“Radical Empathy”

There’s a theater group in my area that exclusively puts on new plays by emerging (and frequently local) playwrights and they recently performed one called “Radical Empathy.” This happens to be from a local playwright who has now done multiple plays with this group (I think it is his third). And I was so struck by this play that I wanted to write a full post on it, not just a This Is Beautiful quick thought, because it felt so timely and powerful, but there were also some serious flaws that I wanted to bring up.

The play starts with a sociology professor giving a TED Talk on empathy and highlighting how Americans should have empathy for citizens of Iraq. Rather than terrorists, he advocates for putting yourself in their shoes and viewing them as people. He goes viral and one Iraqi man ends up reaching out to him, the two develop a friendship as the professor gets the Iraqi man to speak as part of his class. Then tragedy strikes, the Iraqi man’s house is bombed by the US who thinks that he is part of ISIS, he is the only one to survive as his brother, niece, nephew, daughter, and wife are all killed. While the Iraqi man wrestles with survivor’s guilt and how to feel about the situation, the American tries to get him in touch with someone at the embassy who can say that this is a mistake. Eventually the Iraqi man speaks again at the professor’s class about his acceptance of the situation and the students persuade their professor to bring him to the US. The play ends with them taking a selfie together, and the picture of the real life friends is shown behind them.

First thing I want to critique, and this is major, is that the play has four characters. There are the two men and their wives. The wives, while acted out really well and very funny at times, really only serve as vehicles for the men and their friendship. The professor and the Iraqi man both use their wives to bounce ideas around and talk through things, but the wives don’t have a journey of their own. And that bothers me a lot, that they would be half of the cast but not nearly as present as characters.

Beyond that though, the staging did a really good job with using technology. Most of the communication between the men is either through Skype or a phone call. You get to see their reactions to each other while they direct their speech at a laptop or phone. I was a little nervous about this, but I think it worked really well in that you could see things that the characters couldn’t. It was a neat perspective.

I also wasn’t really sure what the ending signified. There’s a fight between the professor and his wife where the wife wants him to do more with his empathy, and that ends up taking the form of the professor talking about his fear of losing his wife with his friend. And bringing him to the US to speak, which is a more tangible form of friendship for sure, but I thought that also didn’t go nearly far enough. The Iraqi man has a line about how he cannot change the situation, and he isn’t mad at the Americans because he knows that they cannot do anything either. Which is a hell of a thing to tell an audience, that they cannot do anything, because I think we can and should be doing so much. Calling representatives, participating in civil disobedience, calling out Islamophobia, so much. And we were just told that best we can do is hope an Iraqi guy emails us to start a friendship. Just sits wrong with me.

Just wanted to briefly touch on the acting as well, it’s sad to say but the guy playing the professor blew everyone else out of the water. The Iraqi man was really stiff most of the show, he did not come off looking great next to an actor who had himself in tears at a key moment and knew how to command the whole space. The female actors were doing the best with what they had, but it was really his show. Such an excellent performance.

And then finally I want to end with how timely this all felt. We are in the middle of a genocide of Palestinian people that is being financed and carried out by American money and bombs. They are not terrorists, but are simply folks trying to live their lives in the shadow of Israel. It would be so cool if we took the great parts of the play to heart and started having empathy for them, and then did something with it.