Mother, I want to Be a Millionaire:

The Temple Group Calling for a Change

Even though the audience will probably not be able to understand every single scene in the play, watching this show is a very unique experience and definitely leaves a different impression from all the dominant forms of theater where there is a linear story line in which events are arranged in a chronological sequence. It is rather a series of snapshots from our lives, which might seem completely unrelated, but which together, in fact, hold a great meaning and fill in the missing blanks to help us realize the magnitude of the difficult situation we are in.

“Unlike my other plays which focused on a specific subject and explored it deeply,” said Ahmad El Attar, the playwright and director of the play, “this play touches upon many issues at the same time, such as education, religion, sexual frustration, TV and media and many others, but none of these issues was deeply explored because this was not my aim. My aim was to provide the audience with a holistic picture of what is happening around us and actually, this picture is very gloomy.” When asked if the message of the play was to make the audience feel that there is no hope in the future with this current reality, El Attar said, “There is no message. I do not believe in messages because I am making a play, not preaching. At the end of the day, all what I am doing is just showing what is going on and by showing it, it speaks for itself. For example, showing the education in schools which is based on filling children’s heads with information without teaching them how to think, or the TV presenter that turns out to be monster and is torturing the rabbit at the end of the play, makes us deduce as an audience that the situation is bad without me having to say this explicitly.”

Making a Change

One of the main aims of the play was to motivate people from all different ideologies, directions, and political factions to work together and figure out a way to get out of our current dilemma because now we are going nowhere, and this is what the play is about. “This is what is happening, what you (as an audience) are going to do about it?” said El Attar. “We are living in a society where there is poverty, unemployment, oppression, and bad education, and it is getting worse and worse. There is nothing ahead of us and nobody knows what is going to happen. Everybody is offering radical solutions; the Islamists are talking about an Islamic state and how it will make things better, but there is no plan. The liberalists are talking about canceling the freedom of education, but God knows what will happen next. The truth is that neither these nor those will make the change alone. We all need to take part of making a change and we all have to change and the first step to do so is for us to realize that there are a lot of things going wrong, and from there we can talk about how to make them better, because if we believe that everything is ok, then there is no point in making the change.” El Attar continued, “I do not blame the government, or the rich people, or the intellectuals. I am blaming everybody in the country because even the poor people—those are oppressed and are fine with it—also have something to do with where we are now. Because if we were not so submissive, they would not be so oppressive; it’s the power game. And throughout the history, it is the people who made the change, not any single person.”   

The Title: Facing the Illusion

One of the first thoughts that come to one’s mind after watching the play is “What does all this have to do with the title of the play?” Ahmad El Attar said that he has called the play Mother, I Want to Be a Millionaire because we are living one big illusion and not seeing what is going on around us. We are just standing there in the mess and dreaming of winning the million-dollar prize, or getting this beautiful car, or marrying that beautiful woman, and not actually realizing the mess we are in, and this is the main point of the play, because we, as individuals have big dreams that we want to realize, but at the same time we are living in a huge mess, so we continue to dream as an escape from our current reality.

The Show: Bring It to Life

Ahmad El Attar and his team spent almost four months bringing to life this show, which has not been a very easy one to put together. The preparation for the show has not been a traditional rehearsal process, where there is a text that is introduced to the actors from the very beginning of the process and the actors are very clear about the characters they are playing. Instead, the first two months were dedicated to acting and improvisation exercises to bring the actors together and to create the characters, and only when the characters were created, the text was introduced and the director began to adjust and adapt the characters and the text to each other.

The show lasted for only one hour, but included 50 scenes, the longest of which was only four minutes. The director used a film editing technique to come up with the right sequence of scenes. After two weeks of editing, live on stage, a final version was made and all the other elements of the performance—light, video, and sound— were integrated into it. “From the very beginning, my idea was to make a play that reads like a movie, so everything got affected by this,” said El Attar. “I wanted people to sit and watch scenes happening after each other as if they were watching a movie. I wanted to get rid of the real time that exists in theater between one scene and the other, so I cut that time and made it look exactly like a movie would look like.”

The Temple

The Temple Independent Theater Company was created in 1993 by director Ahmad El Attar, actress Maya El Kalyoubi, and producer Ali Belail and started out their activity on the rooftop of a friend’s house in Maadi, a Cairo suburb. Since then, the troupe has been creating a new form of Egyptian theater that would be relevant to the contemporary context in both form and content. Their most successful productions were Life Is Beautiful or Waiting for My Uncle from America in 1998, which has been presented in Cairo, Alexandria, Amman, Beirut, Berlin, and is scheduled to be shown in New York in September 2004; and On the Road to Nowhere: A Cairene Journey for Tourists and Lovers in 2001, a performance which was located on a moving bus and has been shown in Cairo, Beirut, and Lisbon.

A great achievement for the Temple Group is that Mother, I want to Be a Millionaire is scheduled to be shown in one of the major theater festivals in Europe, the Berlin Festespiele, in November 2004. Ahmad El Attar is hoping to confront different audiences and challenge different mentalities, and let them think about issues that they would normally overlook or even ignore in the course of their daily lives.
**The Temple Independent Theater Company aims to create new and relevant Egyptian the theatre that is sensitive to the contemporary context in both from and content.

 Mohammad Shawky, A graduating senior in The American University in Cairo majoring in business administration, but is more passionate about education& learning, social development, performing arts, and creative writing.