There’s the young, female Persian acquaintance, complete with a Brazilian Blowout and still-healing nose job, who backhandedly compliments Rostami on her more “natural” appearance. There’s the jingoistic white Texan man who refuses to believe that his friend is actually Muslim because, “he isn’t a towel-head.” There’s the overbearing, middle-aged Auntie who recounts at a mile-a-minute her pre-Revolution years as a fashionable maven of Tehran’s nightlife.
Though Rostami paints with broad strokes, she rarely loses sight of the characters inside these caricatures. The Texan bigot’s un-ironic declaration of love of country is later echoed by a first-generation Persian-American Uncle whose materialist bragging covers a genuine pride in his self-made success. And even though, during Auntie’s monologue, the laughs were audibly louder from the Farsi-speakers in the house, her grandstanding and nagging were immediately recognizable to anyone who has survived a meal with extended family.
The show’s press notes point out that Rostami conceived of each of her characters as a “number” in the musical theater or drag sense. Perhaps this, then, accounts for why each segment felt semi-autonomous, making Persepolis, despite Rostami’s technically smooth transitions, seem cumulatively longer than it’s modest one hour running time.
But this could also be a strategic effect. One of Rostami’s aims in Persepolis is not to present her life’s narrative A-to-Z but to push herself to inhabit, and at times undo, the narratives which have shaped her life. In one of the show’s strongest segments Rostami, dressed as a hejabi woman completely covered save for her face, performs a Chaplin-esque dance with just her eyes to an instrumental folk song. As the music fades and Rostami exits the stage, we see a video projection of the same covered woman’s face, nervously assessing the surrounding blackness of her robes, which now fill the screen. It’s as if she had been swallowed whole.
You could read this passage as re-presenting the oft-contested figure of the “veiled woman” as a sly agent of her own desire, while simultaneously underscoring the West’s continued exoticization of Muslim women as both erotic object and liberal cause célèbre. But such an interpretation, while certainly valid, conveys nothing of the palpable, almost painful ambiguity Rostami telegraphs in the space of a few minutes as she goes from silent clowning to uncomfortable silence.
Who is this woman to Rostami? What does it mean to don her garments? And, more so, what does it feel like? Persepolis is most powerful when it underscores the difficulty in answering these questions; or rather, when it takes stock of the often unexpected emotional and cultural baggage that comes along with playing dress-up, whether on stage or off.
For the show’s finale, Rostami-as-Mona emerges, a vision in gold and sky-high Lucite heels, lip-synching a brooding ’70s ballad by famous Iranian pop chanteuse Googoosh. It is a moment of triumphant pathos, which also makes it Persepolis‘s one true bit of camp.
The song’s speaker (translated lyrics had been projected beforehand as Rostami changed, silhouetted behind the video screen) recounts, almost mythically, of once hoping to return to the ocean from whence they came, but having become stuck in the desert, has transformed into neither sea nor sand but both: a swamp.
This closing image is a potent, if slightly melancholy, metaphor for conflicted love and cultural exile, both themes that surface time and again throughout Persepolis. It’s also a fitting one for Rostami’s current métier, drag, itself another form of hybridity.
Contrary to the breezy self-assurance of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” Persepolis demonstrates, with both humor and grit, that it’s impossible to traverse the distance between what we are born into and who we choose to become without plenty of blood, sweat and tears. A little glitter doesn’t hurt, either.
Persepolis, Texas ran July 15-17, 2011 at CounterPULSE in San Francisco.
