Q & A with Playwright Arad Dabiri about PRESSURE!

What inspired you to write this play?

It started with a feeling. An indefinite feeling – hidden for most of my life and undefinable. Working together with „Wiener Wortstätten“ an Austrian Institution for the dramatic arts,  which promotes young talent and its Drama Lab was the creative trigger. Here, I was able to face the blank page and a small idea. That idea was: a nameless brother goes to prison and the people who remain outside have to deal with it. It was a completely raw confrontation with writing. The more I wrote, the more I understood the characters and discovered the story together with them. This gave me the opportunity to follow that feeling and ultimately arrive at this text. The more I immersed myself in it, the more the thoughts and themes came naturally and flowed into the text. Life up to this point and far beyond suddenly gave me everything I wanted to say here, an intrinsic urgency that I could convey to the outside world. And then I simply tried to write a piece that I myself would like to read or see.

What are your own experiences as an Austrian citizen with a migrant background? Were you once one of the boys on the park bench? Is that a world you know well? How did you experience your childhood/youth in Austria? What has changed, especially in terms of behavior towards people with a migrant background?

Okay, a little digression, story time: Austria is a slow country in every respect, but unfortunately also when it comes to coming to terms with its history. That hasn’t really happened at all. The FPÖ (Freedom Party Austria) was founded in 1955, just think about that. What Germany is currently fearing and grappling with was already the case in Austria more than 25 years ago: around 1999/2000, the FPÖ was elected into government as the second strongest party. In response, artist Christoph Schlingensief (German Theatre director, performance artist 1960-210, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Schlingensief) built a Big Brother-style container with asylum seekers in front of the Vienna State Opera and let the people happily vote on who should be deported next. Those were wild times; I was only three or four years old. It shows one thing: what is considered unimaginable can quickly become reality in Austria. The boozy fascist dream. And that’s only possible because there’s fertile ground for these ideas, because they may never have really gone away, because the process of coming to terms with the historical past was fundamentally insufficient. I’m only saying all this to explain, to paint a picture of what it means to grow up here as someone like me. As a child, there is a lot you don’t notice, also that normality is actually brutality. Sometimes hidden, sometimes intrusive. When posters on your way to school scream in your face that you don’t belong here. And you ask yourself: Do they really mean me? And then the question becomes irrelevant when people say these things out loud, no shame, just words. And the same party, by the way, is reaching new heights again today. The play Heldenplatz (1988) by Austrian dramatist Thomas Bernhard and the theater scandal surrounding it…A quote: “In Austria, everything is still the same as it was in 1938.” Maybe he was always too harsh, Bernhard. Maybe he was also right. But Vienna is and remains the most beautiful city in the world, come what may. This is my city, this is our city. We won’t let such losers take that away from us.

Is there an intention behind the play that you would like to see come to fruition?

To encourage people to reflect, to question their own projections, not to allow themselves to form an opinion or judgment at first glance, but to dare to think twice, that we are all just human beings, that we all have and are stories and biographies, that we cannot all be summed up in a glance or squeezed into a sentence.

In PRESSURE!, there is a great conflict between Hassan’s rather nostalgic image of Iran and Shirin’s more realistic or maybe disillusioned point of view, which is understandably reflected in misogynistic politics – a central conflict to which you also devote the longest scene.  This also gives rise to the siblings‘ opposing interpretations of guilt. For Hassan and his friends, it is a clear case of racial profiling, which seems very plausible as a consequence of strongly right-wing populist politics. On the other side, there is Shirin’s belief in the great opportunity in the West, which should be seized through personal initiative, adaptation, and acceptance of the (economic) rules of the game. Of course, there are some compromises and gray areas in between. Where would you place yourself?

Somewhere between all the voices in this play. Taken individually, each voice would probably not be too healthy for a single mind; it would be too entrenched in one attitude, and one would only drive oneself crazy with either indifference or frustration or anger. That’s the paradox. One day Shirin’s voice wins, the next day it’s the boys on the park bench, another time you find yourself in a mental gray area like Hassan, always back and forth, often at the same time, very exhausting, always somewhere in between.

Your drama has a musical, poetic quality, relies heavily on dialogue, but also has longer narrative prose that functions less as stage directions and more as literary/choral commentary—at least that’s how I interpreted it and emphasized this element even more strongly. Did you have a specific idea of how this should/could be handled in the production? How have these passages been implemented in the productions in Germany?

I would like to see every part of my dramatic texts as a piece of literature, so I tend to take a less technical approach and give hardly any stage directions, but use these spaces to make them more lively with the italicized passages, to carry the text further, to create images that don’t work in the dialogues. Everything is text, and as I said, I don’t give any guidelines, so it’s open to negotiation and directorial vision and practice, anything goes, nothing is mandatory. In the German productions, it was mixed; some had the actors speak the texts, some used them as mood anchors for a scene without explicitly portraying or speaking them.

What really impressed me about the text were the dialogues between the friends on the park bench, who dance around the conflict in an almost poetic, playful way, taking different points of view and then abandoning them again. This allows me to see both the boys’ capacity for reflection and their moments of indecision and immaturity. I see this not as a contradiction, but as a strength to tolerate and celebrate ambiguity and polyphony. Would you agree with me on that?

I would say: Because they believe they know what they are doing.

If you were to continue writing the play, what would the fight announced by the characters at the end, look like?

I think it’s like a cycle, a circle, a cycle of life, about life, which somehow has to be broken at some point. But, to drop a harsh sentence now: we are all racists. It won’t be possible to beat that out of people in one play, but it is possible within that framework to sharpen the senses, mobilize sensitivities, show the realities of life, and depict them vividly.

For a short time, I toyed with the idea of writing a second play, either a direct sequel in which the brother actually appears, dealing with life after the story of PRESSURE! or a play in which only the brother appears, during his time in prison, introspection, reflection, who knows.

In your opinion, in times of democratic decline, is there justified hope for an effective organized civil movement fighting for our values?

The social middle ground (in big quotation marks) is actually what counts and at the same time what is missing. The majority of people want this life to be awesome and have fun. But only the hardliners take to the streets or shout loudly on the internet. The middle class backbone is what holds us and democracy together. And as language becomes more brutal, violence becomes more real, as we can see in so many parts of the world. In Germany, there is heated debate about banning the AfD. Is that the solution? I don’t know. Thoughts don’t disappear; they just hide for a short time, perhaps. Maybe the bad voices shouldn’t be locked away. The majority just needs to get louder. Because we only miss what we have when it’s gone. The so-called middle ground needs to be clear about that. So where is the social body, the social corpus, where are we all when it matters?

Do you see any movements among the younger generation in Austria?

Forward and backward at the same time. The harsh, bitter reality: in Germany and Austria, more and more young people are voting for parties like the AfD or FPÖ. Of course, this may just be a trend, a fad, a lifestyle or accessory, whatever. But it could also be a bad omen. Because these are facts, the numbers speak for themselves. That’s sad. But, but, but: young people are taking to the streets. And as I said, young people can’t fix everything on their own; we need more of civil society to get involved. Time will tell. Even if I don’t always sound like it, I am optimistic. We are ready to defend ourselves, we will no longer put up with everything. Young people are becoming more alert, more socially sensitive, more historically knowledgeable, transgressions are being spotted and called out more quickly, and responsibility is being taken. I see this as a big plus point for my generation. There are more of us, we just have to simply show it again.

Can we look forward to a new piece from you?

Absolutely! In the fall, there will be the premiere of a new play, commissioned by a renowned theater, finally in my hometown: Vienna.