This past Saturday, nine Stanford student and staff members took to the stage to deliver heartfelt, meaningful monologues on the experiences of the “hijabi,” a Muslim woman who chooses to wear the traditional headscarf, the hijab. Unusually, these were not personal experiences of the students, though their conviction and emotional intensity never revealed this fact. Stanford Theatre Activist Mobilization Project’s (STAMP) production of the “Hijabi Monologues,” in conjunction with the Muslim Student Awareness Network (MSAN), departed from STAMP’s usual trend of drawing material from Stanford students and their experiences.

“STAMP has done several different monologue projects in the past… however, in the ‘Hijabi Monologues’ the script itself is not native to Stanford,” said Heidi Thorsen ’12, STAMP’s producer of the show. “The monologues are not, for the most part, a compilation of different individuals’ stories, but rather the work of one writer, Sahar Ullah.”

As STAMP focuses on social theater relevant to the Stanford community, Thorsen said, “There was a much greater concern and emphasis on how we would make these stories our own.” The production team also had the unique experience of working directly with the author of the monologues, Sahar Ullah, who participated in a panel discussion after the show on Saturday.

“We were under a legal obligation to keep the monologues already in the script, though we could add monologues of our own if they were approved,” said Aditya Singh ’13, one of the two directors of the show. “While we did have some extra monologues initially, we eventually discarded them as they were too tangential and we wanted to keep the script coherent.”

In the panel discussion, Ullah explained that even the official canon of the “Monologues” expands organically as she discovers new stories that can be well-incorporated into the show. Nor does the show suffer from a lack of diversity in its content. At times, drastically different consecutive monologues nearly gave me whiplash with their abrupt change of tone, yet I found this style effective in driving home the huge variation in the experiences of the hijabis who tell their stories.

Starting with a short monologue, “I’m Tired,” Kate Hyder ’11 talked about the constant pressure to represent an entire world religion, to deal with people insisting she must be oppressed by her choice of clothing. The monologues soon spiraled into narratives that were at times heartbreaking and hilarious, shocking and relatable. Monologues like “Knock on the Door,” about a young Muslim American woman’s father’s wrongful arrest after 9/11 and “My Son’s Wedding,” a mother’s lament at her son’s premature death, dealt with extremely difficult experiences, whether specific to Muslim women or universal. There were light monologues as well, for instance about the many pickup lines hijabis are likely to receive.

Perhaps the most fun and a perfect penultimate monologue to the much more serious final monologue, “The Hijabi Protectors” excellently acted by Hana Al-Henaid ‘14, is Ullah’s own story of the goofy, nerdy boys of her senior class in high school who decided to take it upon themselves to be her hijabi protectors and keep other boys from touching her. This monologue, like an earlier one where she describes trying to find a place to pray during a football game, is light and entertaining, but also feels astonishingly real and normal, a simple slice of life for a young woman.

Ullah said in the panel that this is in fact the goal of the monologues, to show the real experiences of real women. The show is not about the hijab; most of the stories do not even mention the headscarf. The show is rather about the woman wearing the hijab, and the normal, everyday parts of their lives that do not necessarily define them and are certainly not defined by what is on their head. It aims to demystify the hijab and those who wear it, to show they are normal women with normal, relatable experiences.

Singh said the goal of the monologues is “to show that a single piece of clothing cannot define a person.” By the diverse stories recounted in the vignettes, this much becomes very clear, and hijabis’ lives are opened up and exposed, making them more accessible, less foreign and remote.

Mai El-Sadany ’11, president of MSAN, said in the panel that a survey conducted at the beginning of the year showed the many Stanford students had questions about the hijab, some still equating it with subjugation of women. The power of theater, Singh argues, is to answer these questions in such a tangible, relatable way that the hijabi is made real to the audience, not an abstraction that can been easily dismissed or misconstrued.

Thorsen sums up these sentiments of interfaith connection and similarities: “The Hijabi Monologues does not ask us to delve immediately into differences, theological or otherwise, but rather recognize the commonalities between people of different faiths. Friendship is even more important than dialogue in terms of overcoming the widespread misunderstanding between religions that often leads to a negative and violent portrayal of faith in general.”

By showing that hijabis are like all other people, the monologues aim to dispel the myth of their disparity from everyone else, and in this, the show succeeded admirably.