Looking at all the hullabaloo outside the American University in Cairo’s Howard Theatre Tuesday evening, one might have assumed there was some kind of star-studded gala taking place. Fear not, oh theater-goer, because unless you were friend or family of a player, it’s unlikely you would have bagged a seat anyway, such was the support shown for the Bussy project. Bussy, of monumental AUC fame, began four years ago, a kind of Egyptian answer to Eve Ensler’s infamous award winning play “The Vagina Monologues. It went down a hit, acquiring a kind of cult status at AUC and its social environs.
Designed to raise awareness of women’s issues, the project collects stories every year, from students, their friends and acquaintances and sets them to theater. Thus stories jotted down on paper become public testimonies to the female experience, or, to be more exact, the Egyptian female experience.
Delivered mostly in English, but peppered with classical and colloquial Arabic, Bussy is patently aimed at the AUC crowd. On a strictly theatrical level, there are no quips to be made about the choice of linguistic medium, English, Arabic, Mongolian; it’s irrelevant after all when judging a performance. But Bussy isn’t just a performance, and if it claims to be, it immediately loses its reason d’etre.
But the fact that it’s geared towards the rich and educated, makes it a little like a voluntary session of religious dialogue; over all, you’re preaching to the converted – the liberal and educated. A further performance staged at Downtown’s Rawabet Theater, another cultural hub for the liberal and educated, is unlikely to change things.
However, donations made do go towards a battered woman’s refuge, which is, without doubt, a worthy cause. So where Bussy may lack on ‘taking the word to the streets’ at least it brings in the cash.
The Howard room is not a big theater. In fact, you might say that it was veritably intimate. After packing in the friends, family and acquaintances of all cast members, the actors were left with a sliver of a stage and the audience little room to breathe.
As a fellow theater-goer astutely pointed out, there probably should have been a special performance for friends and family. Never mind, there wasn’t. Instead, I hoped that entertainment value would outweigh a very sore bottom.
And entertaining it began. Introducing an element ‘a little bit different’ from previous Bussy performances, the scene was set for a conversation in colloquial Egyptian between two young men, one wearing a t-shirt, saying, “I shag for food, at once winning a few cheap laughs. Young, dumb and full of err.you know the rest. The two testosterone-charged men debated the types of women who deserve “goozeen a’lam, (a couple of slaps).
From the girl who bares the label on her underwear to the one who frequents beauty parlors (although she’s actually a monkey according to him), Hussam Mulla and Mohamed Abu-Shakka gave a laugh-a-minute rendition of archetypical Egyptian young men who loiter round gardens and squares late into the night, harassing any unfortunate female who happens to come their way.
The first series of monologues set the inaugural 2008 Bussy project off to a flying start. “Three generations and a kiss, a very cutesy tale performed by an equally cute Passant Rabie, is a whimsy monologue told by a granddaughter about her wait, as was her mother’s and grandmother’s, for the Disney ending to her quest for true love.
Different facets of love were ever-present, with its sincere and not-so-sincere faces. Facebook, of course, made an appearance, taking up an oft-told story of unwanted approaches on the net. Karim Swelim perfected the Arabic-English accent in his vain attempts to woo Asma Sami into accepting his friend request.
Simple, accessible and uncontrollably funny, “Facebook, before an audience of the ultra ‘net-worked’ found its niche. It was just a shame that Swelim tippled the comic-cow by trying to milk the dried-up laughter.
“The Push up Bra was the last of the big laughs, and probably the peak of the performance.
Mona Mahfouz’s hellish trio of “Tant Mervat, complete with velvet purple beret and pursed lips, the pushy mother, and grandma whose ill-timed shriek of “Have you found a man yet? in the middle of a funeral, went down a storm.
A play load of skits and monologues is a little – without getting too Forest Gumpish about the whole thing – like eating a box of chocolates. Aside from ‘not knowing what you’re gonna’ get,’ there’re also incredibly more-ish.
But once you hit a few ‘orange fudges’ – and I don’t know anybody who’s a big fan of orange fudges – you’d rather chuck the box away. And the once smacking of the lips in yummy chocolatey pleasure is forever soured by those fudged up duds.
There was more than a jot of that feeling with Bussy. With a soaring start, plenty of laughs and some superb performances – Nesrine Basheer in particular deserves commendation – ranging from the comic to the tragic, it was disappointing to watch it slip into over-sentimental indulgences that lacked any theatrical wallop.
The dip into the latter half of the performance was sharp, not so much in quality of acting, or, in some monologues, more public speaking, but in the theater-worthiness of the texts themselves.
The candy-crusted “I’m Hurt could have been ripped from an American teen show, and “Muslim Woman, opining on whirly-swirly identity vagaries, pushed Bussy into high-school assembly mode.
As for “Elusive, a girl’s moan about being unconfident and over-weight, does this really highlight women’s issues, or just someone who needs to eat less?
The graver issues of child-abuse, sexual harassment and rape were left to the latter end of the performance. Two particularly harrowing stories relate a sexual attack on a five-year-old girl and the persistent sexual harassment of a sister by her brother.
The issue of child-abuse doesn’t get much coverage in Egypt, and there’s plenty of debate on how prolific pedophilia actually is here. But it’s an issue that needs more attention, and deserved more theatrical space if awareness of such phenomena – neglected for their shocking controversy and exposing the fragility of societal sanctity – is to be spread.
Regretfully, their message was engulfed under the swell of saccharine miniseries. Next year, Bussy needs to do some sieving and chuck away those orange fudges; otherwise, it’ll just end up an emotional free-for-all rather than a hard-hitting and essentially pioneering movement.
Catch the latest installment of the Bussy Project tonight at AUC’s Howard Theater. For more information, please call (02) 2797 6373.
