ARTISTS IN CONVERSATION

Interview With Actor Tara Grammy

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Please tell us about your character, Elham.

TARA GRAMMY: She’s a typical Iranian girl who wants to go study abroad, which is very common in Iran. She’s been accepted into a very prestigious school but needs to pass the TOEFL to attend. But she’s also having a hard time in class, because she kind of resents the fact that she has to learn English. She wishes that Persian was the language that everybody spoke, you know? And she’s like, but how can I connect in English?

Q: What in this play particularly resonates with your own experiences?

TG: So, I’m lucky. I grew up very bilingual, but the identity I was most comfortable with was always in English. I didn’t feel like I could fully express myself in Persian. You feel things in one language, but then think things in another language. The language that you’re angry in is one language, but the language that you feel close to your family in is another language. You’re kind of in between two worlds. And it took me a long time to accept this dual identity of being Iranian and being Canadian. In the end, you learn that you can be both.

Q: Have you always been a performer?

TG: Yeah, I was in kindergarten for my first play, and performed through elementary school, middle school, high school. I went to an arts high school and my amazing high school drama teacher gave me the male lead of our high school musical. I was Lord Evelyn Oakleigh in Anything Goes. It was like my dream come true to do that, and I realized, oh, this is actually what I wanna do forever. I even have a diary entry from when I was eight years old where I said, “when I grow up, I wanna be an actress.”

Q: Do you have other performers in your family too?

TG: Literally no one. Even though my mom worked and she was so busy, she was always very clear with me that it was obvious what I was good at. She never pushed me in another direction. She’s like, “You’re a great writer. You’ll either be a journalist or you’ll be an actor.” Everybody has a talent and you have to really pay attention to what you enjoy.

Q: Is the art you make now similar to art you made in high school?

TG:I liked doing comedy. I didn’t like super avant-garde things. I really have always liked comedy as a way to get a message across and to connect. And I think it’s way more interesting to make people laugh than to make them cry. Or both, hopefully.

Q: Could you talk about the intersection of your art and your activism?

TG: I have an activist spirit, but I think being Iranian is being political. Did you know what a revolution was when you were four? Every single Iranian you will ever meet knew what a revolution was when they were four. You understand what oppression and tyranny looks like and you understand what democracy is, and you understand what’s fair and what’s not fair, what justice is, what injustice is from a very young age.

I wrote a one-woman show called Mahmoud and I knew: if it is successful, I probably won’t be able to go back to Iran because it’s a political play. I mean, it’s more of a social play, but it has political undertones because if you’re writing about Iran, it’s political. The play got really big and it was perceived very well. It was nominated for a very prestigious award in Canada. It was published. And I couldn’t go back to Iran. I decided that I’ll always make work about being Iranian.

It’s been really scary always speaking out about Iran. I had a mentor who was like, “they don’t have a voice, be their voice.” And that always stayed with me, and that is my responsibility as an Iranian, and I think it’s our responsibility as human beings to always stand up for justice. So if we know that this country is being so severely oppressed, and women just like you and me, who are sitting here having a casual conversation about politics on the phone, can’t do that. This conversation that you and I just had couldn’t happen in Iran.

We have the power to stand up for that. To stand up for women’s rights, for human rights. So I think it’s a human responsibility and then especially an artist’s responsibility to do that.