Interrobang Theatre Project presents I CALL MY BROTHERS Review

Interrobang Theatre Project production – smooth and intimate

Politics and race define everything and yet they never are the subjects. Instead, the script and the production stay up close and personal. Salar Ardebili is, in this writers’s view, heartbreaking as Amor, an alienated Everyman making his troubled way through the Swedish capital. After hearing of the car bombing, he has a stream of fraught phone conversations. Then he sets off to return a defective drill head to a store as a favor for a cousin. He may fear surveillance but he also fears disappointing his relative.

Three fellow actors (Tina El Gamal, Gloria Imseih Petrelli and Chris Khoshaba) fill the stage as friends, relatives, store clerks, officers – even an animal rights activist who calls at the most inopportune times. Under Abhi Shrestha’s smooth direction, the cast blends direct address to the audience with personal interactions and stylized enactments of Amor’s fantasies. A hand-held microphone confined to an upstage corner by a long cord might be an awkward stage device. But like the play itself, for this writer, it defies expectations by creating a hub of intimacy.

I CALL MY BROTHERS rediscovers bonds

Central to Amor’s life is his childhood friend Shavi, now in the scaffolding business and father of a newborn daughter. While dear to him, Amor openly questions whether he’d die for Shavi as readily as he would for his own biological brothers. Later, he calls Valeria whom he has loved passionately since their youth even though she has never shared his feelings. Married and living elsewhere, Valeria urges him to move on. It takes the crisis of the car bombing to break down Amor’s isolation and push him to rediscover the bonds between himself and those who care about him.