Bobuq Sayed: Tell me a little about how you got your start in theater in New York?
Bina Sharif: I came to America after receiving my Medical degree, to study for my Public Health Masters in Baltimore. That was the plan. Back in Pakistan, I was doing theater. I was friends with the theater group, and they were my friends, and I would do some plays, you know, but it was on the side. Then I took the exam for foreign graduates and I failed by two points. I had never failed in my life. Perhaps I was not 100% interested because in medical school there was so much death. Too much. I’m very sensitive about that, and I think that started my activism.
I had a nervous breakdown. I really had a breakdown in the New York streets. Screaming, crying, everything. And then, eventually, I said, “To hell with it. I’m going to England.” I went to London and I stayed there for about eight or nine months, and all I did was I studied acting there. My own private curriculum. I went to the National Theater of London every night. I had my student card, so I could get very cheap tickets. Chekhov, Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw. I was hooked from there. So when I came back, I didn’t take an exam again. I just started to do.
Bobuq: You accepted that theater was your real passion and you couldn’t ignore the call.
Bina: I think it was my passion back home, too. People think, oh, they liberated me here. They say, oh, aren’t you happy you’re away from Pakistan? You’re free. I think go fuck yourself. I was free. I was very free, actually, and my family was very free. I was riding my own bicycle there. I was smoking Marlboro Lights and I had a group of friends, the artists, the actors, you know, and I had my own flat in one of the best areas of Lahore. It’s very cultural, like Paris even.
Bobuq: So you decided to intervene in your own fate, with or without the institution?
Bina: That was how it started, and then I was going out for an audition everywhere in New York. The transition from acting to directing was very difficult, a lot of suffering, bad experiences. I had difficulty as a woman, a woman director, a Muslim woman director, telling white men what to do.
Bobuq: Presumably they were not used to that.
Bina: [laughs] No, but they would never say so. They were aggressive and all that stuff. But, even before that, I only got the opportunity to get there because I was stubborn as an actor. They’d say the role was for a blonde bombshell and I would still go in and audition.
Bobuq: Right. You’re like, let them see me perform and tell me no to my face.
Bina: Eventually, this place—Theater for the New City—was looking for actors, and the owner says to me, “Can you sing?” She’s very tough, the owner of this place. I said no. “Can you dance?” I said no, but I said—“I can move. I studied with Anna Saccolo.” She didn’t hire me, but a week later, she called me, and she says, “Okay, I'm going to give you a small part.” I was daring enough. When I asked her what made her change her mind, she said, “Your hands. Your hands, and the way you moved.” I did a play showcase. There was no money, nothing. And as rehearsals progressed, my part kept getting bigger and bigger. I was slim, very sexy.
Finally, a role came up for a South Asian actor. A play by a dead British colonialist.
Bobuq: That doesn’t really narrow it down much.
Bina: Rudyard Kipling. Yeah, that was his name. He had a play called The Story of the Gadsbys. It takes place during the British occupation of India, and it was about the British East India Company, and they needed an ayah. You know what an ayah is? Ayah is the servant, and it took place in those days when there was no electricity and no fan. So they needed a brown actor to stand there and pull a rope to fan the white characters. Stand there and shut up and do service.
It was Uptown, like 72nd Street, a nice theater, and they were a very well established little company, so I took the role. I was very open to things, you know, new experiences. You have to be when you’re starting out here. They didn’t take me seriously at all in the beginning.
The director had no idea of the play actually, because it’s a classic. He didn’t know anything. So I said to him one day, I said, “You know, what kind of costume do you want me to wear? Because it’s a period piece and she’s a servant. Even if she’s servant, she’s not going to wear jeans and all that. She has to look like she’s from that time period.” He had no idea. “You are Indian. You must have some clothes; you can bring some.” And I said, “But I have modern clothes!” So, with my own imagination, I took some beautiful skirts and big scarves, and I just, I wore that, and I wore my own jewelry. And he didn’t say anything. He couldn’t care less.
So I’m doing all this and, opening night, there was a very tough theater critic in the audience, a very intelligent foreigner called John Simon. He had a knowledge of theater like nobody else. His review was scathing. He said the show didn’t work. Nothing worked. Except the ayah. She had the most authentic costume, and she was the most authentic thing in the whole play. After that, nobody talked to me for the rest of the run, no actor and no director. They hated my guts.
Bobuq: And, from there, opportunities began coming through for you?
Bina: In some ways, yes. I’d heard they were looking for an Indian woman for a play that was set to debut in Chicago. It’s always an Indian woman. I said okay, I’ll go immediately to audition, except I was wearing very tight size 4 leather pants and a halter top or something. So I go and meet the playwright, Mustapha Matura, he was Trinidadian, and the play was set in Trinidad, to show how Indian people in that context think they’re high and mighty because they’re richer than the Black Trinidadians, which at least felt like a more interesting concept for me to explore as an actor. The director, Derek Walcott, won the Nobel Prize afterwards. He had a big reputation.
In the end, I didn’t get cast. They were looking for an older woman, a traditional woman. When I saw Madhur Jaffrey auditioning too, wearing that typical thing, the sari, I said, “Oh, she's going to get the part.” I knew right away. I just, I’m very perceptive about who I am and who I am not.
I felt freed, in a way. After one week, they called me again, and I was like, what the hell? I mean, Jaffrey got the part. Why are they calling me again? I found out she got a movie job in London, so she had to refuse the play. There was no Indian woman working as an actress at that time in New York. They could’'t find one. They were desperate for an Indian face and, very unhappily, they cast me. Soon they realized, oh, she came with the leather pants and hats and all that. She’s never going to become the character. So, from the very first day of rehearsal, they made me look horrible. They gave me a bandana, slippers, an ugly skirt, and one time I said, “No one else is in costumes. Why am I wearing these?” And they told me, “So you can get used to them. You’re so glamorous.” I said, “Oh come on!” I was so depressed. This was in Chicago, but the theater was a Broadway theater called Goodman Theater. It’s famous—1,800 seats.
The director was horrible to me, this guy, Derek Walcott. I mean, he’s deceased now. I don’t want to say it, but he hated me. I thought, why the fuck are you hating me? You should not have hired me. I mean, I’m younger. I’m different. I am wearing your lousy skirt. I’m wearing the slippers all day. You know, why are you angry at me? He didn’t treat me well at all. I was never late, I learned my lines, but he didn’t treat me well. In any case, they were putting me up in this fabulous hotel, and they were paying me quite a bit of money at that time by Chicago standards.
It was my first professional job, right? At the end of the day, I’d take those shitty clothes off, get into the bathtub, scrub myself, and go to the most fancy restaurant. I went alone like Greta Garbo, you know. I went alone and I ate the best meal to take revenge from the morning.
The reviews came out at the opening night party and it turned out the reviewers loved my character, Miss Gukul. They said I was the greatest picture of racism they had ever seen in their whole lives. I was nominated for a Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Supporting Actress, and the director says to me, “See what I did for you. I was tough on you because I wanted you to do better.” I said directly, “Don't take my credit away from me.” It was the first time they’d nominated an actor from outside of Chicago. The New York critics never paid me any dust.
Bobuq: Did you consider following the momentum and staying on in Chicago?
Bina: No. New York was my home. I couldn’t accept that there was no room for me here. For one year after that, I went for auditions at every single place Uptown, Downtown, everywhere. I never got a single part. One time, a casting director says to me, “You know, Bina, you are a very good actress, and I want to tell you the truth. It’s not that we don’t want to hire you. We don’t have a part for you. Our scripts have no Indians in them. Our scripts are not for Indian actors.”
Eventually, another playwright, Robert Patrick, who’s also deceased now, he became my friend, and he said, “Listen, Bina, you have to write for yourself. You will never work in this country if you don’t.” And I said, “I only write poetry.” He said, “Oh, you can write. I know you can write.” He had a big play, and he cast me in it. I played Picasso’s model. I was fantastic, you know. And he pushed me. We would go for breakfast and he was wonderful. All my gay friends held me. He pushed me to write a 30-40-minute-long one-woman play called The Cosmo Girl. Glitter in my hair, glitter in my eyebrows, fishnets, high heels. Nobody had ever seen a South Asian woman like that. I performed that show for one year all over the clubs in the East Village, on Cable TV, in art galleries, at friends’ weddings, small theaters. There was no other way.
Bobuq: So, in the end, it wasn’t so much that you elected to transition from playwriting to directing, but that the impoverishment of opportunity sort of forced your hand.
Bina: When I would give my plays to other actors and directors—men, usually—they would butcher the script and try to play it off like it was nothing. I said, “Why are you doing that?” You would never treat a play written by another playwright with such disrespect. They said, “Your writing has a lot of grammar problems. American characters don’t speak like that.”
I said, “My American characters do speak like that, thank you very much.”
My study in London helped me, and my ability to be on stage in Pakistan helped me too. I already had a knack for what theater could look like, but it’s also about the right opportunity.
Bobuq: Even today, however many decades later, people of color and immigrants in this country still face the same dilemma. No one tells you that you have to generate the conditions for your own art’s possibility. Nothing is falling from the sky for anyone, or at least that’s not happening for most of us. The grit and challenge of New York City is exactly that seemingly impossible impetus to realize your dreams no matter what.
Bina: The newspapers and the media never pushed me. No, they would not. My work is very different from ordinary playwrights. I don’t fish among their expectations. I’m not into plots and all that. I prefer stream of consciousness. I’m a surrealist, you know. I’m not a follower.
Bobuq: I'm sure that’s why it was so hard to categorize you. They were not expecting a brown Muslim woman surrealist. They wanted a hyperrealist domestic drama narrative from you, and instead you were striking out and doing your own thing, which made you harder to categorize, harder to understand, but ultimately more of an original voice.
Bina: They could not put me in a box. But I don’t even know. Who is saying that? They never even took me seriously. The whole of New York acts like a jury, but then they behave like they couldn’t care less about my work, or they don't know me at all. You know what I mean?
And you know, Kill was the most important play I ever wrote. It was about the Gulf War in Iraq and it emerged from my inability to continue living in this country—that was so indifferent to the suffering of Muslim children, women, and men—without saying something about all of that senseless death. You understand how it is. When you’re from that part of the world, you are not desensitized to our suffering the way Americans are, even the educated and the liberal ones.
It’s not even that I’m very political. More so, it’s that I’m sensitive. Very sensitive. That’s what powers my art. The photos they were showing in newspapers were all these nameless dead.
Bobuq: What kind of photos were they showing?
Bina: Nothing! No photos of people. That’s the problem! It’s not like with Gaza where we’ve witnessed the bloodshed and the atrocity and the occupation. They were ruthless back then, saying, “Do you think the weather is any good for bombing today?” The media would say that. Can you imagine?
We did not see the dead bodies. We did not see the people dying. We just heard the bombs falling. My sister got me a card for the Harvard University Library. Every international paper was there, and there were photos that you cannot believe. Carved out faces. Petrified skeletons. And none of that was anywhere to be seen in America because they wanted to conceal the truth.
America never printed those images because their people can get disturbed or they might actually stop the war. They believe the propaganda. Americans find reasons to support any war against Muslims. They’re too busy with their lives. They don’t know the history of Islam. It’s not that I always wrote Muslim plays. It’s because I am Muslim, even if I never really practiced it.
They made me more Muslim in this country than I was in my own country.
Bobuq: What made you more Muslim?
Bina: I never self-labelled myself a Muslim playwright. It was everyone else! They always say Muslim playwright, Muslim woman artist. They identified me a Pakistani-woman Muslim-woman playwright. You know how many things there are against me? Strikes in this country. Pakistani? Muslim? Woman? Immigrant? My sense of humor saved me. My plays are very serious, but there is always a lot of humor. In Kill it was not that kind of humor, but there was still humor.
Bobuq: Why do you think it’s important to emphasize humor and brutality in your work?
Bina: No, I don't emphasize humor. It’s in there. It’s in me. It’s in my work. When I talk, I’m humorous. But when I talk about war, I can cry. Still, there’s humor in Afghan Woman. There’s a woman. She’s calling her children. I was in a burka in that play, a barefoot burka. Nobody sees me. Nobody ever saw me in that play. She’s against the war and she’s against the terrorism. The audience couldn’t comprehend that at the time. They felt such vengeance after 9/11. It was impossible to get through to people to warn them that this would only cause more harm.
Bobuq: So, what was the reception to Kill?
Bina: A lot of people walked out, right? A lot of people. I had no idea why they were walking out. I wrote it in 1991 when the war was happening. One night, an Arab came to see the show. His name was Muhammad. And afterwards, he invited me for coffee and he said, “Bina, you're very brave.” And I said, “I don't know. I just, I cannot handle wars. I cannot, and I'm an artist and I’m a writer, and that’s all I’m going to write about. Children are dying, children are dying.” There’s one huge monologue, it’s called “My Only Child,” and there are seven Iraqi women in the desert at night looking for the dead body parts of their children, and it’s exactly like Gaza. The other day, I said, “Let me do a reading of this thing, you know, because it seems like I wrote it today.” People didn’t want to hear that kind of writing back then. Maybe they’re ready for it now.
And, you know, that guy Muhammad, he said you’re brave for playing Palestinian resistance music in the opening of your play. I was shocked. I was just playing a tape I’d found in Paris. He said, “Don’t you know? You’re in New York. They hate Palestinians here. No wonder people are walking out of the theater during your show.” But did I stop playing it? No, I didn’t.
Bobuq: Of course not. You can't pander to those regressive cultural forces and their expectations of us. If you did pander to them, Bina, you'd have a very different career.
Bina: Listen, nobody’s paying me. Nobody’s giving me rave reviews. Nobody’s giving me residencies. Nobody. I go see lousy shows all the time, and they get rave reviews in the New York Times. They get every residency. I’ve never gotten anything. So I was very free. If I’m an actor, I’m playing the part. If I’m a writer, I’m writing the play. If I’m a director, I’m directing the play. “To hell with you,” I said. When a lighting designer on the set of a show I wrote called Sex Industry abused me, I said, “Go home. I'll do the lights myself.” I’m sitting upstairs. When my part is coming up, I tiptoe downstairs. I do the scene and then I go back into the lighting booth.
Bobuq: Before we draw this conversation to a close, I want to turn back to Afghan Woman for a moment. We understand now—perhaps for some only with the benefit of hindsight—that the American pretense of invading Afghanistan to save Afghan women was specious from the get go. Something I find so smart about the language of the play is how the main character both draws on and rejects the disempowerment projected upon her. I’m thinking of the line, “Please speak on my behalf / Let me be silent.” Can you elaborate on the context of writing that play and what you see having changed today?
Bina: Yeah, I was so ahead of my time. It’s not only that people ignored me, but also that they had no idea what they were watching. My style was so different for them. Afghan Woman went everywhere, the one play which went to like 20 universities in America. That was the only time I ever got paid well. It went to Manchester, Belgium, Toronto, Hawaii, California. You name it.
Immediately after 9/11, racism towards Muslim people became very open in New York City. I’d be walking down the street, and somebody would say, “We’re going to get you, bitch. You Arab, you Arab bitch.” And I'm so naive sometimes, I’m thinking, who are they talking to? I’m not Arab.
I’d turn around and say, “You bitch,” right back at them. There was such animosity, such fervor, even in New York, and they showed it to everybody. The whole world turned against Muslim people. The whole world turned and since then, it has not been resolved. So this woman in the play, she’s a peasant, but she has incredible knowledge. She questions our assumptions. She says, “Oh, you’ve known for how long that I'm in a burka, and all of a sudden you want to come and free me?” Because they did not really go to Afghanistan to free any woman from the burka. They went for other things, the minerals and the strategic interests. It’s always some bullshit. I never got a single review for Afghan Woman, even though it was performed almost two decades into my theater career. Only in other countries, they wrote a big interview about me and put me on TV and everything. People here thought I was disrespecting 9/11 and, you know, if you watch a play decrying innocent killing and you take offense, that’s not my problem.
Bobuq: The ignorance is intentional. It’s easier for Americans to be controlled if they know less. That’s why AI is propped up by billions of dollars while libraries are getting defunded. There’s a broader political agenda when it comes to the mass illiteracy and miseducation of Americans. It’s not for us to pander to the lowest common denominator.
Bina: [laughs] It’s true. Even when you’re impartial and defend all humanity, even that’s not enough for them. I simply could never accept as normal the wholesale killing of Muslim people in other countries. I had no idea that was anything political. I thought that was having a heart.
The first word in the Quran is Iqra. You know, the Angel Jibreel came to Prophet Muhammad and he said, “Read,” and Prophet Muhammad said, “I can’t read. I’m illiterate.” So Jibreel said, “Recite.” He repeated the command until the Prophet was able to recite the entire verse himself. That’s what Iqra means. Recite, read, recite. It doesn’t matter how. Learn any way you can.
Bobuq: It’s been an absolute pleasure. I hope this conversation plays some small part in honoring your tremendous legacy and your contribution to American literature. When so many artists have proven spineless, you will be remembered for your integrity.