(upbeat music)
- It's summer in the city, and as always,
the best of Broadway is on full display.
This is "The Broadway Show."
I'm Tamsen Fadal.
"The Kite Runner" is now on Broadway,
based on the best selling novel from 2003.
The new stage adaptation is now in previews,
and it features one of the stars of the hit NBC crime drama,
"The Blacklist."
Let's send it out to Paul Wontorek.
- That's right, Tamsen.
"The Kite Runner" is a story that means so much
to so many, especially to stars and Broadway debut makers
Amir Arison and Azita Ghanizada.
We sat down at the Civilian Hotel
to talk about the impact this production is making
beyond the stage.
(upbeat music)
"The Kite Runner,"
I mean, this is a title people immediately know, right?
Thanks to this amazing novel by Khaled Hosseini.
30 million copies, 60 languages or something,
this was like a big international.
- Not a big responsibility or anything like that.
- And now you have to bring this well-loved story,
everybody walks in with a lot of love for it.
How does it feel to be a part of this?
- Quite simply, it feels like an honor.
The book is perfect.
So I honestly feel like don't get in the way of the story.
- [Paul] Yeah.
- Serve it up.
It's out there in the world.
I just cherish to be able to be a part of it here.
- I'm from Afghanistan, and that book,
when it first came out
I actually didn't wanna read it.
It came to me a little bit later, 2006,
cause it was being adapted into a film,
and someone sent it to me.
And I was devastated reading that book.
I mean, I could tell you the smell of the food,
the dirt under their fingernails, like it was so visceral.
And when the play came around,
I had a really hard time reading the play without crying.
And so I actually couldn't read the play.
I couldn't finish the play when I first auditioned for it.
And I actually didn't hear the whole play
until the first table read
because it was too hard to hear the story.
And even on the stage, I have to turn away
cause there are moments
where I can't be in a certain emotional state.
I have to be in a different place when I come on.
And I'm like (exhales heavily).
So to be a part of something
that's both culturally significant
and globally, you know, important
has had such an impact globally,
and to have it be a small piece of Broadway is just,
it's an unbelievable, unknown dream.
- I have to echo something she said.
When I first read the book, I cried six times.
- Six, exactly, six
- Six times.
I can tell you where they were.
And they also, what surprised me is
besides it being sort of a novel and thoughts
and the psychology of Amir,
and the psychology of the other characters
is that it was a page turner.
Somehow it works as a, as a psychological thriller
in many ways, and you can't put it down.
And in many ways I feel the play is no different,
and it has magic in it.
And it hits me in a different place every night.
- [Azita] Yeah.
- Every time we do a run through, another thing hits me.
It is, there is secret power in that play.
- So you're playing many ages, right?
- The span of the book is 26 years.
I age from age 12 to 38 years old.
- [Paul] Wow.
- And there are time jumps, but act one,
it is a little under a year.
And in that, I alternate from 12 to narrator.
Like in scenes, the scenes happen to me,
and in the narrating,
it's like I have to take you to the next scene.
And in the second act, we jump,
I get to marry this lovely gal.
And then we jump, we do a 25-year-journey.
- You both get to do that in the show.
- Yeah, I mean, in the first act, I'm like 17,000 people,
you know, just running around the stage
and having fun playing in his memory.
This is essentially a memory play.
He's like telling us the story of his life.
You know, I get to show up in the second act
and be kind of a young woman from Afghanistan
trying to kind of create her own path,
trying to find her voice and free her voice
and then finding her way through the play
to kind of be a strong pillar in the story.
- One of the things that's amazing about the book
is that every character has a secret.
Every single character, either something happens
that they keep a secret,
and it's a big bonding point for me to her.
And I look to her for courage.
- And it's really about how this story unfolds.
I mean like that's what's so exciting.
Amir is a very haunted man at the top of the show.
- So haunted, so haunted.
- And it's really about sort of uncoiling that ball
of all of that.
- Yeah, and it's so powerful, his journey, right?
Because you just see him as like a kid,
but we start with him as a man,
and then he becomes a kid, and then you see him kind of
it's the hero's journey, you know?
He fumbles, he falls, he fails.
And is he gonna crawl his way back up
out of that and become the man he's meant to be?
- The most unheroic hero you will ever,
so much so that I was almost not sure
if I even wanted to do it.
And the key for me that I discovered
because as an actor you wanna make active choices,
and he is so inactive and indecisive and shame,
which is, which was like, okay so how am I gonna do that?
But what I discovered
is that actually in the narration is the bravery,
that he is airing his dirty laundry,
that he is sharing his pain,
looking for help to get redemption.
So through all those memories
of just a lot of cowardice and shame and guilt,
he's working it out almost like the audience
is almost like his sort of therapist
or Giles calls it his confessor.
- So, Azita, you left Afghanistan as a young girl.
- As a baby, yeah.
- As a baby, okay.
- Yeah, when the Soviets invaded, much like the book,
we were very lucky to receive asylum status
and fled to Vienna, Virginia,
which is a beautiful small town.
And we then kind of brought the remaining
members of our family out of refugee camps,
various refugee camps and into Virginia to resettle with us.
And that was, that was, their journey is unbelievable
for them to be able to tell their story.
We tell a little bit of it in the play.
Much of my childhood was going to the airport
to pick up family members with just the plastic bag.
And I just remember the grief as a young person.
I just remember the photos of children with missing limbs,
and my parents saying, this is what you escaped.
This is what you're free of.
And so never take your freedom for granted.
That's kind of haunted me and stayed with me my entire life.
But you know, I've tried my best to continue to carry
that journey that they went through
and help people that didn't have the same opportunities
that I was given.
- How are we achieving authenticity in the play
for Broadway?
I know that's very important.
It's definitely a big moment for representation.
- We have,
we're very fortunate to have three Afghans in the room:
Azita, Salar, who is our tabla player
and who has been with earlier productions.
- [Paul] right.
- And Humaira Ghilzai, who is our cultural consultant.
There's very lively, useful,
and then all of them have experienced this.
So I'm like, how do you say that?
What did you do?
Oh my God, is that right?
Do I, she's like, Amir turn the light bulb.
Dance with the shoulders.
And now I'm like, I can't stop dancing with my shoulders.
It's a total company on stage of including, you know,
our swings and understudies, it's 19,
and all from the Middle East or South Asia,
and everybody cares and it's very,
we're all together on wanting to get it right.
- I had a number of Afghans come
to the shows the last couple nights,
and you know, they sobbed
and meeting them at the stage door, they're like,
I don't know if it was the trauma of this year
or what it was, but I have never cried so hard
and felt so much joy
because of the authenticity
that was layered into the things we say,
the way that, you know
the way that we're celebrating Afghanistan and its culture,
which I don't think is often celebrated.
We often tell the negative narrative.
We often share the negative images of any minority culture.
That's what we kind of want to play in and dance in.
And this does not do that.
You know, this tells a beautiful, full woven tapestry story
of a culture that's often misunderstood.
- You've actually done a lot of work for diversity
in a much larger sense.
I wanna hear a little bit more about your activist work
and especially with.
- MENA and MENSA.
- Yeah.
- Very important.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's talk about it.
- I had to think about it
and wondering about it and she created it.
- Yeah, let's talk about that.
Do you actually, you fought to get a new classification
for performers' contracts.
- Yes, yeah.
I built the first new hiring contract into a labor contract
in 37 years in the entertainment industry.
I had come off of a TV series called "Alphas"
with David Strathairn and Malik Yoba and Mahershala Ali,
this big thing
and thought this was a really important time for me
in my career.
And I had tested for about six television shows
which is a tremendous, you know, journey.
And finally got one and was told at the table read
that I was white.
And I was very confused by the statement.
They were like, what's your ethnicity
cause you're our diverse hire.
- And then you get money back.
Productions get money back if you click, you know,
what is classified as minority.
- So I was gonna lose the job.
And I was like, well, I've Afghanistan is in Asia.
You can check Asian.
And they're like, but you look Middle Eastern.
And I was like, well, yes, you know,
some people consider us Middle Eastern militarily,
like it's complicated.
And they're like, you don't have anybody protecting you.
You should start something.
And so on the like, you know, I'm a political refugee.
I worked on Capitol Hill in high school, and, you know,
I'm a very determined young woman.
And so I began the, you know process of lobbying
to find out what that was.
I studied the MOUs at networks.
I started to speak to the US Census.
I spoke to scholars,
and after about two and a half, three years of lobbying
with other, you know, actors of that descent
that were kind of experiencing the same thing.
- Right.
- They weren't getting work.
So what was happening was the normal job
that I would normally get, which was the girl next door.
They were now asking me to wear a head scarf
or speak in another language, which is fine.
I'm an actor. I can do that, but it was too much.
And so the increase in stereotypical images were happening
because we didn't have a diversity box.
And so I decided to remove that obstacle,
and I built the new category in,
and now we run around, and we educate people,
and we put out studies and you know,
something that, you know
the talking about the diversity of this play,
on television 78% of the time in our last study
that we're seen on TV, we're seen as terrorists.
And so you think that that
and we're gonna about to put out another study
that directly impacts how people feel about refugees.
- Sure.
- So when you have something
like the fall of Afghanistan, you see this immediate fear
because of the way that we're portrayed on television
and have been since 9/11.
And then when you see Ukraine fall
which is what Afghanistan went through 40 years ago,
you don't have that same thing, right?
They don't have the same legal loopholes that Afghans do.
The Ukrainians have a much easier path to citizenship
and to green card holders than the Afghans that
many of whom fought for the rights of the United States
alongside of them have faced in the last several years.
So kind of just working to be a voice.
And I think being a part of this play has been such a gift
because it allows me to merge my passions.
We are partnering with Welcome US, which is,
President Obama and President Bush
and Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton
and a number of people created a program called Welcome US
that I sit on the national council for.
And it helps people learn how to welcome refugees
in their communities, all across the United States,
how they can become a welcomer to Afghan refugees
and to now Ukrainian refugees.
And so in the inserts of our Playbill,
you can scan a QR code, and everyone in the audience
can learn how to welcome someone like the cast
that they see up on that stage.
And we're also partnered with another org
that I'm an ambassador to called Women for Women,
which right now is helping women
get back to work in a Afghanistan.
And we have worked for many, many decades
helping women survivors of war get back to work
and also educating the men and their communities
about how important it is.
And so, you know, our audiences get to learn
about Women for Women and how to get women in Afghanistan
back to work and how to support them.
And so that's our producers, that's this company,
that's this cast,
that's the authenticity that they care about.
They didn't just wanna, you know,
we have the show which is authentic and the cast,
but then we're also giving the audience
the opportunity to care.
And that to me is the beautiful merging
of like artistry and advocacy.
And God bless Broadway.
If this is this experience, I'm here for it.
- I read recently, 90% of Afghan refugees
are not unfortunately being let into the US.
And when I was prepping,
and I was talking to Humaira,
I said do you know any people that are recent immigrants
that speak English with an accent?
Preferably a man, because I've been learning from a woman,
and I wanna hear any different cadences.
Humaira introduced me to a guy who had come over and was,
the reason he was able to come over
was he worked as a translator for the U.S. Army,
you know, back in, you know, what, 15 years ago.
And so he was able to get a special visa
to come over, and he came over,
and we were talking, the sweetest man,
the sweetest gentleman, talking, and we were like,
would you read this line?
And we're talking about his experience.
And I was like, "Oh, so is your family here?"
He goes, "No, they're still in Afghanistan."
And I said, he says
I can try to get my parents over with a special visa,
but they can't leave my sisters because they're unmarried,
and they won't be able to, they won't be safe.
And the entire play dropped in for me,
the entire, all the book.
And what reminds me for those who may not be Afghan
that come to our show is a very simple individual story.
There's a lot that happens in this story.
There's racism, there's privilege, there's power.
There's love, there's marriage, there's heartbreak,
but there's an immigrant experience,
and a wonderful, rich powerful man
that has to come and work for a gas station
and find their way and figure it out
and learn a new language.
That to me feels, can feel universal,
and hits me in a very deep way.
(upbeat music)