In its first live show since the pandemic closed curtains in March 2020, Long Beach’s International City Theatre (ICT) brings us a politically timely play that fits artistic director caryn desai’s [sic] goal of broadening patrons’ hearts and minds through art. Wendy Graf’s “Closely Related Keys,” directed by Saundra McClain, forces together two strong women—a reluctant New York lawyer and a desperate Iraqi refugee, half-sisters who’ve never met—ten years after 9/11.
Graf notes that her play highlights preconceptions, xenophobia and the divisions that polarize our nation 20 years after 9/11. Not surprisingly, it also speaks to the current U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, leaving to fate the lives of translators and others who helped its 20-year mission.
“It’s natural to pass judgment and objectify those who are different because we haven’t taken the time to appreciate or know their struggles, their values or their humanity,” desai notes of the play.
With so much riding on its premise, the play depends upon its five players to help us not only understand but feel. And it succeeds, to a degree. New York corporate attorney Julia (Sydney A. Mason) is the most sympathetic of the characters. Mason makes palpable how the Yale-educated Julia—a Black woman working in a white man’s world—must hold herself together as strongly as steel to survive, both professionally and personally.
Though Julia enjoys a passionate relationship with fellow attorney Ron (Nick Molari), who is white, we understand why she balks at meeting his parents and doesn’t want him to meet her father Charlie (a warm Oscar Best). Through Mason’s taut movement and facial expressions, we feel Julia’s angst about all she’s had to manage to become who she is.
We also feel Julia’s torment in trying to keep her world from crumbling as her father reveals she has a surprise half-sister—who is an Iraqi Muslim, and who needs to live in Julia’s apartment while auditioning at Juilliard.
As the women meet, or rather fail to connect over a number of days together—like magnets of the same polarity that can’t bond—they reveal deeply entrenched wounds about their mothers that help explain their wariness, especially Julia’s.
For her part, hijab-wearing half-sister Neyla (Mehrnaz Mohammadi) is not only angry at Charlie for abandoning her and her mother in Iraq but secretly communicates with a mysterious but demanding Tariq (Adrian Mohamad Tafesh) back home.
Mohammadi imbues young Neyla with an innocent appeal despite her traumatic upbringing in Iraq, including her mother’s harrowing death. Mohammadi also speaks naturally and mellifluously, but it’s not as easy to connect with Neyla’s experience as with Julia’s. That may be because we don’t see it, only hear Neyla describing it. We see Tariq when they speak over Neyla’s laptop, but his presence doesn’t necessarily make their world more real.
What we do see on stage—very fittingly designed by Stephanie Kerley Schwartz—is Julia’s rather fabulous apartment with the looming ghosts of the World Trade Center twin towers floating above. Composed of crinkled fabric illuminated from behind, they are flanked by two secondary “towers,” suggestive of the two sisters, or perhaps their mothers’ deaths that haunt them.
“Closely Related Keys” is an ambitious play worth experiencing, especially now as we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11. What has changed between people, this play asks, and what still needs to change? What does it take to move forward rather than repeat ourselves? While those questions may be unanswerable, this intricate and well-paced play gives us two women who learn that vulnerability may be necessary to heal their deep wounds and possibly start relating.
International City Theatre’s “Closely Related Keys” continues at the Beverly O’Neill Theatre, 330 E. Seaside Way, through Sunday, Sept. 12, with shows Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. The Sunday, Sept. 5 show features a post-show talkback. Masks required. Tickets are $49 to $52 and can be purchased at ictlongbeach.org.
