Atlanta playwright and actor Suehyla El-Attar partially based her new play, The Doctor, the Devil & My Dad, on her relationship with her late father. But this week’s world premiere at 7 Stages isn’t the first time he inspired her. “I based most of my foundation of who I am off of him,” she says.
El-Attar, 39, fictionalized her relationship with her father in her first full-length play, A Perfect Prayer (Horizon Theatre, 2006), which depicted a young woman torn between her Muslim heritage and her all-American surroundings. This piece draws on her father’s death from multiple myeloma in 2012.
“The play was inspired by the fact that when my dad passed away, it was my first experience with an Islamic burial, and the rituals and practices behind it,” El-Attar says. “It was a time when I could do everything the way it was done in my father’s homeland. And it triggered a bunch of memories of stories my father told me.”
Egyptian-born Mohamed El-Attar had moved from Cairo to America, where he was a professor of sociology at Mississippi State University. He retired in 1997, moving to Atlanta in 2000. When his cancer was diagnosed in August 2011, Suehyla — the only one of his three children in Atlanta then — made sure she helped both of her parents deal with his illness and treatment.
“I didn’t really take care of my father,” she says. “I took care of the man I’d never really got to know [before]. I spent eight hours sitting beside him during treatment and every now and then would stop looking at my phone and ask him questions.”
You can have a lot of intimate moments with someone who knows he’s going to die and is afraid, she says.
ON THE SECOND ANNIVERSARY of her father’s death, Suehyla wrote of him on her blog: “For me, my dad is ‘MacGyver,’ ‘The A-Team,’ ‘Quantum Leap,’ ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation,’ ‘60 Minutes,’ ‘Knight Rider,’ any Clint Eastwood movie (including the orangutan one), ‘Doctor Who’ (with Tom Baker), documentaries on history, documentaries on animals, Mafia movies, westerns, Dan Rather and CBS Nightly News at 5:30, a bowl of salad and glass of water EVERY night before dinner … and praying 5 times a day.”
When El-Attar told friend Heidi Howard about her father’s funeral — which, according to Muslim practice, took place on the day of his death — and about adjusting to life without him, Howard wanted more. The 7 Stages artistic director responded, “I’d like you to write that down and share it.”
Howard directs The Doctor, The Devil and My Dad, which explores the grieving process but goes beyond that to an imaginative, at times humorous, adventure that draws on two cultural icons.
7 Stages describes the piece this way: “Once upon a time, a legendary sci-fi television icon and an infamous biblical villain descended upon a woman trapped by her grief. Reality and fantasy merge as she explores the mysteries of the universe and takes you on a journey of time-bending fantasy paired with the reality of loss that can only culminate with the simple fact that what needs to happen cannot be stopped.”
The Doctor of the title, played by Nicholas Tecosky, is inspired by the protagonist of the 50-year-old British series “Doctor Who,” about an energetic alien do-gooder who travels in a time machine to fight evil in the universe.
The Devil, played by Gina Rickicki, also comes from El-Attar’s childhood memories. “Growing up in our household, the devil was a constant character,” she says. When she misbehaved, her parents would say, “ ‘Don’t do that, you’ll make the devil happy.’ There seemed to be so much hatred for the devil that, in my youthful rebellion, I found some sympathy for the devil.
“I think everyone will assume Summer [played by Stacy Melich] is my surrogate, but that’s not necessarily the case,” the playwright says. “Summer lives with Lucifer in a studio apartment. The Doctor is there to set the universe on the right path, like he always does. They’re both mythical ideas, fictional characters. The play asks, ‘What if everything we ever thought of, ever really believed in, really existed? Or do we have [those ideas] because they’re coming from somewhere else?’ ”
The Doctor, the Devil and My Dad should send artists and audiences alike on an adventure in time and space.
