Mona Mansour jokes that as a playwright, she's such a "bad gay."
"I'm very politically to the left, supportive of all the causes, but I feel like I'm a bad gay," said Mansour about identifying as a lesbian. "It's not the thing that I've really written about a great deal, and I don't know if it is just part of my life so I don't need to work it out on stage, or maybe I'm just so deeply messed up that I don't work it out on stage. I don't know."
Formerly an actress who previously lived in Chicago in the early 1990s, Mansour has now built a career as an award-winning playwright based out of New York. Mansour's dark comedy The Way West is currently making its world premiere run at Steppenwolf Theatre. Mansour is also the recipient of the 2014 Middle East America Distinguished Playwright Award, a $10,000 fellowship prize cosponsored by San Francisco's Golden Thread Productions, New York's The Lark Play Development Center and Chicago's Silk Road Rising.
"The part of my identity that has really been more compelling to me as a writer has been the Arab-American part over the past 10 years," said Mansour, reflecting on her mixed heritage of having a Lebanese father and an American mother with pioneer roots. Her previous plays include The Hour of Feeling, Urge for Going and Across the Water, and Mansour said that just including Arab characters in an American play can be seen as a political act the way that putting an LGBTQ character onstage was a few decades ago.
"The Lebanese side of my family was a much more predominant side, just because the way that culture operates. We have a lot of cousins and my father had like six siblings, and so they're loud Arabs, and I'm a loud Arab," Mansour said. "My mother's side was Norwegian and she was an only child, but she always used to tell me that her grandmother's father was, like, a Mormon bishop, and so I think that may have contributed to my own mother's thing about her obsession with pioneer wagon trains."
Much of this pours through in The Way West, in which Mansour decided to switch focus away from her Arab heritage to that of her mother's.
"It really isn't a tribute, but it was inspired by my mother and her finances and health," said Mansour about The Way West. "And frankly, my finances."
The Way West focuses on a mother and her two grown daughters facing crippling debt and health problems in modern-day California. These women largely remain upbeat and defiant—often harkening back to their pioneer heritage in song for inspiration—even though disaster looms just around the corner.
"It's staggering just the amount of attention we pay to money. I think Americans love to watch people with money like on TV with all those Housewives shows and all that, but we don't like to actually talk about it," Mansour said, adding that she really started writing The Way West to explore her own issues with massive credit-card debt and to examine the blind optimism that many Americans possess when faced with crises tied to both health and financial issues.
"We just use credit. I mean, that's how I ended up in the mess I was in," Mansour said. "I was using credit to live."
Luckily, Mansour says that she's a much better place when it comes to her own personal debt issues, and that a string of commissions ( plus the Middle East America Distinguished Playwright Award ) have helped her to stand on a more secure financial footing.
Even though The Way West has received largely mixed reviews, Mansour is still very happy with the way the Steppenwolf production has turned out. She has loved the way the cast has clicked together, and she considers herself very lucky to have had Steppenwolf ensemble member Amy Morton direct the production.
"Amy is as intense in life as she is onstage. It's really amazing, but at first it can be intimidating," Mansour said. "You work with her and you realize that there is this core of her—I have to use committed because I can't think of another word—to the process and every moment in dialogue. She will dig and try to find out what you were trying to do and pulls it out and finds a way to communicate it to the actors and solidifies in a way that I've never really experienced with a director before."
Mansour is also glad to return to Chicago after so much time away. It also allowed her to reflect on her life back then, when she wasn't really identifying as a lesbian.
"I can't say I was closeted," Mansour said. "I just hadn't figured things out."
Mona Mansour's world premiere play The Way West continues through Sunday, June 8, at Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays ( and Sundays through May 11 ), 3 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays ( no shows May 3 ), 3 p.m. Sundays, 2 p.m. Wednesday matinees start May 14. Admission is $20-$78; call 312-335-1650 or visit www.steppenwolf.org .
