Florida Weekly: One day a socialite, the next day a refugee

The world premiere of ‘The Refugees’ at Gulfshore Playhouse

January 18, 2024

BY NANCY STETSON, FLORIDA WEEKLY
nstetson@floridaweekly.com

How do you cope when you’ve lost your home and feel displaced?

When your entire world has been turned upside down?

In Brent Askari’s play, “The Refugees,” the Suttons, a wealthy white New England family, find themselves unexpectedly living in the Middle East.

“‘The Refugees’ is about a family from Connecticut, a WASP-y, preppie family that, after an American Civil War, find themselves as refugees in an unnamed Middle Eastern country,” says Askari.

The play’s enjoying its world premiere at Gulfshore Playhouse in Naples, where it runs through Feb. 4.

Askari was inspired by his own upbringing.

“My mother was an Episcopalian WASP from New England and my father is a Shiite Muslim from Iran,” he says. “I’ve grown up with these two cultures. When we were living in Texas, relatives started coming over from Iran after the revolution. I was very young and I didn’t quite know what was going on. All of a sudden, my cousin was living with us.”

“People would be coming over, and… I was hearing stories about why people had to leave, the things they had seen. I was also meeting people that maybe were working in retail in a store, but back in Iran, they had this very prestigious job. I was seeing people whose life circumstances had changed dramatically.”

“So the germ for this play was: what if it had been the other way around and it was my New England WASP-y relatives who had found themselves in another part of the world? That was the initial seed of the idea.”

That led to more satirical and dramatic ideas; the play is a mix of the two.

“A lot of the people I knew coming from Iran were in a very privileged situation back there,” he says. “They were leaving behind a life with wealth and prestige. The ones that weren’t able to get their money out early, found themselves stripped of all that. I was seeing people who really had a kind of shellshock; they didn’t expect this would ever happen. They never expected to be a refugee. They had had very comfortable lives, they had positions in society. They didn’t think this would be their fate.

“So, putting a family from Connecticut in that situation, it’s unimaginable. It was unimaginable to a lot of people I saw when I was growing up.”

Beginnings

Askari wrote the play on commission. He’d won the National New Play Network’s Smith Prize for Political Theater; they commissioned him to finish the play. Gulfshore Playhouse chose “The Refugees” to be part of its 2022 New Play festival, but the event was interrupted by Hurricane Ian. It was put in the following festival, where it was given a reading in 2023.

Gulfshore Playhouse thought so highly of the play that it was also put in its 2023-24 schedule as a full production with Marshall Jones III directing it again.

“He was part of the first workshop,” Askari says. “We get along really well and have similar aesthetics and styles.”

The Play Festival was the first time the playwright was able to hear the dialogue read aloud by actors. He tweaked the script but didn’t add any new characters or scenes.

“Nothing drastic on a structural level, but a ton of changes with nuances,” he says. “I think within this play there are a lot of different elements: a satirical element, comedic element, dramatic element, and also a bit of a genre element, with crime. One of the big things has been trying to tonally calibrate it, so that all these elements can fit into the same world and not be jarring.”

When he saw the first tech rehearsal with costumes and sets and props, “it was incredible,” Askari says, “because this play is so much a fish-out-of-water story, and is so much about these people not quite fitting into the environment. Now that the sets are up, that aspect really started becoming apparent in ways you don’t get through a reading. When you see signs in Arabic and the architecture, and this very preppy family from Connecticut, it creates a dimension that wasn’t present in the reading. When you see the juxtaposition, it hits in a different way. What a profound effect; all those elements really are quite powerful.”

Modern-day Civil War

When Askari was writing “The Refugees,” the idea of a Civil War in 21st-century America was “almost a science-fiction element,” he says. “Now, at the time the play is being produced, we have politicians evoking that, a civil war. It’s been fascinating and chilling to see how you can’t help but see the play through a slightly different lens, based on what’s happening in the world.”

In this slightly-in-the-future time, European countries have maxed out their quota of American refugees; other countries don’t want to take them in because Americans are seen as being too violent.

“This family feels like they’ve waited too long,” Askari says. “Maybe they could’ve gotten into England or France, but those places filled up. That’s the back story of guilt and frustration: why didn’t we get out earlier?”

“I saw that with relatives. If people came over sooner, they were able to transfer their money out. But other people waited and at that point weren’t able to get their money out of the country but maybe could’ve done so a year and a half earlier.”

The benefits of not fitting in

Askari has the ideal background to create this play.

Based in Portland, Maine, which he describes as “a vibrant theater city,” he’s a member of the Mad Horse Theatre Company. (His wife, Reba Askari, is the artistic director of The Children’s Theatre of Maine.)

Being an actor and making others’ words come to life onstage helps inform his work as a playwright.

“On a sort of subconscious basis, the fact that being on stage and learning lines and saying dialogue, that all ends up informing when you sit down to write a play,” he says. “I know a lot of times, when people are teaching playwriting, they’ll encourage students to take an Intro to Acting course, just so you know what you’re asking people to do. (So being an actor) absolutely informs being a playwright.”

His childhood and life as a Persian American have also enriched his plays, inspiring unique works that only he can write.

“I think it’s very common for kids of mixed-race marriages to feel: I’m not quite (one or the other),” he says. “As far as the Iranian side, I’d never been to the country and didn’t speak Farsi. That sets you apart from those relatives. And then my mother’s side of the family: there was a picture taken of me with my aunts and uncles. There’s a sea of blond hair and blue eyes, and then these two little noticeably darker faces: me and my sister. You’re very aware of not fitting in.”

“It’s difficult for a kid. You’re always an observer, and you always share the outsider perspective, even with your own family. I feel it more with extended family, but I’m different even with my own family, not just with larger society.”

But as he’s grown older, he’s been able to use that perspective to spur his creativity and his craft. What he may have seen as a negative as a child has become a positive as an adult.

“I think as I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen the real benefits of that,” Askari says. “At the time, you grow up with the sense: I’m not quite this, I’m not quite that. I thought about this recently: it’s hard to engage in any kind of tribalism. You grow up thinking: I don’t fit into any tribe.

“It’s a benefit I wasn’t aware of. When you can’t say ‘I’m 100% in this group, this is me, this is who I am,’ it forces you to look at things from a different perspective.”

SOURCE: https://naples.floridaweekly.com/articles/one-day-a-socialite-the-next-day-a-refugee/