The Kite Runner

Author: Emma Stanford

Last Monday, students at a packed Wright Memorial Theatre saw one of the decade's most popular and powerful books brought to vivid, wrenching life. Arian Moayed performed a concentration in under one hour of The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini's compelling book about love, guilt and social classes in 1970s Afghanistan.

This production was part of the touring Literature to Life program of The American Place Theatre. The American Place Theatre has been a mainstay of the off-Broadway theater community for 47 years; the Literature to Life program is relatively new, bringing books such as The Kite Runner to audiences through intense performances including only one actor. Master teaching artist Chris Snock, who worked extensively on this production, came onstage for a few minutes before the performance to stress the authenticity of what the audience was about to see. Although Wynn Handman necessarily cut large portions of the 400-page novel while adapting it for the stage, the entire script is drawn directly from Hosseini's text.

"If it's not on the page, it's not on the stage," said Snock.

Anyone familiar with the book will appreciate the challenges Handman faced in adapting it as a one-man stage performance. The Kite Runner is an epic, spanning several decades and cultures while touching on many broad themes. The crux of the story, however, lies in the events that took place in Afghanistan in 1975, and these same events are those relayed to us through Moayed's potent performance.

The central character is Amir, a bookish twelve-year-old of the elite Pashtun ethnic group, who lives with his father in Kabul. Amir's relationship with his father is strained; his mother died in childbirth, and he constantly fails to live up to his father's expectations of bravery and athleticism. His solace has been the devoted friendship of the family servant's son, a member of the persecuted Hazara named Hassan. But the friendship becomes a torture when, defending the kite that Amir has won in a competition, Hassan is raped and brutalized by the bully Assef. Amir sees this happening, but does nothing to defend his friend. From that moment onward their friendship is corrupted by Amir's guilt and his determination to find fault in Hassan. In one harrowing scene, Amir holds up a pomegranate and asks Hassan, "What would you do if I hit you with this?" Hassan does nothing. Amir, made violent by guilt, pelts Hassan with pomegranates, waiting for a reaction. Finally Hassan smashes the last pomegranate into his own face and asks, "Are you satisfied?" As he performed this scene, Moayed's eyes were filled with tears. He was clearly painfully aware of Amir's wrongdoing, but he spared the audience nothing in conveying that injustice.

Wright Memorial Theatre was left bare for this performance, with a stool covered in bright cloth standing out as the only set piece. While The Kite Runner's tragedy revolves around inaction, whether Amir's failure to fight for Hassan or Hassan's failure to fight back, Moayed committed no such crime. He began slowly, trudging onstage in jeans and a fleece vest and speaking, as the adult Amir, as if each word were made of iron. But as soon as he slipped on an embroidered vest to portray the twelve-year-old Amir, he was constantly in motion. Amir was his primary character, and he perfectly captured the excited superlatives and nervous energy of a young boy, bouncing on the stool and wiping his nose with a sleeve. But Moayed also played around eight other characters, including Hassan and Assef. By adjusting his posture or the cadence of his voice, or even by moving his eyes, Moayed constructed remarkably vivid multi-character scenes. When he acted out an early face-off between Amir and Assef, Assef's swagger and Amir's terrified gaze were enough to set a one-actor confrontation on fire.

In a question-and-answer session after the performance, Moayed described his preparation for this role. He conducted hours of character interviews with the writers, assuming the role of each character and answering questions about characters as minor as a street vendor with two lines. Moayed did not merely throw on the postures and habits of his characters. He inhabited those characters, finding nuances of agony that would have been lost in a less devoted actor's performance. In the final scene, when Amir watched his best friend leave forever as a result of his own dishonesty, Moayed's eyes were red and his voice ragged. When he finished the last sentence and bowed his head, there was a moment when the audience struggled to distance itself from the performance enough to clap.