The Art of Character: Nadia Manzoor's "Burq Off!"

Or How a British Pakistani Upstart Turned Herself Inside Out

By Sheana Ochoa

If you're like me, you're fascinated by actors who can transform themselves on stage and play multiple characters convincingly in a sitting. That's acting. The inimitable Marlon Brando, who died ten years ago, said that acting is not an art, it is a business, but anyone watching his oeuvre of films would disagree. Let's agree that acting is a craft, like any art, that must be practiced and honed. Happily, once in a while a new talent comes to us with such presence and authenticity, the artistic merit of the work cannot be denied. Nadia P. Manzoor's one-woman autobiographical play Burq Off! — which breezed into Los Angeles for a mere three-day run on its way to San Francisco-is one such ennobling and humanizing tour de force.

It's also hysterically funny.

Nadia Manzoor in her one-woman show, Burq Off!

But let's save Manzoor's performance for last, because theater is a collaborative effort, and if one of the technical components that makes Burq Off! so extraordinary had been lacking, the experience would have been significantly less stellar.

Burq Off!  is one of the rare plays where the technical aspects from lighting to set design are ingeniously incorporated into the play's plot and character development. With a set of one table, three chairs, one long piece of saffron orange fabric used as Manzoor's costume (changing her into a hunchbacked relative or a scary Islamic studies tutor) and one sheer drape falling from the ceiling into a circular net, director Tara Elliot creates an entire universe that travels from a middle class Pakistani home in England to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The table alone is alternately used to signify the play's different settings, from the Manzoor's dining table, Nadia's dorm room, a bar where she falls for a charming Irish bloke, and her mother, or Imma's, hospital bed. In this last case, during a scene change from dorm to home, Imma, who has cancer, is too weak to turn the prop back into the family dining room table.

The sound designer, J.X Randall's seamless cues are barely noticeable in their subtlety and precision, but they too transport us in place and time from a London nightclub to the chirping birds of sunrise. To discuss the way in which sound design serves character and plot development, one need look no further than the central character of Nadia herself. We meet Nadia when she is five years old and already dreaming of becoming an astronaut, as a way to spirit away from the home where adult movies are forbidden, sex is never discussed, and her twin brother is free from a girl's responsibility to someday make a man "very, very happy." As Nadia grows up negotiating her orthodox Pakistani home with the liberal, western attitudes of her English counterparts, she questions her identity as a woman living between such divergent worlds. When the family travels to Mecca, she discovers the "freedom of a burka," finally fitting into the culture that surrounds her. There in the midst of these pious pilgrims, her dear mother declares, "You look so beautiful when you're all covered up," which rated a big laugh with the audience we caught the show with.

Later, when Nadia sneaks off to Majorca and borrows a bikini from her clueless but hip English girlhood friend, she finds "freedom in a bikini," again liberated by cohering with her fellows and surroundings. In both scenes, Nadia's freedom is symbolized by a free-flowing Bollywood hip hop dance (which as with all her characters, Nadia manages to make humorous through an assortment of comical facial expressions that rivals Jim Carrey's for elasticity). The music and movement create an indelible metaphor for freedom without jarring the audience from the narrative, which in less expert hands would be the case in a straight play.

The most intriguing and enjoyable aspect of Burq Off! is not knowing exactly where the narrative is going and yet being rewarded with the protagonist's character arc, the villain's (at one point we wonder if brother Horam is going to hurt or kill Nadia or her Irish boyfriend) detestability, and the reinforcement of the theme without being transparent such as the scene in the hospital when Nadia summons the courage to tell Imma about her forbidden love with a white man and Imma responds with approval, echoing Nadia's girlhood desire to be an astronaut in order to escape her oppressive home where "authoritative patriarchs lay down their own law in the name of Allah."

Playing twenty-one characters, Manzoor seamlessly illustrates women's confining world in Islamic "culture," a word in the play that has little to do with language, food, and rituals, and everything to do with societal expectations of women maintaining the honor of the family. "It's our culture" drones her father every time he wants to explain why tradition trumps individuality. Never is Manzoor funnier than when she channels the old man.

In one of the rare preachy lines of the play, Nadia tells the audience that that year 5,000 Muslim girls had been slain by their own family in "honor killings" in the West for failing to adhere to strict Islamic tradition where modesty and marriage are concerned. Yet this pronouncement is necessary to convey the very real possibility that Nadia's life is in danger as she challenges her cultural norms. The theme of an eastern girl's loyalty to family chafing against a longing to embrace western ideals of emancipation is not new, but I've never seen it tackled with such brilliance and acuity as in Burq Off!.

The play travels to London in September and there is talk of a theatrical run in the new year. 

— • —

Sheana Ochoa is the author of the biography, Stella! Mother of Modern Acting, and writes about theatre for a variety of publications.  This review originally appeared in the Levantine Review on July 21, 2014.