Chaim Potok’s Daughter On Playing A Muslim Mother: ‘Devotion Is Devotion’
Image by Twitter/@HaramIranNYC
By Talya Zax March 17, 2017
Naama Potok, daughter of the famed novelist Chaim Potok, has been acting for over three decades. Now, as Playbill’s Joe Gambino reported, she’s taken on a role that’s entirely new to her: That of a Muslim mother in Iran.
“I fully honor and accept the profound differences that exist between and among people,” Potok told Gambino, of her approach to the role in Red Spear’s production of Jay Paul Deratany’s “Haram! Iran!.”
“I equally, if not even more, acknowledge how similar and connected we are. Devotion is devotion, so it becomes, ‘How is this woman expressing her devotion and how does it manifest itself?’”
“Haram! Iran!” dramatizes the true story of Ayaz Marhoni and Mahmoud Asgari, two teenage boys who were hanged in Iran in 2005. The duo had been convicted on charges of raping a 13-year-old boy. Their case gained international attention after their executions, when a group of organizations focused on LGBTQ advocacy alleged the boys had, in fact, been executed for engaging in consensual homosexual acts.
In the play, Potok plays Marhoni’s mother, Gila. She told Gambino her preparation for the role included studying Iran’s political circumstances at the time surrounding the events depicted in her play and Farsi pronunciation. As her character wears a hijab, she also spoke with the play’s dramaturg, Amir Darvish, about the habits of hijab-wearing women.
“He said it depended entirely on how religious a woman I am and so what I gathered was that I don’t think she’s so religious that she would wear her hijab all the time,” Potok said.
The play, she said, is especially essential given the United States’s current political climate.
“We need a safe space in which we can debate and tolerate differences of opinion without silencing one another,” she said. “The climate we’re living in now can make people feel very alone so to come to the theatre is healing.”
“Haram! Iran!” runs through March 19th at TADA! Youth Theatre.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
