Three years ago, a small amateur female theater group at the American University in Cairo staged American playwright Eve Ensler s off-Broadway controversial play The Vagina Monologues, raising about $1,200 for Egypt s first shelter for battered women.
Despite the enormous crowds who turned up to watch the performance, the explicit content of the play – that featured a group of women discussing orgasms, lesbianism and tampons – was subjected to stern criticism from students, critics, feminists and the Egyptian National Council of Women headed by the First Lady, Suzanne Mubarak.
Last year, some AUC students established a group called Bussy! (Look!) that aimed at raising awareness of women’s issues. They wanted to create an Egyptian version of the Monologues. The result was a play mimicking the formula of Ensler s drama, but with a context relevant to AUC students in particular and Egyptian women in general.
The play went down a storm and as a result, the second Bussy installment produced this year tells more intimate, fierce and witty anecdotes of Egyptian women struggling for freedom, love, respect and understanding.
Bussy comprises 30 stories that highlight a variety of problems that have become part of any Egyptian woman’s life: Verbal abuse, sexual harassment, male dominance, repression, lack of freedom of choice, struggles with standards of beauty, discrimination against the veil in the workplace, and the pain of love.
The second Bussy episode is a stripped-down production that sees the performers reciting their stories directly to the audience. The stage is completely bare of any props, and the structure of the play doesn t follow the classical one or three act narrative. The stories are told one after the other in dissimilar tones, languages (colloquial Arabic, English, a combination of the two and classical Arabic) and types of narative (the play includes poetry and a dance segment to name a few).
None of the subject matter that forms the heart of each tale is new or revelatory. Yet, surprisingly, the majority of these chronicles overspill with intensity and sincerity. This elevates the show above the overblown long narratives about similar topics.
As a viewer, you won’t be shocked by the issues, as much as by the way they are described, treated, and enacted.
Sarah Abdel Rahman s Gender Identity piece, about a girl who is being constantly made to feel ashamed of her body and her nature was made more poignant by the actress moving, evocative performance. It shows a regular girl confused about her identity and longing for others to simply accept her femininity.The sexual molestation stories will leave no one undisturbed as they shatters the religious/conservative facade that society has hidden behind for centuries.
In Child Molestation by Tutor, a damaged Sondos Shebayak describes how her private teacher exploited her innocence and ignorance. Unaware of the significance of his moves, she admits a pleasure she initially experienced and the horror that raided her young existence when his caresses changed to hunger and became a source of enduring pain.
The Girl s Encounter with Religion is even more scandalous as it charts Reem Amr s recollections of a sheikh (preacher) who masturbated in front of her before her oblivious mother commissioned him to teach her the Quran. With every new prayer, a new part of my body was to be explored, she professes in one of the most memorable moments of the show.
In fact, the word masturbation is mentioned frequently. This is not only a testament to Egyptian men s repression, but shows the over-sexualization of women suffered by women all over the world.
It s not all doom and gloom though. Aisha Nouh easily steals the show with her characters parables of the double standards in a decaying society. Hypocrisy and Condoms finds her character amusingly justifying the cigarettes, porn and condoms her mother discovers in her drawer. Her other piece, Double Standards, shows how her parents grant more privileges to her brother.
The exceedingly appealing, natural and sharp Nouh manages to draw the biggest laughs of the evening that are stained with bitterness and a slight contempt for the archetypical Egyptian parents who pay more attention to the bawab s (doorman s) perception of them than the happiness of their own daughter.
Other stand-outs include Sarah Abdel Razak s portrayal of a veiled girl confronting the bigotry of workplaces that refuse to see beyond the headscarf; Sarah Abdel Razak as a girl who becomes empowered to stand up to anyone who harasses her on the street; and the hilarious sketch (The Sharm Apartment) that presents the three directors of the play (Menan Omar, Marihan Iskandar and Yasmine Khalifa) ridiculing the shallow principles that the older generations set for appraising suitors.
There are a few duds though. The play, in its entirety, is superb, featuring gripping and interesting stories. But some of the fillers are slightly tedious and redundant rendering the play at least 15 minutes too long.
In addition, the Abortion part, where a character views her co-worker s abortion operation as an act stemming from lack of education, is simple-minded, arrogant and will offend millions of educated women and men who are pro-choice.
It s also quite surprising that none of these accounts touched upon the physical abuse committed against women which many social scientists and feminists alike regard as a persistent ill that still goes unpunished.
Apart from one segment of the play, all stories are true with most of them performed exactly as written. Director Iskandar told The Daily Star Egypt that the bulk of these stories are submitted by anonymous women who responded to an ad the group disseminated at university encouraging women of all ages to divulge stories related to obstacles they might have faced because of their gender.
The compiled stories are a sample of many anecdotes put forward on campus and through the group s website. Iskandar believes that their project has grown into one large healing process for everyone involved in it and that s why she expects the show to continue for years to come. Bussy will run from May 13 -15, 7 pm at the AUC s Howard Theater at the Main Campus. For more on the Bussy project, please visit www.geocities.com/thebussyproject.
