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Part One
Little does anyone know, that when an opportunity to test your skills arises, the effect that opportunity will have on you. How quickly energy falls into place when a challenge ignites the imagination.
In June, 2004, I picked up a voice mail from Liz Smailes of the Prelude production company in Germany. She had been trying to reach me, and urged that I contact her immediately. Liz, and her partner American Voices, sponsor international jazz festivals in Europe and Asia – most recently in Thailand, where Liz helped raise money through a concert for the victims of the Tsunami.
We arranged to meet in Manhattan in a café, and then moved on to the lobby of the Fashion Institute; an appropriate setting, where theatrical costumes are on display in abundance. Here we discussed the project in depth. She wanted to hire me to write a stage adaptation of Kurban Said's highly regarded novel, "Ali and Nino" – an Azerbaijanis work that has now been translated, at last count, into 25 languages - including Braille.
Why me, I asked? Why not hire an Azerbaijani writer to do the job? For one thing, Liz responded, she planned to stage the play in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, with performers who speak both English and Azeri. My work training performers and directing in Turkey, Bulgaria, and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, qualified me for the job. I would also train a young Azeri assistant director, who would then take over the directing chores for a planned annual festival surrounding Ali and Nino in Baku. It sounded like a tall order, to say the least, and a challenge that both whet my appetite and kept me on my wit's end. Not a bad place to begin.
What did I know about Azerbaijan? Hardly anything, if anything: I did know that Azerbaijan resides in the Caucasus above Turkey; on the west, Armenia, where a war in the divided Karabakh region is still going on. To the north of Azerbaijan sits Georgia; on the east rests the Caspian Sea (reported to be one of the largest inland seas in the world); and in the south and southeast respectively, Turkey and Iran. Iran (Persia in the novel) continues to this day to be a source of confusion and antagonism in the western world, especially in the United States, but not necessarily in the eyes of the Muslim world. Within shooting distance of Azerbaijan are Russia, Kazakhstan, and Chechnya (the names of the nations nearly immobilized me). The sheer volume of land and history in the Caucasus, the cultural matrix of each nation, astonishes the imagination. How could I even conceive of the distances, much less the history and regional complexity of the Caucasus – as is, as it was, or as I would have it be?
When Betty Blair, the editor of Azerbaijan International, a highly informative and intriguingly illustrative magazine, sent me historical photographs of Baku, CD's of Azerbaijani music, and a variety of covers for the novel published in an amazing array of languages, I was hooked. Her support gave me the courage to begin.
In early July, 2004 in Toronto, Canada, I spent five mornings in a lovely garden of a bed and breakfast off Bloor street reading the novel. I had no idea about how I was going to transform the novel into a play. Before I got halfway through my initial reading, I was impressed and started writing the play before I finished the novel. One shouldn't do that, right? But here I was taking the liberty of doing just that. Following hunches, jumping back and forth between chapters, high lighting passages, using stars and arrows to pinpoint one major incident to the next, I searched for a skeletal grip on the shape of the play. Writing the play while reading the novel is not as far-fetched as it seems. In very real sense, I was reliving the process through which the author created the work. Absorption in the characters and events of the novel, the struggle to get it right, and put behind doubts, led me to take the risks necessary to maintain inspiration. Inspiration is not the last call for alcohol; it is the first step in writing a draft. You prepare to make mistakes and roll up the mistakes later.
The play, like the novel, takes place between 1917-1920 in Baku, an oil rich city, and a crossroads between east and west; including the regions of Karabakh, Daghestan, Georgia and Persia – the later a powerful influence on Ali Khan Shirvanshir, the hero of the novel. Ali Khan is a young Muslim aristocrat of the Shiite faith; intense, romantic, patriotic and volatile. His love, Nino Kipiani is a bright, witty, high-spirited 17-year-old Christian girl. Born and educated by Russians in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, Ali struggles throughout the novel to discover his true identity: Am I Asiatic, or a Westerner? Nino, on the other hand, knows who she is. Of Georgian heritage, and also educated in Baku, Nino matures from a naïve girl to a young woman of backbone and emotional depth - all within three years.
I divided the narration between the mysterious author, Kurban Said, and the leading male character, Ali Kahn Shirvanshir - for a good reason. The author, Kurban Said, is a person with multiple identities that have yet to be resolved. I chose not to focus on the controversy. I was more interested in the mystery of the novel than the mystery of the pseudonymous author. The novel stands on its own feet, whoever the author might be. A divided narration is a jumping off place for the action of the play. A contrasting theatrical device that enabled me to focus on the identity crisis of the hero, Ali Khan, and the national crisis of identify that created the nation of Azerbaijan. Ali and Nino's intense romance, tested by historical events, generates a message of tolerance and cross-cultural understanding. I felt that the substance of the novel is remarkably relevant for today – in more ways than one.
Listen to Kurban Said, like the Stage Manager in Our Town, talking about Baku, circa 1917; the setting for the opening of the novel and the play:
"The two towns, one inside the other, like a kernel in a nut. Outside the old wall, was the Outer Town, with wide streets, high houses, and its people noisy and greedy for money. This outer town was built out of oil that comes from our desert and brings riches.There were theatres, schools, hospitals, libraries, policeman, and beautiful women with naked shoulders. If there was a shooting in the Outer Town, it was always about money. Europe's geological border began in the Outer Town, and that's where Nino lived. Inside the old wall - Ichari Shahar - houses were narrow. Curved like oriental daggers. Minarets pierced the mild moon. So different from the oil derricks the House of Nobel had erected...."
When Ali speaks of the old town, Ichari Shahar (pronounced ee-char-EE-sha-HAR), originally a 12th century citadel, built like a circular maze, he speaks with absorbed passion - and a touch of youthful, romantic contrivance. A contrivance that eventually plays itself out in unexpected ways in a major event of the novel: an abduction – but not by Ali Khan.
"What was it to me that there were other towns? Other roofs? Other landscapes? I loved the flat sea, the flat desert, and the old town. The noisy crowd who came looking for oil? Found it, got rich, left again? They are not the real people of Baku. Oh no, they don't love the desert. I will go to Moscow. To the Lazarev Institute for Oriental Languages. I'll be miles ahead of the Russians. It would be hard for them to learn all the things that are second nature to me. And I will marry Nino. Even though she is a Christian. If she refuses? I will throw her across my saddle, and off we will go over the Persian border to Tehran. She will give in, what else can she do?
And then again, Ali, meditatively:
"Our old town is full of secrets and mysteries. I love the soft night murmurs. The hidden nooks, the little alleys, the moon over the flat roofs. The hot quiet afternoons in the courtyard of the mosque with its atmosphere of silent meditation. God let me be born here, a Muslim of the Shiite Faith. May he be merciful and let me die here - in the same house where I was born. Me and Nino. A Christian who eats with knife and fork, has laughing eyes, and wears filmy silk stockings. A wise rule demands that a man should keep away from women when he stands at life's crossroads...."
Theatre is the art of achieving presence on stage; Ali Kahn achieves that presence instantly. The contrast between the mysterious Kurban Said and Ali Kahn is like counterpoint in music. Kurban Said speaks in well-shaped sentences; Ali Khan speaks in his own voice. Ali's passion for his home town, and his way of life, goes beyond his religious beliefs and stirs our interest in his paradoxical nature. He learns how to love a young woman with a set of beliefs different from his own. An intriguing leap in understanding that adds to the impact of his status as a figure to be reckoned with.
The struggle for identity is at the heart of the action in the play. It is action that I imagine as being continuous, contiguous and open; on a multi-layered stage, where performers move from one locale to the next by simply walking into a scene. These shifts in time and place mirror the shifts in the novel. What would happen, I thought, if Ali Kahn stole the lines from Kurban Said at the climax of the play, when the Bolsheviks attacked Baku, and occupied Azerbaijan for more than 70 years, from 1920-1991? The very idea, stealing lines from the author? Why would he do such a thing? Why not? At the climax of the novel and the play, Ali Khan takes a stand for himself, for Azerbaijani independence, knowing full well they are one and the same. He puts his life on the line, and loses it. Sound familiar?
Truth can be stranger than fiction.
Ali Khan no more needs the mysterious figure of Kurban Said than Hamlet needs the mysterious figure of Shakespeare. He is what he is when he does what he does, and that's the way it ought to be on the stage. There is nothing "make believe" about it. I found myself rediscovering Nino, who, at the climax of the novel and the play, is the mother of Ali's child. Nino has lived through war, separation, and dislocation, and at the end of the play, feels a terrible sorrow when Ali goes off to war. She knows she is faced with their inevitable and fateful parting. Till death do us part…
I started to listen to Azerbaijani Baliban and Persian music. I knew that listening to indigenous music from Azerbaijan would teach me a lot about what I don't know. Then I began to weave musical notations and sound effects into the script, to establish mood and aural dimension. Music along with dance, puppetry, mime, poetry and hopefully, a native visual perspective, are the theatrical elements that I felt will make the novel work on stage. In the next two segments of this journal I hope to explore that with you. For further information about Baku and Azerbaijan, surf the unique website of Azerbaijan International: www.azer.com
Look for Part Two in the April issue of Scene4.
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