When “Yasmina’s Necklace” opens this week at Berwyn’s 16th Street Theatre, it will be another landmark in the career of playwright Rohina Malik, a Niles North High School alum. The five-character drama explores the fraught intersection of race and love in the story of a Puerto Rican-Iraqi man and a Middle Eastern woman trying to forge a relationship in a world that often seems set on keeping them apart.
The piece follows Malik’s acclaimed shows “Unveiled” and “The Mecca Tales,” and should further cement the Pakistani-American’s reputation as an emerging playwright whose work bears watching. But Malik’s career as a playwright almost never happened.
“I loved theater in high school. I found my place there,” she recalls. It was a place she sometimes had to fight for. Malik was 15 when her family emigrated to the United States from London, where she’d been a student at an all-girls school. “I remember trying out for ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ which requires an English accent. I was like, ‘I’ve got this.’ I can do an English accent better than anybody. I’m from England. And I remember the president of the drama club saying to me after auditions, ‘You know, we can’t really cast you because it wouldn’t make sense. Your character is supposed to be related to the others and the rest of the cast is white.'”
Fortunately, the student drama club chief was overruled by an instructor. Malik got the part. “Being involved in theater made me feel fully alive. Like I had a purpose,” she says. That involvement ended with high school. “In college, I gave it all up. My parents were like, ‘theater isn’t something girls like you do. Look around. You’re Muslim. You have brown skin. You cover your hair. You don’t see girls like you in theater.’ So I just stopped, and life went on. I got married. I had four kids. I tried to forget about theater.”
Malik’s parents were right — brown girls with covered hair are few and far between in the world of female thespians. Malik settled in to a marriage. By 32, she had four children and a resume that featured her work as a Montessori school teacher. But as life went on, she became acutely aware that she wasn’t happy.
“It was horrible,” she recalls, “I felt like my life was passing me by, and I was wasting it, not doing what I was supposed to be doing. At one point, it just became unbearable. So I sat down and asked myself, ‘When was the last time I felt whole? What was I doing? What do I love?’ And it all came back to theater.”
In 2008, Malik dipped a toe in the water by taking a class with beloved Chicago solo artist Tekki Lomnicki. At the end of the course, Malik had “Unveiled,” a one-woman series of monologues that offered insight into the lives of five different Muslim women, ranging form a London hip-hop artist to a Moroccan lawyer. Since that fortuitous debut, Malik has performed “Unveiled” at theaters, universities and for community groups across the country. She’s also earned a coveted spot as a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists, a nationally recognized incubator of new works. The Goodman Theater commissioned her to write “The Mecca Tales,” a play that wound up garnering a Joseph Jefferson Nomination for Best New Work of 2010. Her family, Malik says, has long since come around to the fact that she’s a theatre artist.
“When my mom saw ‘Unveiled,’ it was like something inside of her switched. She was like ‘You need to keep doing this. I’ll do whatever I can to support you.’ And she meant it. She’s become my number one babysitter. “
When Malik first started working on “Yasmina’s Necklace,” her youngest child — now 8 — was still an infant. There have been staged readings of the piece at the Goodman and Silk Road theaters, but 16th Street will be the first full production of the play. “I’ve been at this for seven years,” Malik says, “I feel like it’s ready.”
Malik was in a grocery story when she got the first inkling of the idea that would become “Yasmina’s Necklace.”
“There was this checkout girl wearing a necklace that spelled out ‘Iraq,’ Malik says, “I thought that was so unusual, so kind of brave. Iraq has so many bad connotations in the U.S.; we associate it with war and terrorism. And here was this girl, not afraid to wear a necklace that spelled it out. “
Malik draws much of her inspiration from interviewing refugees who arrive in the United States after harrowing escapes from the Middle East. “When I talk to refugees from Iraq, lots of times they’ll actually whisper the word — like it’s so shameful they don’t want anyone else to hear,” Malik said. “Right now, there’s so much fear-mongering about refugees. It’s disturbing and upsetting.
“I hope audiences leave the theater with a better understanding of their Muslim neighbors, and I hope they can see that, at the end of the day, we are all more similar than we are different.”
‘Yasmina’s Necklace’
When: Jan. 21-Feb. 27
Where: 16th Street Theatre, 6420 16th St., Berwyn
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Tickets: $18-$20
Contact: 708-795-6704; www.16thstreettheater.org