 as something perhaps from evil. And I wonder, just talk about that relationship between an authentic voice and a market-driven voice and how to navigate this, especially as you hit this period where your world is, your voice is in the market. Right, well, such an amazing testimony you attribute to. I mean, your experience of the disgrace is very moving to hear about it. And I remember meeting you that afternoon, actually. Yeah, because I couldn't leave the theater. I was like, I don't know where to go now after having watched it. Your enthusiasm really meant so much to me, and it still does. I mean, it sounds louder than it is. It's a good question. I think today we had a story seminar. We talked about Aristotle, and we talked about his idea that a dramatic story is the movement of a protagonist from one pole to the other, a full reversal that results in a kind of recognition of some sort, on his own part, the edifice that he is the source of the plague and thieves, but also the audience's recognition of what the character is going through. And towards the end of the session today, we were talking about the process of what it takes to get a story. We were defining character as not as a list of traits, but as what a character does, that we actually don't know who a character is until they do something. And so one of the students late in the session was talking about the difficulty that you have to go through yourself to be able to get to a place where a character actually does do something unexpected, or does something that breaks the frame of whatever you thought you've created or that you are creating. And I think, in a way, we have to go through a kind of reversal and recognition process ourselves in the process of making the work. And the reason I bring all of this up is because I think that the market-driven forces can be like the screws that tighten on you as an artist and that force you to come out with what's really inside you. Because I think if you're really an artist, you don't want to capitulate to the market. You don't want to tell people what they already know. You don't want to tell people what you already know. I think you come to understand at a certain point what's really interesting is to discover something unknown. But to be able to have the fortitude to do that doesn't just require an act of will. It requires a circumstance that forces you past what you know and past yourself. It forces you past cognitive ease. It forces you past whatever you think you're doing. And so in a way, the proper calibrated relationship to the marketplace can actually serve as that pressure cooker that explodes into something true. I don't think that I personally don't think that authenticity exists in opposition to the world. Because I think there is this paradigm of there's me and then there's the world. I don't think that's the way it works. I think that authenticity arises because of the friction and the conflict that we have with reality. That's where it begins to emerge. So I think for a dramatist, that's a really pregnant idea because that's exactly what characters have to do. They have to go through that process of through friction with each other, with the world, come out with what's truly inside them. Yeah, no, it's great. And to that end, I keep thinking about all of your characters and the work that I know and am familiar with, which is most of the things that you've written and I've seen in your films, they come to a point where they make Charles Baxter's calls it a one-way gay action, a point of no return. And I think that was one of the things that was so stunning about Disgraced is there's just a moment of no return. And you know that that character can't recover. And I just, I don't know what the question is, but I just wanted you to talk a little bit about all of your characters. Really, there are moments that are very identifiable. And they're always quite shocking, no matter how close a reader I am or watcher I am. I'm like so surprised at how far they go. And yet they're still behaving within the realm of possibility still. And so I just, you know, that sense of, that real sense of plot and where that comes from. And you know, we were talking about today character in relationship to plot. And I just wonder how you think about that as a writer. I think one thing I think is that I grew up in a Punjabi household, Punjabi, you know, this part of Pakistan and India called Punjab. And it's like, you know, Southern Italians in India, right, so Southern Italy of India. And so it's a very operatic culture and this sort of very loud, big people, big actions, extreme behavior. So I think that there's a degree of attunement to the extravagant polarities that humans are capable of that I witnessed as a young boy. And that I think were just part and parcel of my understanding of the world. It turns out that that's a pretty good perspective to have, I guess, if you're a dramatist and you're interested in showing what human beings are capable of doing, not just what they usually do, but what they are actually capable of and pushed to extremes. I think there's a pleasure in that kind of dramatic movement that we don't, it's just not as much fun, really, to watch a story that doesn't go there. If a story goes there and plausibly does so, there's a feeling of having experienced something. You know, and we could say that what we're experiencing is what Aristotle calls catharsis. That catharsis is only possible when the full dimension of our pity and our terror are aroused by what we see. If you know if it's, if the volume dial is on two or three, then you can't really have catharsis. Catharsis isn't necessarily, you know, a lot of people, I think misuse the word, doesn't just mean I have some new feelings and I cry and maybe I feel something and it's gone. It's a very specific process that he describes having to do with identification, anticipation, pity and terror. And I just think that the bigger the story, the more compelling that process can be. I wonder too, I sent you an email at some point after I read American Dervish and said, we had to talk about Mina in American Dervish. So maybe we could, you know, your women don't always fare well, although they're very compelling characters. Mina is, you know, is both devout and irreverent, but ultimately in your metaphor ground, to dust at the end of American Dervish, you know, Amir hits Emily in Disgraced. And then the who and the what, you're kind of roaming around similar themes there as well. And I just, just wonder. I think Zarina, I'm doing a lot of work on the play before Christmas in the good center. Yes. I think Zarina's gonna prevail. Is she gonna prevail? Which I think is going to be a huge step for me as an artist, I'm very excited to see if I can pull it off. But I just wonder, I mean, they're very compelling, you know, they're very compelling characters. But I do just, you know, wonder, I wanted to just, you know, have that conversation with you. So. Well, look, I mean, there's no way to avoid it. I think that the less charitable reading of my work is that it's laced with unconscious misogyny. I think the more charitable reading of the work is that I am trying to understand an abuse of the feminine that has been rampant throughout my experience of Muslim and Muslim American life. I would say that I don't think it's a phenomenon that is exclusive to Muslim American life. I think that there is an abusive, if we talk about the theological issues that I'm trying to grapple with in different ways, you know, I think of different modalities of divine experience. I think of God the Father. God the Father as the force, the law that we must obey, the behavior that we must embody in order to identify ourselves as different from others. So it's a kind of rule-bound, fear-based, and also identity-conferring modality of faith. So that's one, this is God the Father, and then I think it's sort of God the Mother as the nurturing, nourishing, sustaining relationship to faith that has something not to do with identity and with rule or law, but has simply to do with the present and the dispensation of the present, the relational, right? And I think that we exist, I mean, look, the history of Greek tragedy on some level is the erasure of the matriarchal God the Mother paradigm in favor of the God the Father system. And I think that we in Abrahamic sort of monotheistic culture, whether it's Judaism or Christianity, or Islam are dealing with the erasure of the feminine spiritual dimension or logos, the feminine spiritual logos in favor of the patriarchal. And so it's a big struggle. And it's one that is part and parcel, I think of what it means to be Muslim today, but perhaps not just Muslim. And so I think that I'm trying to grapple with those issues. I'm not controlling my production. That is to say, the day that I wrote the scene in which the part of the scene in which Emily beats, I mean, Amir beats Emily senseless was really an awful, awful day. And it was something that happened. And I was so surprised that he had done this. And I was not asking the question at the time, is this right? It was like I had dropped to a new level of experience, both in terms of myself as a writer, but also in terms of whatever was inside me, gave it expression, and then I had to deal with the consequence of, okay, well, there it is. Now what am I gonna do? Am I gonna suppress it? Am I gonna try to make a meeting out of it? What am I gonna do? So I can't really control. I can't, you know, it's one of those things is if I was to decide, well, you know, your work is laced with unconscious misogyny. So what am I gonna do about that? Am I going to, what? Am I going to stop expressing the themes that seem to be emerging from me? I don't think I can, but I think what I can hope to do is I can hope to find a more calibrated relationship to my own sort of understanding of what it is that I'm doing in hope that by working through those things, I can move into a different place. You know, I will say this. Amina, in many ways, embodies, you know, she's ground to dust at the end of the book, but she embodies a kind of, if we look at this sort of history of representation of saints, hagiography as it were, Amina is really just the portrait of a saint in the real world. And it turns out that the idea of saint as exemplary sufferer, to quote Susan Sontag, who talks of the artist as the exemplary sufferer, the saint is really the exemplary sufferer and that the exemplary life, as given to us by sainthood, is one who would willingly suffer for the sake of others. That's a problematic idea, certainly within a sort of post-enlightenment consciousness. And so the book is an exploration of that living in this world and a narrator who doesn't understand what the example of that is and what it means to him. And how, I mean, talk about just the influence of that. I mean, you're using a lot of religious metaphor and so talk a little bit about that, you know, again, we've gone back a little bit about kind of religiosity to your writing, which is more about the intensity. And I think mean is a great example of that. I mean, I think the life of a saint is exactly right. Talk a little bit about the history of where that comes from in the writing and what you are exploring at the level of those big questions. Well, I think that the calling of literature, this is my opinion, I mean, who am I, some dumb guy, but I think that the calling of literature is to answer, to ask the very biggest questions. And then font number one said that literature or the name must deal with the question of evil. Who deals with the question of evil? Religions deal with the question of evil. Religions systematically ask the biggest questions. They don't always have the best answers, but they ask the biggest questions. And somehow the frame of the literary has become very narrow in terms of its exploration of the full spectrum of what we're up against as creatures. And so I think I naturally find my inspiration in a different tradition. And it's, I remember being a sort of young boy and being sensitive to the kind of splendor and wonder and dimension and depth of experience. And remember thinking, I was eight and nine years old, that the only thing that responded to this register of experience was the Koran and Star Wars. Yoda and that whole thing, right? That responded to this depth of the mystery of things and the wonder. And so I think that in a way, it's just a natural, I just, I find that scripture and religious figures those stories have the widest dramatic possibilities. And they also, I mean, nothing like the Old Testament to really show you all of the possible faces of humanity. I read that on the topic of your last three plays have dealt with the Muslim identity. And I read that you understood how you could be branded as a niche Muslim American writer and that your mother had recently advised you and you have to stop this Muslim thing. So- I think I could have stopped with this Muslim thing. Yeah. I didn't get the accent right. No, I didn't. I didn't forgive you. What, do you, I mean, where are the directions of your story? Does that, you know, did your mother's mourning? Did I, am I heeding it? Yeah. Did you heed your mother's mourning? I guess that's the question. W. E. B. Du Bois talks about double consciousness. Double consciousness being the phenomena whereby a minority people sees itself through the eyes of the majority. For some reason, I have never really experienced double consciousness. So I don't see my experience as mediated through the white American majority eyes. It can create for some very startling surprises when I show my work and people say, oh my God, what do you do? Do you realize you're reaffirming stereotypes or you're doing this or you're doing, so I'm not thinking about what you're thinking about. I'm not thinking about what you're gonna say about Muslims. I'm just having this experience which is reflective of my experience, which to me is primary and is unmediated by an external gaze. I can't account for that. I don't know why that's the case. I don't know why I don't have double consciousness. And so when people say, well, you're a Muslim American, I'm like, great, so what? That's great. I mean, I'm writing about American life. American garbage to me is about the American religious experience about the rapture and violence, the radical passion for the aloneness with God that is the hallmark of American faith. That's what the book is about. It just happens to be from a Muslim point of view. And I think that reactions that I've had across the world really, but in particular, I was in Denver at an event and a guy had driven 250 miles to come see a reading and he came up to me afterwards, almost crying and hugged me, said, you know, I grew up in a Pentecostal family, fundamentalist family, and this book is the first book I've read that really feels to me like it's about my experience. Well, yeah, because it's about the American religious experience. I didn't say that. I was very excited about this. I was very moved myself by that. But in retrospect, that's my conclusion. So to me, the niche Muslim thing, I'm like, yeah, you know, look, I mean, I'm just grateful that anybody's paying any attention to what I'm doing. I spent so long people not paying any attention. So I'm just glad and hopefully things will go, continue to go well for me creatively and I'll continue to have ideas and continue to, and if some of those ideas are about Muslim American life, great. And if others are not, great. I just actually finished a play which is set on Wall Street, which is 25 characters, two women, 23 men. No Muslims. No Muslims. That's my Asian, he's talking. But I'm also now working on a novel which is all about Muslim American life post-9, 11, 10 years later and how things are the politics of, the truculent cultural politics of being Muslim. So I'm not thinking necessarily in those terms. But my mom is. But your mom? She's worried about me. It's all that matters what your mother is thinking ultimately. Well, I mean, you've even said in your own influence that a lot, you've been very influenced by a number of Jewish writers, you know. Kind of Botan, Philip Bronze, Old Bellow, Woody Allen. Jerry Seinfeld. Jerry Seinfeld. And Larry David. Oh, Larry David, yeah, yeah. Who has a student, I think, in Emerson College. A kid at Emerson College, I should say. So, and I think that that's interesting, you know, that that's been one of the major, have there been, there's been a fairly, you know, there's been a fair amount of growth in the sort of Muslim voice in American literature over the last decade since 9-11. And how do you see yourself fitting into, you know, into that conversation? I'm thinking, you know, like, you know, the reluctant fundamentalist, you know, some of those. I think Mohsen's writing mostly about, I think, I don't think Mohsen's writing about American Muslim identity as much. I think, I mean, I don't think there's too many people who are doing, who are having this particular conversation. But I think they will be. I think that that's bound to happen. I think that I don't know how I fit in because it seems that, it seems that I seem, I seem to piss off as many Muslims as I, as who would like what I'm doing. It was an interesting anecdote in that respect. Disgraced, it was someone who I was communicating with about the play about eight months after it had gone up. Somebody in the theater community who was asking me to be involved with something and I was not able to, but we started an email correspondence between the two of us. And he mentioned to me that he had a Pakistani partner, Pakistani male partner. And that he had taken his in-laws, his Pakistani male partners relatives, his in-laws to see Disgrace at Lincoln Center in the fall of 2012. About 12, I mean, taken about a dozen of them to go see it. And they absolutely abhorred it. I mean, they hated it, loathed it. I remember, I remember in London, I remember some folks, young Muslims walking, I say, overhearing them saying, who, what would possess anyone to write something like that? He said, what's interesting, so this fellow in our email counter of correspondence said to me, it was, but interesting is to observe what's happened in the last eight months because Disgrace will still sometimes come up at dinner and there will be vociferous arguments about it. And now half of the people have changed their position and think that it is actually a very profound comment on their experience as Americans, as Muslims in America. And I just think to myself, well, isn't that, that's the goal. The goal is to try to do something that makes enough of a, carves enough of a groove that people care to think about it eight months later. And that they care to think about it enough that their opinions about it could change. You know, it's an example that I sometimes give when I'm speaking about writing about how an audience's first reaction isn't necessarily even the most interesting reaction. It doesn't really even, what it is that they think or say is not really even all that interesting at first. If the goal is to make work that has the staying power for audiences to continue to see it and to continue to make up their minds about it. The theater's funny that way, right? It has this kind of instantaneous, what, you know, did you like it or not like it or, is there one genre you prefer writing in? Do you enjoy film work because it has a different kind of lifespan or do you like that kind of momentary nature of the theater? I mean, we always talk about it's so great because it's live, right, you know, right then or, you know, because I know, we talked a little bit about the work within, the preparation as an actor and what that takes. Is there a place you find yourself more comfortable or do you like, you know, the moving in between? I think as a fundamentally religious person, I think the theater appeals to me in that the way that I describe it is that I think we, social, hurting animals gather together in a room and we experience something that actually happens in front of us, that we are present to, not a screen but a live thing that we identify with which of course takes us back to the ritual root, the ritual root of theater. Gathered in a room together, hurting social creatures that we are, we experience this event together as one and we are able to experience emotions together that we cannot experience individually. There is a depth of emotion that we can have as a group. I mean, just think about mob, a mob to the bad version of the bad extreme of what people are capable of when they gather as a group. And I think that that experience of unity, of union, with something that is present together as a community takes us back again to that ritual root, the religious root of the theater. And so something is capable, you can do something in the theater you can't do in any other art form. And that is to use a different version of this word, the epiphany to make, to reveal, to reveal the face of the divine in a way, to reveal the face of some collective energy or source that unifies us all. I think it's very difficult or almost impossible to do in any other art form. But I think the theater, you can do it. And I think it's one of the reasons people say that when theater is good, it's the best thing. You hear that all the time. Oh, there's nothing like it when it's good. It's usually bad, which it is. I mean, we know that. It's usually boring. But when it's not, when it really gets that right, it has the possibility to renew us, to renew us in that religious way. Yeah, there's something about that. There's something about a kind of group imagination, imagining a world together that is to me very profound. You know, as much as I enjoy it in a novel, there's something about sharing it in a room that is... It's magic. It's magic. Like anything else. I want to make time for people who have questions out there if you mind doing it in the microphone so that how around TV can record it and people can hear it. Any questions out there? Anyone? Viewer? And I can talk for hours. I'm happy to keep going, but nothing so far. All right, I'm going to ask you a couple more questions. All right, just since... I'd love to talk a little bit about the acting, both, you know, I'd love to hear about, you know, the preparation for the war within. I was... The intensity of your character in that film overwhelmed me, just sitting at home on Netflix. So, you know, I can't even imagine what kind of preparation... I mean, you seemed... I hardly recognized you. You seemed otherworldly in that. And I just wonder what that was like. I'm a kind of a weird method guy in the sense that, you know, the history of acting theory and acting practice, basically you could break it up into two schools. One is the school of appearance and the other is the school of being. And both schools are aptly demonstrated by that wonderful anecdote. I don't know if it's true or not. Dustin Hoffman showing up for a shooting day on Marathon Man with Lawrence Olivier, the famous scene in which Olivier uses a... tooth drill to torture him to get the password. And apparently Dustin Hoffman in that scene is supposed to have been up for days and he's obviously supposed to look like a mess. And so the day of the shoot, the day of the shoot, Dustin Hoffman shows up looking like a mess. And Olivier says, you know, Dustin really, what will happen to you? And Dustin says, well, you know, Larry got this shot today and you know, it's gonna be really tough. And I've been up for three days and I haven't even drank a coffee. I mean, I'm ready to do it. And Lawrence Olivier says, Dustin, you really should learn how to act, right? And that's the division right there. To appear is the thing or to be the thing. And the American school is being, the British school is appearance. And each looks down on the other and each is good for specific things. Now, I just, you know, I'm very much school of being to the point that I don't, I feel like if I, when I don't have a line to say, or I am just listening or I'm just, I don't wanna be thinking about the character. Anything spontaneous, any thought that I'm having should be the character's thought. And I don't wanna go through the process of questioning. Wait a second, is that thought a character's thought or is that me thinking? And so in order to immerse myself so fully in the being of that character, I have to go through a very long process. So for the war with it, it was eight months. Eight months of gradually becoming this other person. And to a point where I did not, I was relaxed enough to not have the thought, am I this other person? Because I was the other person. And it's a kind of a level of, you know, it's extremely, but it's also, it speaks to a confidence issue to me that I need to feel that secure and that contained by my preparation in order to be able to release and be spontaneous. I think there are other actors who would feel more, excuse me, more confident with less. And it doesn't speak better of me or worse of them that that's the case. And when you're doing something like that, can you write at the same time or if you're writing a stream play, can you be writing a novel? Can you be writing a play? Can you be, I mean, can you do all those things simultaneously or do they take different kinds of space? Yeah, not so much. The acting thing is kind of a, it's kind of a total immersion. I think that, you know, over the course of eight months, I'd say, yeah, the beginning, yeah, I could do other things. Because I was, the preparation was discovering, you know, posture and different ways of, you know, feeling in the shoulder and how he might hold his head a little bit differently than me and then just spending a lot of time, you know, five minutes walking like him, then five minutes not walking like him, then five minutes walking like him, and then not, and then taking a nap and trying to put that in my body and then, you know, language and starting to work with the accent and trying to figure out what is the accent, what is the accent, what is it going to sound like? Can you speak with something that's not so similar to consonants? Consonantity, if it has a lot of consonant and Indian accent, then it's going to sound funny. It's not funny characters. I have to, how do I get rid of the consonant and go into the vowels, more and more into the vowels. So I'm losing the sense of the comedic aspect so what is, it's just constantly working this, all the time and also the thought process, this is the big one is the internal, is at some point it was very important to maybe two or three months in, it was very important for me to start practicing looking at the world as he did. So I would have to rigorously go through the process of what would he think when he saw that person on the street? What would he think when he goes in? Would he go into this Starbucks? What would he think when he, and just kind of getting a sense of those things and gradually accumulating all of that information and internalizing it as a discipline. That internalized discipline practiced over time begins to result, like Stanislavski says, when you do as if, you become. So enough of the as if time put in results in a becoming. But that just takes time. I mean, some people are good at this stuff right away. I'm not, it takes me, I've got to work very hard for whatever I do, so. Do you, no questions out there? I don't want to make sure everybody has a chance because we have a adopter here or something. Well, I'm just going to ask you a final question, I guess, then what's the impact that you want to have as an artist? I mean, what, why do you get up in the morning and what are you hoping for in the end? It's a big question. And there's a part of that question that's answerable and a part that's not answerable. The part that's answerable has something to do with union and has something to do with wishing to be unified with the audience or the reader to exist in a kind of union. I figure that as an artist in terms of craft, as absorption. If I can create an experience that is absorbing intellectually, emotionally, at the level of anticipation, expectation, rich in terms of its field of ideas and color, that there's a loss of the self, an awareness of the self, what, I can never pronounce his name, Mihaly Singh Simali, the guy talks about flow experience, to create flow experience for the audience because in that flow experience, something, there's a togetherness that comes, that can happen. Now, why do that is the question I cannot answer. I know why I feel that that is necessary to do, but I'm not sure I have words to articulate. I think the only thing that can articulate the whinness of that is the work well done. When the work is done right and I still feel like I haven't done it, that will be self-evident. Yeah, it's what Herman Klerman talks about with the group theater. It's that moment of union that it's that moment of union between the artists and the audience. It's when we all come together, there's something, I think, to use your language wholly. Well, I do think it is. I think it's wholly, I think it's transformative. I think it's like that 15-second period in high school. It's the reason to be alive. And have you had that 15 seconds again in the artistic world I won't ask about? But has that, or is it like a seeking for that 15, continual seeking to feel that again, you're talking a little bit about that, finding those moments again? I have to think about that. It's a good question. All right, well, I'm super grateful that you took the time I took with us. You'll be here for a few minutes if people want to ask questions, not on TV. Absolutely. All right, thank you. Thank you. We'll take us off TV. So I can put my glasses on. You can put your glasses on. Must have been nice.