Haunting music plays as the lights come up across a minimal but
effective set with actors dragging colorful carpets loaded down with household
items back and forth across the stage. The audience is then introduced to a
family of three who are packing to flee Kabul, Afghanistan, while rockets and explosions
are heard going off in the distance. One rocket gets a little too close, destroying
the home and orphaning a teenager named Laila (played by Mirian Katrib). She is
injured and wakes to being cared for by a man named Rasheed (played by Haysam
Kadri) and his wife, Mariam (played by Hend Ayoub), who is immediately
resentful of the young girl who captures Rasheed’s affection and attention.
The 2007 novel “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Afghan-American
author Khaled Hosseini was first adapted for the stage in California in 2017.
It made its East coast debut at Arena Stage in Washington last month.
“No artist has done more to bring Afghanistan into the American
consciousness than Hosseini,” said Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith. “His
novels, which include the internationally bestselling ‘The Kite Runner,’ ‘And
the Mountains Echoed,’ and ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns,’ ask us to see Afghans
not as faceless statistics, but as human beings who love, struggle and yearn.”
Throughout the play, Laila’s life unfolds as flashbacks of
happier times that include a boy she grew up with named Tariq (played by
Antoine Yared), whom she secretly loves. After finding out about her parents’
death, she feels hopeful she can go live with Tariq and his family — but learns
from a man Rasheed brings to the house that they are all dead.
She quickly agrees to marry Rasheed — much to the annoyance of
Mariam — for fear of being sent to live on the street, and for an important
reason revealed later.
As Mariam and Laila learn to cohabitate as wives to the same
cruel man, they share stories about themselves and become confidants and eventually
friends.
In the first act, the audience learns that Laila’s somewhat privileged
life started out happy and she was loved and doted on by her parents. She now
lives in sadness and fear — especially after giving birth to a baby girl,
Aziza, that Rasheed barely tolerates and even tries to kill after a scene in
which Laila and Mariam try to flee the country and run away from the abusive
household.
Mariam shares that she started life in a sad situation as the
illegitimate child of a father who discarded and ignored her, and a resentful
mother who mistreated her and committed suicide. Mariam therefore saw marriage
to Rasheed, more than 20 years her senior, as an escape to a hopefully happy
life. This quickly sours as he abuses her after she miscarries multiple
children.
As time passes, the women lean on each other even more as “surrogate
mother and daughter.” They face challenges that include Laila becoming pregnant
with a son named Zalmai (played by Ravi Mampara), who is overly spoiled by
Rasheed; a now older Aziza (played by Nikita Tewani) is sent to an orphanage
due to financial hardship; and living under a Taliban-controlled country with
many of their rights stripped away add to the abuses they suffer.
The more than two-hour play only scratches the surface of the nearly
400-page novel, but the show “has the heartbeat of the book, and really focuses
on the journey of the women and their friendship,” said Director Carey Perloff.
“It’s rare to find a play about a female friendship and about generations of
women raising and caring for each other.”
Much of the story is heartbreaking, and it is compelling to see
the courage Mariam and Laila exhibit as they struggle to help one another
survive and come to truly love one another.
Watch out for: Scenes of war
including loud noises and flashing lights, beatings and mistreatment of women,
non-graphic sexual encounters, themes of suicide and murder.
If you go
“A Thousand Splendid Suns” runs through March 1 at Arena
Stage, 1101 Sixth St., S.W., Washington. For more info go to arenastage.org.