Tucked into the corner of an expansive artist studio that he rents in Edgewater with 13 other creative friends, Martin Yousif Zebari spent the latter half of 2020 sewing and writing. When he wasn’t designing and constructing “entire gaudy outfits” for himself or hooded scarves for his friends, he managed to write his first full-length play. He says he did it on a whim, but after spending a Tuesday morning in conversation with Zebari, I am convinced that very little, if anything, about the play or the playwright is impulsive.
One of the first things Zebari asks me after we’ve both logged into my Zoom room and exchanged hellos is whether I’m Assyrian. “Yes!” I exclaim. It’s one of the reasons I am drawn to his play, eager to watch it and ask him a long list of questions I’ve managed to trim down enough to tackle in an hour.
Layalina
Through 12/19: Thu 7:30 PM, Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre.org; free, but reservations suggested.
Zebari is from the same ethnic community as me—the same ethnic community that’s often mischaracterized in the media and misunderstood at dinner tables. We both happen to be hundreds of thousands of miles from our birthplace and we find ourselves here, today, exploring and contributing to the American theater canon in a way that has the potential to be transformative for our community.
There is a moment of unspoken understanding, a conduit of shared emotions and histories we’ve both experienced and nuanced pasts we can only begin to know about the other. Two days before, I watched Zebari’s play during its opening performance. After debating my seat for a good five minutes, I finally chose house center and sat delighted as familiar words like “dolma” and “kubbah hamith” were casually tossed around on stage and carefully selected samples of Linda George 90s pop played over the speakers.
Zebari wrote Layalina during the height of the lockdown in November 2020. In the span of six months, the play underwent two workshops—one at the Goodman Theatre and one in upstate New York—a staged reading in New York City, and an offer for a staged developmental production at the 17th annual New Stages Festival at the Goodman.
Born in Baghdad in the early 90s, Zebari moved to Syria when he was six and immigrated to the U.S. at the age of nine. Halfway through college at Illinois State, he took a semester to study abroad and decided to transfer to a college in the UK where he completed a BFA in acting.
It was after his college graduation, when he enrolled in a year-long internship in Michigan, that revealed the limited capacity of the roles in which he was being cast.
“That experience kind of made me realize my place in American theater as a SWANA person, and specifically as a queer SWANA person,” he says. “It seemed like the world had pinned me as I have one thing to offer, which is to play horrible stereotypes of our people such as terrorists, angry dads and angry brothers, and abusive husbands.”
After getting COVID-19 and going through what he calls a traumatic experience in his community, he decided to practice self-care by gifting himself a playwriting workshop. Zebari and seven other playwrights met every Saturday for four hours over Zoom. On the first day of the workshop, he came in with the first five pages of Layalina written, and over the course of eight weeks, he completed what would become act one of his play.
As an Iraqi-born American Assyrian, Zebari is a member of the SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) community. SWANA is an endonym used by individuals with connections to the geographical region who wish to decolonize identifiers like the Middle East. For Zebari, writing a story about a family who starts off in Iraq and ends up in the U.S. meant exploring a lot of themes and experiences that are often painted with too broad a stroke, including the lack of subtlety in the language and words used to describe his community.
“To me, SWANA was a noncolonial version of that terminology. Middle of what? East of what?” says Zebari. “It’s all in relation to whiteness and to the western perspective.”
At Goodman, the SWANA identifier is being used for the first time on their website and in printed material, ever since Layalina’s script started a dialogue about the acronym.
For this reason and others, Zebari underscores the importance of finding the right home for a young play. At the Goodman, he says the development of his play has been handled with “care and sensitivity,” from getting him the director he wanted (Sivan Battat) to making sure his entire cast was SWANA.
“When it comes to talking about the region, which so often happens in conversations of equity and inclusion in the theater, Iraqi, Assyrian, Lebanese, Syrian—all of us face the same thing, which is inaccurate, harmful representations of our people and our stories,” says Zebari. “And not being given the agency to lead those stories.”
Zebari says accurate representations of SWANA families means allowing and exploring the inevitable moments that unfold after trauma and pain and war take place. Instead of tokenized portrayals of immigrants traumatized by the pursuits of warring nations and one-dimensional iterations of angry Iraqi uncles, Zebari imagines tenderness and love. And at the same time he imagines disapproval and disappointment and pain.
“I’m drawn to family stories,” he tells me. “I’m drawn to how a family operates and how a family hurts each other while they love each other. And I find that to be very true especially in SWANA culture.”
In Layalina, there is something very real about older sister Layal’s ability to progress and shed the traditional standards that don’t work for her, but still misunderstand and cause real pain for her younger sister Marwa. The duality of that existence, the ability to live in fully realized albeit contradictory spaces, is a true expression of the human experience. And Zebari captures it all so well.
“And I think a lot of queer folks have built up a wall against writing their own stories when it comes to the intersectionality of their queerness and their SWANA-ness because it’s a point of contention for a lot of people—especially their families.”
Even as he talks about it, saying that “queer SWANA perspectives are so missing from the American theater canon,” I’m not sure Zebari realizes how much he is changing the canon with his brazen approach.
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