
It's hard not to admire Fallaci for her lifelong commitment to fighting tyranny wherever she saw it, regardless of her tendency to embellish her narratives after the fact. The play exploits this tension between her courage and her Islamophobia very productively; she was fascinating, uncompromising, and compelling because of that. At the same time, though, I know that I wouldn't be anywhere near as willing to cut Fallaci or the play any slack if it were about, say, a man like Christopher Hitchens. And I guess my problem with the play is that in the end, in the person of the Iranian-American journalist and her relationship with Fallaci, it seems to come down on the opposite side of the scale.
I'd never heard of Oriana Fallaci before I went to see this play in three acts, which surveys her life and work and her turn to Islamophobic "clash of civilizations" fundamentalist rhetoric beloved by neoconservatives after 9/11 and doesn't come up with any easy answers. I liked the play, but I also had issues with it.
Some of these can be attributed to it being a world premiere--though Fallaci's cancer is a leitmotif throughout, it's totally unclear what kind of cancer she had, which is confusing given that in the play as in life she blames Saddam Hussein burning the oil fields of Kuwait for her developing lung cancer. That was a minor note; more important was the fact that the foil character, a young Iranian-American journalist, feels at times more like a caricature than a real person. Particularly given the arc of her development in the play--ably symbolized by her sartorial transition from short skirt and sleeveless blouse to full-on chador in the final act--I had problems with this. (It doesn't help that the performance of the actress in question was, I thought, a bit wooden in the first act.) It seemed to me too pat, too easy (and I particularly didn't like the very final bit at the end, about Emilia) in a lot of ways that were questionable.
It's hard not to admire Fallaci for her lifelong commitment to fighting tyranny wherever she saw it, regardless of her tendency to embellish her narratives after the fact. The play exploits this tension between her courage and her Islamophobia very productively; she was fascinating, uncompromising, and compelling because of that. At the same time, though, I know that I wouldn't be anywhere near as willing to cut Fallaci or the play any slack if it were about, say, a man like Christopher Hitchens. And I guess my problem with the play is that in the end, in the person of the Iranian-American journalist and her relationship with Fallaci, it seems to come down on the opposite side of the scale.
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I loved the play while watching it, and am glad I saw it. And I don't think (for me at least) that it made me like Fallaci more than is appropriate. My big concern is about inventing a fictional character to balance an historical one, and especially inventing a very marginalized fictional character to balance a relatively privileged historical one.
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I definitely agree that her clothing changes came out of the story, but the story itself felt trite and stereotypical to me. Like you say, the marginalized versus privileged dynamics--and whose views get confirmed in the end by the narrative--felt very ishy.