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Widow of Abraham

nytheatre.com review by Gregg Bellon
August 15, 2005

“Widow.” The word itself inspires sympathy, weighed heavily by the archetype of grief and suffering. When personified and given a historical context, say the 9/11 attacks, the widow transcends mythological distance and digs herself deep into your psyche: “I know her,” you say.David Valdes Greenwood, playwright, knows this, and in Widow of Abraham, the eponymous widow he creates in Sarah (played by the versatile Anne Thibault) carries this grief and suffering in with her as she enters through the audience; when she arrives on stage, where eight black chairs have been arranged randomly, she instantly has our sympathy. Unfortunately, Greenwood's 85-minute-long solo play, with characters ringing true to stereotypes, cannot be sustained by sympathy alone.Sarah and Abe are a happily married, pseudo-interracial urban couple living the big city romance of Chinese-take-out movie Fridays and walk-up apartments. Until, that is, September 11, 2001, when their world is turned inside out. Abe is a British citizen, the son of a British father and an Afghan mother who, a widow herself, repatriates from the U.K. after her husband dies. A sudden dubious plea from Ibrahim’s mother, feigning illness, draws him to travel to Afghanistan just prior to September 11, and winds him into the worst-case scenario of a War-on-Terror dragnet. While in Afghanistan, Abe re-adopts his given name of Ibrahim as a filial catalyst to his reburgeoning interest in Islam. This family obligation, his metaphorical jihad, splits Abe/Ibrahim, according to Sarah, because his love for her was all that he wanted, but now he’s compelled to stay with the family despite the impending invasion.The military stampede arrives, trigger-happy artillery sergeants mistake Ibrahim’s family dwelling for an insurgent outpost, and shells rain down, destroying the place. A relative recovers a Kenneth Cole loafer, size 11, that Sarah holds in effigy of her lost soulmate. Alas, some time later, comes a phone call out of the blue. “Your husband is in Cuba,” a thick Middle-Eastern accented voice says over the line. Not dead, but worse, in American custody on the tropical Eastern tip of the beautiful Pearl of the Antilles. Or so “they” say. And so on.This leads Sarah on a biblical quest to find at least five humans worth saving that would justify her abandoning what she feels is now her mandate: an event so symbolic that it justifies all the destruction it inflicts, a new Sodom, Gomorrah, Rome… the latest Great Fall. Sarah travels the public transportation system, buses in general, in her quest to find those redeemable souls.Greenwood's writing choice—to reveal the character of Abe/Ibrahim to us in bits and pieces woven in between the conversations with six or seven bus riders that Sarah re-enacts for us in her biblical quest to justify the atrocity she feels a greater source has mandated of her—eventually negates the effect of the injustice. Both Abe/Ibrahim and Sarah suffer the loss of civil liberties and basic human rights, which should scare us all into an awareness of the current stance our government is taking domestically and globally in the name of national security.But Greenwood is the one taunting us, tempting us to defy his gumption. He allies himself with the biblical Abraham who was called by his God to sacrifice his only son as a show of affection to the only true idol one should have, um, God: in the name of “good” even my atrocities are justified. A faulty premise to begin with, and one which Widow of Abraham fails to re-examine to substantial effect.