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cunyappliedtheatreblog · 5 years

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Alumni Spotlight : October Ramy El-Etreby (13′)

Photo: Emery Younes

What are you up to, Ramy?

These days, I am working as a teaching artist for a few theatre companies here in L.A.: the Geffen Playhouse as well as Center Theatre Group. I’ve been doing this work with them for a few years—I take students to see professional productions and then I lead workshops with them. That’s a very specific way in which I’m working. And I believe the MA in Applied Theatre has given me some very useful skills in doing that work.

I think this past summer hit six years since I graduated.

“This summer.” You had your show! Would you describe that?

So, I’m currently in the afterglow of having performed my solo show at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Throughout the whole month of June I did six performances of my solo show. It is a 55-minute long personal storytelling, memoir based piece of theatre in which I play multiple characters from my life, including my parents, my siblings and my best friend. These are all characters who tell a very specific story about a very pivotal time in my life- when I’m in my early 20s, like 22-24. So, I crafted this play that I’m very proud of, from a writing standpoint.

The show tells a compelling story, it’s funny, and it’s heartbreaking. Most of the audience would cry, which I see as an element of success. I don’t want people to cry, but if they’re moved by something I’m doing, sounds good to me.

It won at least one award.

It won a producers’ encore award. What that meant is that I was given the opportunity to do an encore performance. The last three of the five had sold out, so we added a sixth and that sold out as well.

Congratulations, Ramy. You mentioned you were basking?

I’m basking in the afterglow of this feeling that I created something important and beautiful and moving and it makes me want to do it more. So I’m thinking about the next steps…who do I send this to? Which companies across the country would maybe be interested in featuring this piece? It could be theatre houses. It doesn’t have to be in a traditional theatre space at all. It can be in a community center, at a university.

I’m thinking about readers knowing what the show IS. The blurb online is:

THE RIDE. After being outed publicly in the LA Times, Ramy’s world is turned upside down. As his relationship with his family becomes strained, so does his faith in God. THE RIDE takes Ramy down a dark hole where he loses touch with the most precious parts of himself. Featuring multiple characters from Ramy’s life: his Egyptian immigrant parents, his caring best friend, and his snarky “catterpist” (that’s his cat/therapist), THE RIDE offers lessons learned on Ramy’s bumpy road from self-loathing to self-love.

Photo: Lea Darjes

And, friends, the poster design, it looks like a fashion magazine cover—

—that’s exactly what I was going for! That’s funny. It’s compelling. Would you want to see that show?

Yes!

Maybe I’ll do it in New York. I did come to New York last November. I performed an early version of this in Queens and had many MA alumn come see. A lot of class of ’12 and ’13 was there, and saw it, and that experience in New York last year was so important for me to truly get behind the piece and see if it was worth developing further.

What would you say to yourself at the beginning of your process that you’ve now learned on the journey, that would help you know what it takes to make the work?

I think you have to really believe in yourself and believe in the piece. Truthfully—and it’s what I lead with what I’m most proud of—I think it’s a good piece of work. I invested a lot of myself in the craft.

To be able to perform it multiple times in the Fringe was such a gift. I don’t think it was until the fourth or fifth performance that I understood why it was that I wrote the piece.

Why did you write the piece?

I think I am trying to connect to my younger self. I told you the Ramy in the piece is between the ages of 22 and 24. And…I might get emotional…I really miss him [cries]. I really miss that guy. I lost touch with him and I feel like at this point in my life, I feel so far away from who my younger self was. You know…I lost him through things like trauma and hardship and numbing myself and detaching.

And the hardships that I refer to, they’re in the show. It’s not just about connecting to my younger self. It’s trying to make sense of everything that happened to my younger self that made me lose this person. I think I’ve never really processed the journey, truly.

Everything I’ve learned about healing from trauma is about, first of all, getting safe, and then being able to reintegrate the painful stuff that happened and look at it holistically, so that it’s all part of a story. There aren’t these gaps where the story just goes on freeze and can’t be experienced.

Yes. Yes. That’s very true. Thank you for saying that. My intuition was telling me to do it [the show]. My brain was taking a while to catch up. Because the show deals with some of the trauma from my past, it was very difficult to perform, from a personal—in front of certain people who were around me during that time. It was difficult for them to have to see me perform this thing. And I just kept opening up these old wounds and I was like, why am I doing this? Why am I reopening my trauma? Shouldn’t I just be moving on?

That stuff is stuff I still question. I think when it comes to creating theatre, and being applied theatre artists, you know, you always want to know what the political implication of your work is. And I just was very, as a solo theatre artist, you don’t want to be seen as seen as narcissistic—

Talking of the political implications, and talking about these pressures to not tell the story, I think about the double cultures of silence about being gay and being Muslim.

—Gay, Arab, Muslim—

It’s not neutral.

There is a culture of silence, and sometimes you wonder whether you’re…I feel like sometimes just by telling the story I’m already doing a revolutionary thing, and it doesn’t even matter what the story is. Just by having this queer, Arab, Muslim artist in the Fringe telling their story, and the story has to do with faith and god and all that stuff, I feel from a political standpoint that that’s amazing. And I’m very proud that I am putting work out there, that artists like me are putting their work out there. But, should Ramy be doing it? Should Ramy’s community be there to support him doing it?

Can I say, spoiler alert: yes.

Yeah? Yes. Yes. See, I guess, but you understand the questioning of it all.

The reason I’m so confident about saying yes is because you get to reconnect with joy and spontaneity and freedom that was silenced by the hurts that you explore in the piece.

Oh, that’s beautiful. I needed to have recorded that.

I’ll send it to you! And the show sold out night after night, so people were getting something, and I would dare to say that those tears were about their own reintegration.

[Voice breaks] Ah. Thank you for saying that, Michael, I appreciate it.

Yeah. Easy to see from the outside. And speaking of being out and about, you did this video, “Alhamdu: Muslim Hipsters.”

[Laughs.] The “Mipsterz!” Yeah. They’re doing this project in which they’re trying to feature fashionable, stylish Muslim people, in a sort of futuristic quality. I think they’re inspired by Black Panther’s Afro-Futurism quality. They want to do a Muslim futuristic musical art piece, and they started by shooting on the west coast, back in May. There was a big search for Muslim artists. I got personally invited, which was nice.

I’m grateful to be in it, because it does look amazing, and what a gift to be able to be a part of an art piece that showcases Muslims in a positive, joyous manner. Politically, I am here for that.

Photo: Mipsterz

It’s been a minute now, but you had a TIE piece that went to a conference or conferences some years back? It’s about the Arab Spring?

Yeah. We first did it in 2012, in our IDC class, we took it to Face to Face in 2013, and then to AATE in 2014. I know that Amy Sawyers-Williams (‘13) has taken it a couple of times locally in Raleigh, NC. She has found other artists to perform this process drama in North Carolina more than once. This piece has had a life beyond the program for sure. Michelle O’Conner (’13) did it with me in 2014 in Denver at AATE. I would love to create more work like that. But you want me to talk specifically about the creation of the process drama?

I want to hear you talk about the practice of applied theatre.

The teaching artist work that I have done here, post-MA, the one workshop that I am the most absolutely proud of, is the workshop that I led with students who went to see a play called Disgraced. I don’t know if you know this play. It won the Pulitzer for one thing. It was on Broadway, I don’t know, 2014, 2015. It was written by a Muslim-American playwright named Ayad Akhtar. The play has a Muslim-American protagonist who is a controversial character. Theatre companies across America in 2016, every company was producing this play, including Center Theatre Group here in L.A. And they could see that the play was controversial.

They were specifically looking for Muslim teaching artists to lead a workshop around the themes of the play with students at a youth summit in advance of them seeing the play. It was my first gig with Center Theatre Group. Three and a half years later, I’m still working with them. I’ll be honest, I’m really bothered by the fact that I didn’t get an opportunity to show my skills as a teaching artist until the company was doing a Muslim play and they specifically were looking for a Muslim teaching artist. Because I am skilled, and four years later I am still working with them.

The truth looks good on you, Ramy. Now, you said you were really proud about it [the workshop]. Why?

My personal opinion was that the play reinforces stereotypes and doesn’t challenge them. There are all these young students who are about to see it and for the most part I perceive them to be like, white American students and I don’t know what their prior knowledge is about Islam or Muslims. What do I do as a teaching artist? What do I do as an applied theatre artist? How do I get the participants to be critical of their position and their understanding and be critical of what they hear and to be critical of what they hear in the play?

I was very much inspired by some of the process drama [work] that Chris Vine led with us in IDC. I used so many of these conventions…the pre-text, there was a poem on the wall and that was the first thing they [the students] entered with and they were reading it aloud. Then I did activities asking questions around biases and prejudices.

I placed them all in role as “truth seekers.” I fashioned a room, I asked for a second room in which I delineated a sacred space for Islam. I asked the students to stay in the [first] room and they were looking at all these statistics, like pictographs on the wall about Islam in the world, where is Islam practiced, how many people…I said, “peruse this for the next five minutes, and when the buzzer goes off join me in the next room.” I asked them to take their shoes off. So they take their shoes off and they walk into this [second] room and the first thing they do is they see me praying. By the time I’m done praying (my back is to them), they’re all sitting there with their shoes off, waiting to have a conversation. I did that on purpose. You just learned a bunch of facts. Now you’re going to meet a real person.

I’m so proud of this piece. Look, it’s been over three years. I think I truly did the most applied-theatre thing I could in that moment. I used myself as a Muslim facilitator to be able to share what I considered a very important perspective. I feel like I was able to achieve this balance of me as this professional teaching artist and the students and the content of this play. I was able to weave all of that together in a very nice way.

Is there anything else you would want readers to know about you and your work?

Um. I would love the readers to know that I am 100% grateful and appreciative of the education that I got in the MA in Applied Theatre program. I believe that Chris and Helen create an atmosphere and a culture of questioning and always advocating for the participants and having very honest conversations about power, class and access. I’m so grateful to have had the space to learn and have important conversations with colleagues, because that has truly taken me through my practice here.

There are other applied theatre artists that I meet here who studied more locally, at a different institution, and… the truth is, they had a much more narrow curriculum. It was theatre of the oppressed focused and it was one year, I did it in two years, so I literally have double the working experience in terms of focusing on the field. I just learned more tools. The MA in Applied Theatre at the CUNY School of Professional Studies is a unique program and it’s very, very important. I’m so grateful I went through it.

Thanks Ramy.

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