'Sons of the Prophet' Dramaturgy Notes

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

These words have often been attributed to Anton Chekhov, whom Stephen Karam includes in a multi-quotation epigraph to Sons of the Prophet, perhaps to reinforce that this is a play that ought to “evoke a sense of empathy without pity, sadness without wallowing” (Beth Schwartzapfel, “Playing with Real Life,” Brown Alumni Magazine, April 2011). Since Karam’s is a world of tangential yet consequential connections, it is worth mentioning that Chekhov trained as a physician, later renouncing not only the profession but also his confidence in medicine, in that he saw it only destroy lives, not heal them; Joseph might certainly relate. The poetic imperative above asks us to show, not tell; to engage in description of the world—bleak though it may be, reflected on broken glass—rather than simply stating fact.

Karam offers us characters who tell us stories in this fashion. “Afghanistan looks like a clenched fist?” supposes Charles, engaged in analogizing the unfamiliar with the familiar, a tactic in which the characters of the play engage in turn. The narratives they offer or impose on others provide a way for each to negotiate the consequences of real suffering. Bilquis notes the beauty in the suffering in a picture of St. Rafka, asserting faith that “all is well” right before taking a bad fall. Timothy asks Joseph to entertain the integrity of his “sort of history through personal history” by arguing that “there are so many compelling stories out there that aren’t being told and, the fact that people don’t know about them, it…it compounds their suffering.” So much of the play lies in how each character invests in what is not known, veering towards deceit: consider Vin’s placement of the deer decoy, a distraction with dire consequences. Following her fall from the graces of the Manhattan industry due to her publication of what turned out to be a fictionalized Holocaust account, Gloria engages in a desperate pitch involving Joseph in a Kahlil Gibran-inspired memoir. She later becomes the unlikely conscience of the room during a particularly chaotic afternoon in the Douaihy home when she asserts that “anytime you try to put the truth on paper, you get a form of fiction.”

In the play, Stephen Karam has layered facts upon fiction. He shares in an interview that he grew up across the street from the “Duwahis,” including two sisters who happened to be lesbians and served as his “role models and heroes” (Jerry Portwood, “Catching Up with Stephen Karam,” Out Magazine, November 2011). Karam is half Lebanese with family born in Lebanon; he is from Scranton, Pennsylvania, close to Nazareth, the setting of the play. He claims that the “best way to describe it that isn’t a lie is that it’s deeply personal but not autobiography. For me, I can go deeper and put more of myself on the line by having a shield of fiction.” These shields, these risks, these masks inform the journey of each character within the story of Sons of the Prophet.

Karam insists that the “one thing that isn’t up for question” is the familial love in the play, namely that between brothers Joseph and Charles. Looking back to Chekhov, it turns out that the aforementioned expression is abbreviated; a fiction borne out of fact—and fraternity. The phrase is a gloss from a letter Chekhov wrote to his brother Alexander in May 1886: "In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball" (Walter Horace Bruford, Anton Chekhov, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1954: 26).

In his own gesture towards the power of a simile, “Russia looks like a headless dog,” muses Charles. In a small doctor’s office, unsure of the pain to come within and without his family, his is an image distinctly of Karam’s imagination: at once whimsically pat and palliative, a distraction and a directive.

—Alyssa Schmidt, Assistant Professor of Theater