The notion of a thirtysomething, queer man with a full beard playing his mother might have a reviewer scribbling a note or two on camp and drag performances. Yet, for his one-mother show “Avaaz” — at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts through Nov. 17 — writer Michael Shayan dons mother Roya’s flowing kaftan, not for laughs — although there are many — or for the heightened, winking abandon that drag performers can be so good at.
Instead, with Shayan’s abundance of authentic insights and the nuanced guidance of director Moritz von Stuelpnagel, audiences are in for a dose of radical empathy. “Avaaz” is a work about familial reckoning and forgiveness, about the promises and challenges of immigration, about a gay son seeing — and making sure we do as well — his mother for the remarkable, resilient, sometimes aggravating figure that she is.
Before the play properly began on opening night, Roya strolled down the stairs of the intimate Singleton Theatre, chatting up the sold-out audience with the sweet cadence of accented, charmingly personalized English.
Playwright Micheal Shayan as his mother Roya welcomes you to Tehran-geles, CA in the one-mother show “Avaaz” at the Denver Center. (Jamie Kraus Photography, provided by the Denver Center)Roya wears a shiny kaftan, big rings, bigger-framed eyeglasses and furry facial hair. The actor is not going for illusion here. Yet, Roya’s direct, coaxing and confiding banter will bridge the gap between what we see and who we hear, between a guy in a brocade get-up and the woman who left Tehran, moved to Los Angeles without any family, married (badly), went to college and made a life for herself and a young child.
Beneath a surfeit of chandeliers stands a table laden with items of celebratory excess. “We like to keep our tables subtle. Understated, nothing flashy,” Roya says, adding, “Just the gold you have around the house.”
(The visual cacophony was carefully curated by scenic designer Beowulf Boritt.)
The pile resembles a mini-Mount Damavand of candles, vases and food, including the “Seven Sins” — no not those, but the seven symbols that speak of renewal, of spring, of a new year. “Avaaz” takes place on the first night of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year. (“Nowruz, really, it’s like, metaphor, about rebirth, winter becomes spring, dark becomes the light. Full price becomes clearance.”) Roya is hoping son Michael will join her. He’s never missed the holiday, she tells us, but acknowledges there’s a strain between her and her adult, gay son.
“Some Persians, they hear gay. They kick out from house,” she says after a funny riff about “the gays” that surely reflects the playwright’s own tart observations about queer life in Los Angeles. “I did not disown. I did not kick out. Only I ask ‘Not so loud! Less Elton John, more Anderson Cooper.’”
We’ll learn many more things about Michael from Roya over the course of the 90-minute show. In addition to being gay, he is a writer (“That’s Farsi for unemployed”) and, well, he’s overweight (“I know you’re gay but try one girl, Jenny Craig”). In a couple of double-take instances, Roya will imitate the recurring arguments she and Micheal have. The actor deftly switches from Roya’s cadence to Michael’s straight-up, second-generation way of talking.
If Roya delivers one-liners reminiscent of the trope-y, wiseacre asides of a Jewish mother, it’s because she is that. She hails from an Iranian Jewish family. After the Islamic revolution ended the Shah’s reign and ushered in the theocracy of Ayatollah Khomeini, Roya’s Baba was in and out of Evin Prison, the infamous jail where political prisoners were incarcerated, tortured, killed. At 16, she recalls, she picked up the phone to hear an anonymous caller telling her that Baba was lying dead at the prison.
That Roya traveled to Los Angeles is no surprise. That city has a sizable Persian population that began growing after the 1979 revolt. That she did so alone, as a young woman, is estimable. In L.A., she was put up by another Iranian Jewish family. “We are in the heart of Tehran-geles,” she says at the play’s opening, using the nickname of the city’s Westwood neighborhood. With its insider knowledge, “Avaaz” is a study in the ways a place is flavored by its immigrant populations and how those people and their children are shaped by their new home.
In between introducing the audience to the meaning of each of the Sins, Roya recounts the story of her departure from Tehran and of her new life in the United States. It’s an account that has its share of heartbreak and hardship. Roya’s hasty marriage to fellow Iranian American Bijan — Michael’s father — hasn’t much sweetness and light. Even so, she tells of her tribulations with the buoyance of having emerged on the other side.
The playwright’s recognition of the losses that Roya experienced as a woman escaping the patriarchal lockdown of Khomeini’s Iran, only to be ensnared in the different traps of a sexist marriage, reveals the show’s socio-political-cultural depth. Even more, it speaks of an adult child’s love. While threads of Shayan’s own story are woven into the rich pattern of Roya’s life, it is her tale that struts its stuff.
“Avaaz” is Farsi for a song as it is being sung, according to the script. In addition to being its own kind of ballad, Roya’s monologue is rife with reminiscences about Iranian music and singers. Many of those recollections contain notes of sorrow. And yet, it is the joy that endures after the last, loving ecstatic scene.
Lisa Kennedy is a Denver-based freelance writer specializing in film and theater.
IF YOU GO
“Avaaz”: Written by Michael Shayan. Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel. Featuring Michael Shayan. At the Singleton Theatre in the Denver Center’s Helen Bonfils Theatre, 14th and Curtis streets. Through Nov. 17, denvercenter.org and 303-893-4100.