What happens if you wear a Muslim burka to a Macalester play? All kinds of interesting things.

by Anne Campisi

Two views of the author.

One day in April I put on a burka--a long black dress, my face and hair veiled--before I drove to the Macalester theater. My husband, Evan Winet, was directing a dress rehearsal of The Jester, a 1967 Syrian comedy, for the spring production. He was the only person who knew I was coming.

I suspected this might bother some people, both the appearance of a veiled woman on campus and the eventual understanding that I was not a Muslim. But I was curious and Evan was game: how would people react? A combination of nervousness and the burka's elegance improved my posture when I left the car. Two passersby, reflected in the window ahead of me, openly stared until I entered the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center.

Four months earlier, in January 2005, a faculty travel grant sent Evan to Damascus to research the play. This was a new translation, commissioned specifically for Macalester's production, and one of the few Arab plays staged in the United States in recent years. In Syria, we had a chance to consult with the reclusive playwright, Mohammad al-Maghut, who at 71 is renowned as one of the Arab world's foremost living poets.

Back home, students participating in the play took a Theater Projects course that focused on issues of the text. Not only did they learn lines and collaborate with local Arabic dancers and musicians, they discussed extensive readings on subjects like Arab nationalism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

At the dress rehearsal, I took my seat three minutes into the first scene. The entire cast was on stage and eight people were in the house. With all but my eyes and fingers draped in black, no one knew it was me. But everybody noticed.

"When you came in," Rachel Cole '97 told me afterwards, "a stillness fell, a shock, just an acknowledgement of the entrance of this woman."

Though no one broke character, students told me later that some of them were disturbed, reading the veil as an extreme form of female oppression in their own space. Others shrugged me off as a reporter for a local Islamic paper. A few thought the burka was exotically sexy. More than a few--myself keenly among them--felt enormously self-conscious.

"It challenged my own position of being in the play," said Cole. "[The Jester] was written by a Syrian man criticizing Arab nationalism, and here's me as a white, Jewish, American woman. What is my relationship to these issues?...It complicates the project, but doesn't negate it." Ultimately, she went on to explain, an actor has to act. And she can't control who's in the audience.

Students wrestled between the rhetorical openness taught in their classrooms and the spontaneous social habits of the real world. Though I laughed aloud at the funny bits of The Jester and applauded heartily at the end, people passed me on tip-toe.

Just after the curtain call, however, one student actor came up and bridged the perceived divide. A cart of cupcakes had appeared, in honor of a birthday, and with this she approached me at my seat, smiled and offered me one. She held it out almost warily, as if her overture might cause offense requiring a quick retreat. I accepted the cupcake with thanks and congratulations, and everyone heard my voice. The student asked my name and the game was up: I was someone they knew. Reactions varied from laughter and loud appreciation to sober feelings that a non-Muslim American wearing Islamic clothing in public was an unacceptable transgression. The conversations would go on for weeks. Meanwhile, I puzzled over just how one ate a cupcake while veiled.

Partly because the play was recommended by the weekly City Pages newspaper, The Jester's audiences were fairly diverse and included many theatergoers from the local Arab-American community. This fact alone defied my preconceptions of life in Minnesota. Originally from New York and California, I didn't expect the ethnic diversity I've found here in the Twin Cities; I didn't expect to sip tea among women in black Iranian chador, or colorful Somali head scarves, at the café on my St. Paul street. As the Midwest continues to change and grow, I see Macalester boldly facing forward.

Anne Campisi is a writer who lives in the Twin Cities.