LaGuardia Community College Tackles Social Injustices

[NOTE- This review was previously submitted to The Bridge, LaGuardia Community College's official newspaper.]

November 2014, LaGuardia’s Performing Arts Center produced to the campus,  a social injustice play entitled, Lonely Leela. The show had strong run of a week and a half leading to upcoming events of a bigger social scale.

At the beginning of this enchanted play the audience is transformed, along with the characters, into a cyber ruled world, filled with characters that show us the enjoyments, excitement, and harm that comes along with the internet occupied world. As a satirical piece, written by Rehana Mirza,  Lonely Leela explores how seemingly harmless, everyday internet surfing can quickly escalate into discrimination, verbal bashing, brainwashing, and all over time consumption. Directed by Handan Ozbilgin, Lonely Leela was a vision that Mirza transformed into a mystified world controlled by Giggle, the queen of this cyber land who reigned down on its people, literally, sitting perched ten feet above the performers and the audience. Nothing was left out of this piece, where no controversial stone was left unturned. Everything from pop culture do’s and don’ts to lude remarks and behaviors were exhibited in the land of uncensored, free for all we know as the internet.

The playwright made it an effort to express the controversial topic of an increase in bigotry and distrust towards the Muslim community. With an Alice in Wonderland theme the main character, Leela, tries to escape this strange land and find her way back home to her boyfriend, but in the end finds her true identity as a Muslim-American woman. Throughout the play she is faced with trials and triumphs that force her to explore her own identity.

            Just like the well known Alice story, Leela finds herself entangled with the characters in this new place finding friends and villains along the way. She encounters Java and Flash, minions of S.A.T.A.N, System Administrative Tools for Analyzing Networks, who try to defer her from her mission to get back home. She is also captivated by the eccentric characters who were personifications of internet findings like online shopping, internet blogging, online gaming, and lets not forget scams.

            The brash comedy illuminates the issues  giving the audience a grim realization of the truth. By meeting a Muslim-American social-political blogger, Fareed, who is trapped in cyber land, she learns that denying her Muslim identity and turning a blind eye to discrimination of her people and other people makes her no better than those who spread the hate firsthand.

The social injustices that people face on a daily basis has found a new medium through the internet where there is no telling where discriminatory images, videos, or posts will end up. What starts in the home of a hateful blogger can reach the screens of a reader halfway around the world who feels the words on a deeper level than just nonsensical ranting. Being apart of the audience, I left the Black Box Theater having learned something and having an empathy re-instilled in me that had gotten lost by the flashy distractions of the internet, or even the physical world. Actors, Giovanni Ortiz, Viguens Louis, and Joell Jackson expressed to me that after rehearsing, practicing and performing night after night the words they uttered stick with them days after the production run. It’s a magical thing for a playwright to captivate the audience, but when the performers who hear the same lines repeatedly feel a deeper meaning every time, then you know the message has been embedded in the minds of everyone who has witnessed it. After seeing the play and getting some insight and having a face to face conversation with these three actors, I experienced the messaged projected on a deeper level that just watching couldn’t provide, and that’s what the playwright wanted. Jackson, who played Fareed, says that the profanity used and the lude jokes made are “catalysts [or] conversation starters.” Ortiz stated, in congruence, that the idea behind it was to be more aware and that they were “not here to change [the audiences] minds.”

This play was one of many installments or social awareness for Muslim discrimination being produced in LaGuardia’s acclaimed LPAC. The collection of pieces is entitled  Beyond Sacred: Unthinking Muslim Identity and its interdisciplinary artistic accounts exhibit the overall goal of spreading awareness and tolerance for all, through a  focus on the Muslim community. Along side Leela will be other theatre productions, art and photo exhibits, and community forums for its 2014-2015 season. Outside of the LPAC, one of the photography installments has been  debuted starting with a grand opening, on November 13,with curators from the colleges photography and theatre departments along with the  students and subjects who captured and posed for these pictures. Among the curators are Lidiya Kan, Scott Sternbach, Javier Larenas, Thierry Gourjon, and Hugo Fernandez, from the photography department, an outside source Alexandra Ben-Olhman, and Steven Hitt, the director of the theatre program. After spending a few months at LaGuardia Community College, the pictures previewed and additional images will be transferred to the Queens Museum for further viewing.

The college’s theater community is also doing a segment in conjunction with Beyond Sacred, labeled, Theatre for the Oppressed, which following the theme of social injustices focuses on gender differences and Muslim equality. Actor Viguens Louis, form Lonely Leela, says that with the performances given by theatres who promote social change the controversy is “right in front of you. You can’t run away. When your home you can change the channel or turn off the TV.”

The objective of the performing arts center and the photography program is to open the eyes of the students, parents, and faculty that attend these shows and viewings. The world is a difficult place for anyone to live in now a days and with a little social awareness and collective change it could become a little safer.With all the different cultures, ethnicities, and races that make up the United States of America, tolerance should not be a taboo subject. In the words of Green Day, recited both in Lonely Leela and by actor Joell Jackson, “Don’t wanna be an American Idiot.”