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Layla: A Car Play

Director -------------------------------------------- Mel Elkouz

Created by -------------Layla Bahmanziari, Mel Elkouz

Meet the team!

    Each place you go is soaked in memories. Yours, your friends’, strangers’. Every place you go is important to someone. In Layla: A Car Play, we journey through the life of Layla. Zhe drives us to the locations that shaped zer life and, through these stories, we get closer and closer to understanding who zhe is. At its core, this play is about how places and moments shape your life. 

    Devised by Layla Bahmanziari and I, it was shaped around the premise that it takes place in an actual car. This only allowed us to have four audience members total for each performance or however many can comfortably fit into Layla's car. The play begins when you enter the car and ends when you exit. Zhe drives the audience to places that shaped who zhe is. To zer first house where zhe came to terms with zer father's death all the way to the O'Charleys where he was murdered. Although about Layla, this story was shaped around the trauma zhe has faced and how we often connect the most pivotal moments of our lives to very specific places. There is a section of the play where there is no speaking. The hope was that the audience would look at all the places passing by and notice their own attachments to these places or at the very least, recognize how meaningful these places could be to other people. 

    The fact that the play was immersive, interactive, and just odd allowed for a lot of discoveries. I noticed that the mood of the play sometimes depended on the weather. Some audience members saw the show when it was pouring down rain, creating a much more somber environment. Others saw a more energized, exciting show when it was sunny. 

    Directing this piece was one of my favorite experiences to date. Due to the play being inspired by Layla's life, this piece took an incredible amount of collaboration. The rawness and vulnerability in the subject matter always made the work feel important to me. 

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