By Aníse Meccouri

Anisa George made me cry. In February 2005, her revelatory one-woman play "Khouraji" ("Foreigner") debuted in New York City. I missed it. Months later, George sent me a DVD of the performance. After watching it, I felt like I had just witnessed someone being born.

"There is certain dynamic that things get broken. I have to keep picking up the pieces. It's like evolution," George later explained. "Shedding skin is very painful; it's painful to be born. The piece is a lot about bearing witness to that process of searching and growth."

As a prime example of this, look to the first scene. The play ("Foreigner," at the Touchstone Theatre in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, February 22 to 26, 2006) opens warily, with George standing toward the front of the stage, prim and proud and looking very amateur. Then she breaks out into a popular Bahá'í children's song, "God is One." We realize she is playing herself as a five-year-old, establishing her religious identity. The song is playful, cute, and abruptly disrupted as the stage lights turn red and George physically collapses in a silent sequence of agony.

In theater, one can go into abstraction and use the body in unusual ways. "Emotional realities are so much more vast and complicated than we're allowed to output in everyday life," George says of her many physically interpretive scenes. In one particularly poignant scene, she lays to rest her encouraging, loving, but obstructive father character before a bowl of water she uses to wash her face and hands—reminiscent of ablutions that accompany the daily Bahá'í obligatory prayer.

George, clearly an experienced dancer with limberness and grace, is also a brilliant actor. She is so open and spiritually beautiful in "Khouraji" that all I could think was, finally, a representation of the Bahá'í Faith that honors our humanity.

We met to discuss "Khouraji," which George wrote, produced, and performs herself, at the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam Avenue in New York City, near Columbia University. It was April, and the Upper West Side was lovely since the trees turned green and flowery. Sidewalk café tables had emerged in submission to the arrival of spring. The setting sun cast a warm glow on everything, and made every city light sparkle on the golden street.

This was two months after the play debuted, and there was plenty of buzz in the New York City Bahá'í community. People were calling it "daring" and "beautiful." One man, who considers himself cynical when it comes to inspirational art, told me, "It made me feel better. It made me feel like I had a piece of this faith, too. That girl's amazing."

I found the little old-world café and looked for Anisa George. She was easy to spot; a tall, blonde, and pensive-looking young woman reading what looked like an antique book of poems, in front of a pot of tea and pumpkin pie.

"Hey Anisa, what's up?" I said, tripping over every table and chair between us in the tightly-packed room.

"Anise, how are you?" she said, smiling, not at all disappointed to put her book away.

"Fine...this is a nice place," I said, sitting down in a small wooden chair. "What is that?"

"Pumpkin pie. Have some," George offered graciously. "I'm used to being in your position—I had to do so many interviews for this project, so this is fun."

Despite being a remarkably talented writer and actor, George remains extremely humble, not through self-deprecation, but through her general respect for everyone around her. This humility is apparent in her performance in "Khouraji," but more so in her personal interactions. She has manners, for one, but also a true sincerity that can be noticed when she's talking to you.

"Khouraji" is an independent, contemporary masterpiece, especially when considered in the context of art that has emerged from the Bahá'í community in the west. One of the most important things this piece does is crack the cultural mystery surrounding second-generation Bahá'í youth in the United States in particular. It oxygenates the true spiritual paralysis and pressure that our generation is fighting with every day, and explores why it has been such a challenge to own our Faith, despite being told all the time that we are "the spiritual descendants of the Dawnbreakers" (a theme regarded with some irony in "Khouraji").

George, through her intense and penetrating performance, taps into the truth of her own spiritual maturation in an unguarded, uncensored way that caused me, as a young western Bahá'í, to exhale in relief.

"I think it's important that Bahá'ís don't turn their art into worship in the sense that what they're doing is trying to please God by being 'good Bahá'ís,'" George told me. "I believe that to please God is to be utterly honest and compassionate to all the stories you're telling. Where else—outside of artistic expression—can people be that private in public?"

At the time we talked, George was majoring in Middle Eastern studies, which no doubt aided in the cultural intuitiveness she displays in her play. She began college in Scotland, studying Islamic history, Persian and social anthropology. George had gone to school after a year of volunteer service. She was on fire, full of inspiration. But studying social anthropology was more threatening to this inspired mentality than she might have guessed.

"There is no truth," she said, of what she was hearing from her professors. "Religion is magic. It's all relative. This was so at odds with my Bahá'í beliefs."

In one of the most painful and comic scenes in "Khouraji," George re-enacts her first psychotherapy session with a school counselor. George sits, alone in a chair on the stage, radiating nervousness, tragedy and confusion.

"It's like… nothing is really wrong," she tells the counselor. Then the lights go red again, and she contorts into another silent agony sequence.

It is truly amazing to watch George physically represent her soul's reactionary nature. Frustrated and emotionally paralyzed as an anthropology major, she's been told God doesn't exist, and religion is society worshipping itself. She is disturbed, unhinged, and scared, and even as I watched this scene on a computer, her emotions were terribly palpable.

"It doesn't matter how I feel if I can't express it logically. Nothing that I feel that I can't explain logically exists," she tells the counselor, who is perhaps, intentionally, not spoken for in this scene. She explains that her Bahá'í identity is being corroded by her intellectual pursuits, and that it just can't be right. She says painfully, "If I could just cut this part of myself out, I could just have a beer, I could mess around, I wouldn't have to be part of an 'Army of Light' ushering in peace. I could just be. Can't I just be?"

It is a breaking point all too familiar. George's Bahá'í character sees only two options: succumb to apathy and adopt sociology as religion, or go to Iran, where the Bahá'í Faith was born, and discover truth in its origin. She chooses the latter, "because I'm not sure of anything," deciding that she must go to Iran to see the cultural truth where the Faith emerged.

Anisa left after her sophomore year, and went to Isfahan, Iran, where she studied Persian for three months. As a Bahá'í woman, two major parts of her identity would have to be quiet during her time there. George is an artist, with a powerful mind, so instead of lamenting a loss of expression, she started writing vigorously: "It was the only way I could express myself. I was struggling with expressing simple things."

When George returned to school, at Barnard College in New York City, she had generated a rich volume of private, written material, which was channeled into a theater class. During the following summer, she sculpted it into a play.

"I never set out to make a theater piece of my experiences," George explained. "I just couldn't answer the question, 'Hey Anisa, how was Iran?' This play was an organic response to that. I knew, through my dad [Bahá'í playwright and perfomer Bill George], that this could work. I did have something to say to that question—and this is how it emerged. With this performance, I had the opportunity to play other people: men, Shiites, people who wanted to violate me, people who forged my identity. I played my parents, you know?"

It is inspiring to watch George play the real people in her life, all of whom are well-intentioned, most of whom who unintentionally cause damage. Instead of blaming them, George gets into their psyches and empathizes with them, until she effectively recreates them, presenting their humanity.

"Bahá'ís talk about how we're all one, but it's not always that simple: you have to be very careful not to dehumanize other people," she said. We may be one human family, but we have our differences, too, and it's somehow the process of learning about each other that forges our common bonds.

George's versatility and empathic ability as an actor enables this process. "Actors can change context, emotions, and places," she said. "Theater says, 'You're not stuck. Watch how easily I just become something else.'"

This is directly relatable to the scene of which I say, "Anisa made me cry." In Iran, she embodies a character named Hamid, who is so disgusted with George that he shatters her perceptions of herself as a risk-taker, and reduces her to a privileged American who will never know what it is be a Middle Eastern woman, no matter how long she wears a veil.

Quite viciously, Hamid explains the situation of women in Iran, how they are sold and degraded, "in the front, in the back, in the mouth," and dehumanized by their takers. He describes this perspective mercilessly, referring to George's American privilege, and her education in Isfahan, a privilege the women who live there will never enjoy. In her performance, George is so utterly Hamid, so flawless and faithful in his persona, it is downright chilling and heartbreaking.

"Khouraji" is not a tragedy; it is more an affirming narrative about the value of the independent investigation of truth. It also acknowledges, however, that investigation requires venturing into dark, personal territory. The play deals with some very heavy subject material, including molestation, drug use, harsh cultural interchange, and powerful use of language. But "Khouraji" never fails to be completely justified in its presentation, or light-hearted in its regard of life's chances.

George illuminates how funny it is to grow up Bahá'í and deal with the situations that accompany secular holidays, Bahá'í history lessons, and school. Among some of the funniest scenes is near the beginning, when young George accidentally breaks the Naw Rúz bird on top of the Ayyám'i'Há tree her mother made (can we get a witness?). George is convinced that she has just stopped spring from ever coming again.

In another priceless scene, George impersonates her father giving a Bahá'í history lesson, presumably to a group of young Bahá'ís. She is animated and overstated, shouting "You're! The Spiritual! Descendants! Of the Dawnbreakers!" As her father, George recites the world-transformative Bahá'í religious principles as one might run down a grocery list.

Yet George is not harsh in her interpretations of her parents. She is entirely sympathetic and presents everybody as doing the best they can. After all, it was never easy for our American parents to become Bahá'ís and then make the religion a chewable tablet for their children. "Khouraji" humorously respects the mature generation of Western Bahá'ís in that way.

"I used to think if I did a Bahá'í play, I'd have to play Táhirih!" George laughs. She actually did play Táhirih, the poetess and mystic martyr in the history of the Bahá'í Faith, but as a young girl. In "Khouraji," George briefly lets us see her younger performance through a hilarious scene in which she inaccurately delivers the grave proclaimation of Táhirih, "You can kill me, but you can never, ever, stop the emancipation of women," with perfect inexperience and unbalance, clearly unaware of the meaning of each word. "I'm not interested in seeing anyone play Táhirih," George said to me. "I have her poetry, I have her stories. I want to see people I can identify with."

Reactions to "Khouraji" are overwhelmingly positive, George told me. "I thought I was going to alienate everyone. Orthodox Jewish women seemed to relate to it a lot. That came outta nowhere!" she laughs. "Women, overall, just took a lot from it. I think Bahá'ís were just relieved that I didn't censor myself."

When I asked about adaptations of the script, perhaps to film or an ensemble theater piece, George assured me that there is no adaptation in sight. "It has to remain a one-woman play. Like I said, it's a self-reflection."