The photo is of Adil Mansoor when he was a child, in Pakistan. The scene was a family celebration, and a relative, on a lark, dressed the boy in a fine women’s gown. The adult Mansoor regards the picture from a few feet — and a few decades — away.
He notes the irony that this photograph perhaps best represents the fullness of who he is, as a queer South Asian man, proud of who he is and where he’s from. The irony lies in the fact that he has perhaps never been able to fully be who he is since that moment. Especially for his mother.
The complex bond between mother and son is the central tension in Adil Mansoor’s Amm(i)gone,a funny, charming, and often tender one-person show co-directed by Mansoor and Lyam B. Gabel, produced by the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with Kelly Strayhorn Theatre, and running now as the final show in Long Wharf Theatre’s 2023 – 24 season, through June 23, at the Theater and Performance Studies Black Box at Yale University.
