Centerstage Theatre closes its 2023-2024 season with “Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith”, a poignant family drama which follows the chaos that unfolds in an immigrant, Muslim-Egyptian family where the children of the family, all young adults in their own right, start to diverge and wrestle with the family values they’d been raised with. 

The whole cast is stellar – bringing charisma, passion, and earnestness to their roles. The show itself is captivating and thought provoking, tackling powerful and heavy subject matter, mostly regarding religion, and the way those beliefs can become heavily intertwined with family dynamics, and an attempt to detangle the two and understand each other.

Actor Sameer Arshad plays the role of Aziz, a friend of the family the play follows, and the father of Murad, who the daughter of the family is set to be engaged to.

When Aziz comes to visit the family and hears that the eldest, Tawfiq, has recently told his family he’s going to become an atheist, he greets this information with curiosity, wanting to know what led Tawfiq to this decision and what he does believe in.

Arshad came into this role after playing the same character in a previous production of the show back in 2017 at the University of Washington, and being remembered from it by the playwright and director, who called him up and asked if he wanted to audition for the role again.

He says he enjoys being a part of this show because it “has something new to say about the Arab American and the Muslim American experience.” He says that, oftentimes, the portrayal of Muslims and Arabs in American media is of violence, portraying them as terrorists and people who don’t belong in the states.

“And I just really think that is a very unfair and unrealistic and quite frankly politically motivated portrayal of a group of people who have as much diversity within them as any other group of people,” said Arshad.

Arshad says that “Ten Acrobats” is all about “the different perspectives they hold onto and the leaps of faith that they make about how they want to live their lives.”

The show “presents so many different ways of being a Muslim, which are kind of surprising to somebody who’s not well introduced to the Muslim culture,” said Arshad. “I like that that open-mindedness is what this play brings to portray the Muslim experience. We don’t have violence in this play, we don’t have people talking about war or conflict. There is conflict, but it’s family drama.”

He says he hopes that one of the takeaways people get from this show is that the problems Muslim Americans and Arab Americans face are just like everyone else’s. “We’re not that much different from each other at all. We have our own, unique flavor of how we live, but we’re all embracing our humanity, and that’s what’s more important,” said Arshad.

Putting on this show didn’t come without its own set of challenges, such as the fact that most actors in the Seattle-area have full time jobs and it can be tough to schedule around, especially with how long the scenes in “Ten Acrobats” are. The final scene, Arshad said, makes up about a quarter of the play and clocks in at about 40 minutes.

But he also says, “it’s all worth it, for the shared experience that we have and the magic that we bring to the community with what we have to say in our play, in our performances.”

Ejay Amor, who plays Hamza, the younger son of the family, says one thing that’s challenging to him about the show is “how close it relates to my own queer experience, and every night having to experience what it is trying to come out to a family who you don’t know is going to be accepting of you. And it’s a lot of vulnerability, it’s a lot of re-experiencing what it’s like to come into your sexuality all over again and it’s real rough some nights.”

“Ten Acrobats” runs for two more weekends at Centerstage Theatre, and more information can be found at centerstagetheatre.com.