The Who & The What Theatre Review by Matthew Murray

When it comes to stories about major religious figures, which is truer, the fact or the fiction? Though this question may appear simple, it’s not, as Ayad Akhtar details with his new play The Who & The What, which just opened in an LCT3 production at the Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center. Given enough years, or perhaps eons, of retelling and relating, folklore might come to mean far more than the truth, which is naturally going to be an enormous problem for someone who’s more interested in that. That someone, in this case, is Zarina (Nadine Malouf), a 32-year-old Arab-American woman who’s struggling to live a more liberal Muslim life in her family’s conservative Atlanta household. Her wealthy father, Afzal (Bernard White), owns 30 percent of the city’s taxis, and her sister, Mahwish (Tala Ashe), is 25 years old and ready to wed her childhood boyfriend, Haroun, though Zarina still being single poses something of a problem for Dad. Not that Zarina agrees with him, about that or pretty much anything else.