10 years with Mona Mansour
As one gets older, the weight of time warps one's perception of the day to day, week to week, year to year. People ask me how long I’ve known someone and I honestly could not tell you - a few years? Fifteen? It’s anyone's guess. In the end it’s like, well we decided to continue the relationship huh? Because often people don’t. They grow, you grow, eventually one of you lets go. And then so many years go by and you think back, and you can’t remember why you let it go at all. Can’t remember how it started, can’t remember how it ended. This is what getting old is. To avoid this confusion, it can be useful to have sign posts, mile markers, touchstones to remind oneself how long you’ve known someone, why you know them, how you kept it going so long. Thank god for the theater right? Thank god for art projects. Thank god for long term relationships.
I met Mona Mansour in 2011. Truth be told, we probably met in 2009 when she started her time in the Emerging Writers Group at the Public, but those memories are faded pastels, covered in a light layer of dust, so I prefer to start our memory at something clear. In 2011 Mona had a workshop production of her play URGE FOR GOING up at the Public Theater. It was a play about Palestinian displacement, lost ambitions, lost chances, and poetry. The beauty of poetry. Now at this time I was working as the assistant to the artistic director of the Public theater, Oskar Eustis - and then on the side producing with my own off off broadway theater company, dipping my toes into dramaturgy here and there. Mona was in rehearsal and she had a question about a line of poetry that she wanted to ask Oskar about. 5 minutes, she said that she just needed 5 minutes, when emailed me to ask. Oskar Eustis has a monstrous schedule, I mean he still does - one where 5 minutes is no easy ask. But I remember asking Oskar if he had 5 minutes for Mona, him saying yes of course find it, I found it and I emailed her to come right up. And I remember seeing her sprinting up the stairs from the Anspacher theater, an artist on a mission, she stopped at my desk to say thank you, then she stepped into Oskar’s office. I heard their voices talking and debating for a few minutes, and then I saw her come out of the office, more certain, more clear. And on time, which was great because he really did only have 5 minutes. But I remember thinking wow, now that must have been a conversation. I also recognize that I have heard Mona tell this story so many times from her point of view talking to Oskar, that I question if I remember this story at all, or if my mind has constructed a memory to put myself in context. Still, it is what I remember, real or not, it’s how I started to admire her.
Mona is a playwright who is easy to admire. She is very smart, a quick brain, a fast speaker - but she’s not at all gruff, she’s generous with her time and her energy. She’ll talk to everyone about all sorts of things. But she’s discerning, she’s been around the block you know? She knows truth from bullshit from a thousand meters away. Mona stands on firm ground - she’s got ideas about the world that are steeped in actual knowledge. Mona is gentle - she thinks about how other people move in the world, and is considerate to that. Mona is a storyteller - she knows structure and flow and language and action. And Mona is open - she’s wonderful to work with, she listens to her own work and asks questions about it, she collaborates, she WORKS, she rewrites and examines and does delicate surgery. Mona is easy to admire from afar, and since that moment in Oskar’s office I have admired her, as one riding a train admires a mountain in the distance. And as the years went by, I didn’t even realize that the mountain was getting closer and closer. This is also the nature of relationships, the closeness builds step by step. Almost indiscernible. The closeness builds. A conversation about leaving your homeland. A conversation about being a first generation american and going back to your parents homeland realizing how far you are from it. Talking about poetry - the reach of it, the depth, the heights it can reach, the simple beauty of language. Getting drunk at an irish pub in DC before a first preview. Watching each other fall in love and get married - watching each other struggle and get divorced. And through it all, the conversation continues. It continues through rewrites, it continues through writer's block, it continues through lonely, endless days of a pandemic. Text messages, zoom poetry readings, masked walks in the park. We continue the relationship.
I could give a step by step description of the development path for the Vagrant trilogy, Liz Frankel’s support, commission and elegant pass off to me, my various promotions over the years and how the plays remained the thing I just wouldn’t stop talking about, out of town tryouts and all the different variations on scene structure, the completely beautiful team of actors, how wonderful it is to be with them, the rehearsals finally starting, entering tech, the heartbreak of watching the entire project be put on pause indefinitely as the world fell apart under the weight of the plague. All these things are part of the story of this production, the story of the art, but it leaves out the story of Mona and I.
In 2021, I just had to leave. Like Jamilla, in Mona’s third play, the pandemic taught me that if I stayed, rust would grow on me and I would never be able to become something more. You stay in one place too long, tilling the soil, and the earth becomes worn out. So I decided to leave the Public Theater where I had spent more than 15 years. The decision was inevitable, but still difficult. It meant leaving so much work undone. There were so many projects that I wanted to see through. But I had to leave them all behind so I could grow. So I told Mona that I was leaving the Public and tragically, wouldn’t be able to see her epic trilogy to fruition. We almost got there! But god stepped in. And I would not make it to the promised land. And she told me, no. She wouldn’t let me go. And I explained to her the complications of The Public and that it felt like hanging out with an ex-boyfriend all the time and they said it was fine, but you know, I’m sure they felt annoyed seeing me darken their doorstep still and I just had to leave. And she said fine, leave, but also stay. History, time spent talking talking talking, nuance, remembering the last draft and the one before that and the one before that, all those things we tried, value. And you know, there’s a real rare joy that comes in someone telling you that you have value. So often in the theater world the artistic directors take credit, the theater gets credit, the director gets credit, sometimes even the writer gets credit! And you get used to working hard and having no one notice. It’s almost embarrassing when someone dares to point to you in your nakedness, and say, hey you, you helped make this happen. But that is what Mona has done for over ten years now. She continued to point to me and say “Hey, you”. Mona has insisted on continuing the relationship. And that has been the greatest gift she’s given to me.