“Yasmina’s Necklace”

Playwright Rohina Malik has deployed elements of nearly every dramatic genre for her impassioned play “Yasmina’s Necklace.” From sitcom to agitprop, from farce to soap opera and from romantic comedy to intense melodrama, her play with its surfeit of both political and personal aspects is fractured to a fault. That it is also sincerely intentioned and often engaging helps the audience to stay apace with the romantic and familial tribulations of Sam (Cesar J. Rosado), a 30-something recently divorced American-born business professional who has decided to change his name from Abdul much to objection of his Iraqi father and Puerto Rican mother.

  

Recovering from a failed marriage and intent on maintaining a successful career in a racist environment, Sam is keeping his Iraqi/Puerto Rican as well as his Muslim heritage under wraps. This, to the dismay of his parents. 

  

In the play that begins comically with his outlandishly depicted father Ali (Eliud Kauffman) and mother Sara (Socorro Santiago) vigorously trying to make another match for their son with Yasmina (Layan Elwazani) an Iraqi immigrant. Her resistance to a match is as strong as is Sam’s. In marked contrast to Sam, Yasmina is committed to combating racism but also to making her past inform her activism. In addition, she has troubling memories of her distant lover.

Yasmina’s father Musa (Haythern Noor) is an Iraqi immigrant devoted to protecting Yasmina whose activism and imprisonment in Syria is partly channeled through her paintings depicting the horrors and the destruction of her homeland. Musa is also devoted to Kareem (Robert Manning, Jr.) the African-American Imam of the local Mosque whose presence and advice is welcomed. 

Dramatically  problematic is Yasmina’s fragile emotional state as are the flashbacks of her life in Iraq. These are too fitfully and ineffectively experienced and deserve more dramatic focus.  They appear with a seriousness, however, that is counter to the unconvincingly farcical behavior that defines Sam’s parents. 

The actors handle their assignments with skill and a willingness to go along with the play’s blatant mixture of theatrical tropes. Director Kareem Fahmy obviously had his hands finding a cohesive frame for a play’s mix of genres and also allowing Sam’s parents to become ethnic clichés. A more restrained approach to the parents’ unrealistic outbursts would be helpful.

Malik has evidently much to say and reveal about the state of refugees and the many displaced people of the world, especially as it relates to her own ethnicity. One comes away from the play with feeling that the reality being revealed has itself been displaced and sacrificed for the sake of entertainment. As inferred by the play’s title more meaningfully and explicitly is our need to cling to things and to memories when we are far from home.  

   

The production has a fine setting by David M. Barber that serves several locations both past and in the present and is enhanced by designer Cha See’s excellent lighting. Most noteworthy is that playwright Malik brings a fresh perspective to America’s multi-cultural dramatic landscape.