Screened as a fund-raiser for Passage Theatre Company in Trenton, William Mastrosimone’s story takes place in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in 1979.
By: Elise Nakhnikian
The Beast was released in 1988, but its May 1 showing at MarketFair will be a kind of debut.
An engaging though occasionally stagy war story, The Beast cuts between two sets of people caught in parallel traps. A handful of Russian soldiers lost in a tank lumber through the Afghan desert after destroying a village, while a precarious coalition of idealistic mujahedeen, revenge-maddened women and opportunistic looters pursue them on foot.
The movie is based on a play called Nanawatai, which roughly translates as "sanctuary." In the movie, the Afghan fighters who find a stranded member of the tank crew feel obliged to take him in because he invokes the term, which is part of an Afghan code of honor. In real life, says playwright and screenwriter William Mastrosimone, the code explains why the Afghans would not turn over Osama bin Laden to the United States after Sept. 11. "The Afghans hate Arabs," he says in a phone interview from Oregon, where he was workshopping his new play. "But the average Afghan was not going to condone turning (bin Laden) over. He was a guest in their country."
Our post-9/11 interest in Afghanistan along with the fact that Mr. Mastrosimone is a co-founder of Trenton’s Passage Theatre Company probably explains why the theater is hosting a benefit showing of the movie next month. But not many Americans were looking for insight into that part of the world when The Beast came out.
"It took seven years to get it made," recalls Mr. Mastrosimone, a native of Lawrence Township who now lives in Titusville with his wife, Sharon, and their four kids. Mr. Mastrosimone wrote the play on which The Beast is based in the early ’80s and then began to pitch it as a movie a movie in which the actors who play Afghans speak in subtitled Pashto.
Getting Hollywood to green-light that sort of picture is never easy, but it must have been particularly hard in the post-Jaws ’80s, when studio heads were chasing after high-concept blockbusters and merchandising tie-ins as if they were the Holy Grail. Mr. Mastrosimone eventually found a taker in David Puttnam, a producer who put in a brief stint as chairman of Columbia Pictures. The studio assembled a package that included actor Jason Patric and director Kevin Reynolds, who was, says Mr. Mastrosimone, "very respectful of me and the play, and the movie script that I wrote."
Puttnam was fired before the movie could be released, and his successors decided not to pour a lot of money into promoting The Beast, which sat on a shelf before being very briefly released with no advertising campaign and in just two theaters. "This was one of the most devastating blows to me psychologically in my entire career," says Mr. Mastrosimone. "Even when you do good work, and even when you get it done, the people at the top can kill it."
But The Beast wasn’t dead after all. It made it to video and later DVD. Along the way, according to Mr. Mastrosimone, it developed a cult following, especially among Afghans.
Mr. Mastrosimone has written a few other screenplays, but he’s primarily a playwright. Although he bristles at being typecast, pointing out that he has written 30 plays in various genres, his best-known works are intense stories with a topical twist about relatively powerless people fighting for their survival. They include Extremities, about a woman who turns the tables on the man who attacked her, and Bang, Bang, You’re Dead, about a high school student who threatens to bomb his school.
That may have something to do with the "obsession" he developed with Afghanistan soon after the Soviets invaded in December 1979. "I felt there was some inexplicable force that drew me to Afghanistan," he says. "I think that curiosity was fueled by the media’s lack of concern about the Soviet Union invading yet another country. This was a country of 15 million people and 5 million were refugees, and the whole world seemed just not to notice."
He made contact with a group of Afghan war refugees in New York, who gave him permission to join their comrades in Afghanistan and told him how to go about it, starting with a rigorous year-long physical training regimen. Then he checked into a hotel in Pakistan, where he waited for someone from the group to smuggle him into the country. He lived with the Freedom Fighters for about six weeks.
"Everything that’s in ‘The Beast’ I witnessed in Afghanistan," he says. "I witnessed the destruction of a village from far off. And later we went into the village and found out the Soviets had terrorized the village by crushing some of the people in the village with tanks."
Mr. Mastrosimone also found himself in a situation much like the one faced by the Russian soldier who gets separated from his comrades in the movie. At one point, he says, when the men he was with were hauling ammo to the front, he became too ill to walk. "They left me at the foot of a road up a mountain," he recalls. "There was a village at the top, and they said, ‘The people in the village will take care of you.’"
Instead, the villagers mistook him for a Russian and nearly killed him. But an Oxford-educated doctor born in the village who lived abroad happened to be visiting that month. He explained that the sick man was an American and the villagers carried him up the hill, where they tended to him until he got well. Mr. Mastrosimone particularly remembers one old woman who came to visit him and asked the doctor what he needed. Told that he couldn’t eat solid food for a few days, she killed her goat to make him soup.
"Right then, I saw the beauty of the Afghan culture," says Mr. Mastrosimone. "Hospitality was sacred to them. These people were starving; they had nothing. And they gave me everything they had."
Yet, he adds, there’s "a dark side" to the country: Warlords who thrive on chaos stir up trouble between warring tribes. Although he didn’t know it when he went to Afghanistan, he says, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the man who helped him enter the country, is one of those war profiteers. "He has now fought with the Taliban, against the Taliban, and now against us," he says. "This man is a symbol of what’s wrong with Afghanistan. He has a private army. All he’s about is his own interests. And there are a dozen guys like that."
Mr. Mastrosimone says he is "absolutely sure" that the U.S. was right to invade Afghanistan and drive out the Taliban. "I could not have said that in the beginning; I just wasn’t sure. But now that I’m talking to people who go and come back, and I talk to people who are still there, and they feel that they have a chance to have a democratic country where they’re ruled by laws, not by men. We’re heroes in Afghanistan right now."
One of this country’s most important functions in Afghanistan, he believes, is to ensure its women are not treated as second-class citizens. "After 20 years of war, most of the men are dead. The country is about 80 percent women. And those women do not have a chance without us. If America left and the country fell back into a state of warfare, those women would fall back into the position they were in before, which is no education and no opportunities for work, except in the home. There’s an old proverb in Afghanistan: ‘There are two places for women, at home and in the grave.’"
Mr. Mastrosimone’s latest play is about some of those women. In a way, he says, The Afghan Women, which will open at Passage Theatre this fall, is a sequel to The Beast, though he didn’t think of it as such while writing it. "I’m dealing with the same code of honor. ‘The Afghan Women’ deals with hospitality but it’s really a Greek tragedy. It’s about four women who conspire to murder a warlord."
The play is a fund-raiser for International Orphan Care (www.orphanproject.org), a group of Afghan-Americans that runs orphanages in Afghanistan. "I think the way to fight future terrorism is to make sure that these million orphans in Afghanistan have a roof over their heads and a stable life, so they don’t fall into the hands of those people who would turn them into soldiers for their violent causes," explains Mr. Mastrosimone. Not only is he donating all proceeds to the group, but he’s distributing free copies of the script through e-mail and the Internet to anyone who wants to produce it on the condition that it’s done as a fund-raiser for the orphan care group.
In the meantime, Mr. Mastrosimone looks forward to seeing his first Afghan story on the big screen for the first time. "I’m very proud of it," he says, "and I’m very grateful that these people got together and decided to give it its due."
The Beast will be screened at the REG/UA Theaters at MarketFair, 3535 Route 1, West Windsor, May 1, 7:30 p.m. Movie-only tickets cost $10; tickets cost $100 for a 6 p.m. reception with Mastrosimone and cast members, catered by Marsilio’s Restaurant. Proceeds will benefit Passage Theatre Company. For information, call (609) 392-0766 or e-mail [email protected]