An interview with writer/director Mashreka Mahmood about her new play 71
The Strand:
As you are both the writer and director, could you walk through the process of developing the show? How long did it take and what was that process like?
Mashreka Mahmood:
I wrote my last show over the summer of 2022, and that was really quick because I honestly just had one song that I’d written at the time of pitches, and the story came from there. But this time, I’ve been thinking about it since right after the last show closed in 2023. It’s been something that has been percolating for years just because of my background. Every time I talk about the war or any of the post-colonial things that have happened in our country, it’s riddled with misinformation. There’s a lot of nationalist tendencies to warp history in a way that makes sense for whatever party was speaking at the time. I don’t have all that information. There is so many biased takes on it that it’s really hard to be ethically researching it. This project is more about bringing awareness to the diaspora, but also people beyond that, so they can ask their living grandparents who have been in the war and are still alive. The writing process came down to me throwing things at a wall and seeing what stuck. That’s how the character of Gigi came about. I was trying to figure out the voice of the main character Naznin and I was having such a hard time with that because most of my writing has been contemporary. This person was living in the 70s, dealing with things that I couldn’t have imagined at the time. So it was really important for me to have a character that she could talk to without being judged. Gigi is kind of separate from her, so she could say anything that her heart desired.
The Strand:
When dealing with such heavy subject matter, many writers try to balance humour alongside the darker parts of a story. Did you go about writing those and trying to find a balance? Did you feel it needed to have a balance throughout?
Mahmood:
Yeah, I really did. Obviously we all love watching theatre and watching movies and shows, and I find that I’m only able to watch emotional, dramatic and difficult to stomach things because of that balance. I understood that without it, not only would I not be able to write it, I don’t think my actors would be able to take it on. I don’t think it would be healthy for anybody to watch it. So from the start of the show, it’s funny, it’s silly and it just gets darker and darker over time. I think that can be really tracked with what I consider the anchor event, Operation Searchlight, when people were randomly brought out of their houses, lined up on the street, and shot to instill fear in the rebellion. That is the real event that took place and the whole show is structured around that. After that scene, it really does start to devolve. The first four or six scenes of the show are quite funny, and the friends bring a lot of that in. I find that friends in my life also bring a lot of comedy and levity. I wanted to find that balance because I find that reality has that balance as well.
The Strand:
How did you go about telling this large-scale event through the lens of a smaller-scale and individual story?
Mahmood:
I knew that it wasn’t possible to capture that large-scale story, because again, there’s so many views on it. I knew that I had to focus on one person’s view on it and the best way to do that is through conversation. Almost every scene starts in the middle of a conversation. Naznin’s opinion changes throughout the course of the story by talking to other people, by listening to what they’re saying. The students are one part of it, but so are the parents, the older generation who have stable jobs and have things to lose versus the students who are fighting for their future and really have nothing to lose. You can really see that juxtaposition of how the real adults were approaching in more of a passive way and more so trying to survive. Whereas the students are thinking “we are the ones that have to make change because clearly the people in charge aren’t doing anything”. I also don’t think that looking at something broadly has ever connected to an audience or to me. So it’s always about the personal experience.
The Strand:
I know it can be very hard to get non-white-centered shows produced at university. How has it been going through UofT to produce a show like this and getting actors to fit these roles?
Mahmood:
They can be very challenging. The last show I wrote was also Bangali and we just needed five people, but ended up getting none. So we expanded the casting call to South Asian and East Asian actors to play some of those roles. It was a workshop, so we were able to get away with it. The actors were great, but it was difficult incorporating the Bangla. But it was very important to me that this show was mostly in Bangla. Bangladesh fought for our language. Our national language going to be made Urdu because we were part of Pakistan and we literally had to die to make a stand for that during the language movement. So this was absolutely necessary. It was either we find actors who can speak Bangla or we don’t do the show. Some advice I got from members of the UofT drama community was to cast aggressively, and that has been my motto. Our marketing director Dua Siddiqui helped so much. I think she reached out to all the Bangladeshi Students’ Associations (BSA) in the province. Our posts reached all the way to places like Guelph as well. The BSA members from places like UTSG, UTSC, and TMU came in, and they showed up. There were so many incredible people that auditioned to the point where three people had to drop out of the show and we still had the ability to replace them, which is such a privilege. So yeah, I’m just very grateful.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
