‘SESTERCENTENNIAL’, Q&A with cast and crew
2026 marks America’s 250th anniversary and in recognition of this enormous milestone comes Gnomon Theatre’s bold and exciting new play ‘SESTERCENTENNIAL’. A dark and piercing reflection on the state of the nation, the play wrestles with issues surrounding race, identity and belonging, exploring the ever-present anxieties within America’s political and cultural landscape. Written in the second person, Sestercentennial asks audiences to look closer at the inextricable connections between race, American politics and its cultural and social life.
Ahead of its run at the Bread & Roses Theatre, I spoke to the team behind the production about bringing Sestercentennial to the stage, the challenges and triumphs of the process and how they have come to terms with the challenging themes at the heart of the play.
Questions for the crew:
1. Tell us a little about Gnomon Theatre. Who’s involved, how did the company come about..?
This is a little embarrassing to admit, but the idea for Gnomon Theatre emerged after my assistant director suggested that when I email industry folks about my work, that it comes from an official email and not my personal one. I slept on exactly what I wanted the name to be, and then remembered that Gnomon is an old Greek word that translates to “The One Who Knows” - which is also what my name means. Serendipitously, Gnomon is also a book that I really like by Nick Harkaway. The book is strange, funny, fantastical, and very smart - all qualities I aspire to evoke in my work. When it came to Social Media, I already had an instagram page for a previous play of mine, so I changed it into this fledgling company’s page and started promoting SESTERCENTENNIAL! Next time I produce a show on my own, it will be under this moniker and through this page and email, and if anyone else is interested in producing their work with us, that would be very exciting!
2. Arif, as Writer, Actor and Director, can you share some more about the creative process behind the show? How did the project come together and what first sparked your interest in exploring this subject through theatre?
I first got the idea for the show when last year, the US National Endowment for the Arts made the astonishing announcement they wouldn’t fund any projects committed to centering DEI or LGBTQ voices and/or themes, choosing instead to focus on projects celebrating the 250th Anniversary of American Independence. I asked myself if it was possible to tell a progressive story amidst such draconian restrictions. There is of course precedent - Arthur Miller’s The Crucible covertly speaks to the totalitarian evils of McCarthyism through allegory, for instance. But the fact that the NEA’s guidelines explicitly stated they were focusing on this milestone anniversary provoked my imagination. Soon the idea of a Bangladeshi conservative child of immigrants celebrating America 250 popped into my head, and I quickly realized I wanted to perform it as close to the actual date as possible. The timeline is part of why I’ve ended up wearing all these hats myself - it’s felt like a mad dash to the finish line, and it felt unreasonable of me to ask my friends to strap in for such a tumultuous and unpredictable ride, especially as I didn’t have any funding. Maybe I should have applied for an NEA grant just to see what they would do!
3. The play engages with issues surrounding race, identity and of course America’s history and national memory. These are, as ever, tough and contested themes - how did you cope reckoning with them to create this piece of work?
There are definitely a lot of my own experiences in the piece, but this is by no means an autobiographical work. Some of those experiences are contorted to be darker and more painful than they actually were. These were difficult to write, and evoked real insecurities within me. But the framing of this play, remembering that I was building a character who was separate from myself, served as needed emotional padding and a vital reminder that I am telling a story, not attempting to use the play as therapy. Earlier drafts of the play had more explicit discussions of major political events in American history. But the more I wrote, the more I realized that the themes and feelings I was trying to evoke through these historical moments - paranoia, racism, gossip, covert sinister plotting - could be better served through keeping the story small. There’s a quote early on in the play - “It’s not about America, it’s just about the guys.” In other words, Hamza is throwing a barbecue to celebrate his love for his friends more than love for his country. This sort of became a creed as I continued developing the play. So it’s smaller than I thought it would be, but hopefully still evokes these bigger political themes.
4. Do you think the play challenges any commonly held assumptions about history, race and heritage or the stories societies tell about outsiders/themselves?
There is a brief moment in the play where Hamza speaks to Marx’s racism towards the people of the Indian continent, which I think people may find surprising. This year was the first time I read the Communist Manifesto and it rocked my world - I am really excited by so many of the ideas Marx has articulated in this small, charismatic document. So it was especially heartbreaking when I learned Marx had written two articles about how the British colonization of India was a net good thing because it transformed India into more of a capitalist and industrialized society, paving the way for its eventual proletariat revolution. The two articles are shockingly flippant towards Indian people, history, and culture, even as Marx tries to qualify his writings by acknowledging the many evils the British committed in India. I didn’t want to be too didactic in how this got incorporated into the text, but it also felt important to include, and helped justify Hamza’s skepticism towards Marxism. Societal narratives around outsiders are a key element of this play. I am fascinated by how a growing number of immigrants in America are becoming more conservative in spite of the racist rhetoric that is becoming increasingly vitriolic within the conservative movement. In the play, Hamza - a child of Bangladeshi immigrants - is desperately trying to fit in amidst his conservative friends, and finds himself hitting a lot of obstacles that might very well be unbreachable.
5. The play is written in second person and involves audiences as active members of the action on stage, how do you expect audiences to react to this?
In writing in the second person, the audience is essentially cast as Hamza, and I serve to act as Hamza’s mind. I suspect there will be some discomfort in how the audience is implicated in what he believes. A few times in the play, Hamza passionately articulates his conservative political outlook, and I fully suspect this will create dissonance with the audience - I certainly feel dissonant from him in this regard. But there will be other moments of vulnerability and deep personal reflection where I hope audiences will really identify with him, or at least empathize with him. This is by no means an attempt to coax audiences into considering adopting a more conservative ideology. Rather, I am interested in what happens when an audience is implicated in embodying someone with whom they probably won’t fully align. It is possible there will be a conservative Bangladeshi American who comes to see the show, but even then they may find themselves at odds with how Hamza wrestles with his identity. It is that dissonance that really interests me - what is our threshold of empathy towards someone whose views we find problematic? This has been an active question throughout this whole process, and in some ways it remains active.
6. How would you describe the relationships, individual motivations and lived experiences of the characters? How does that shape the atmosphere of the piece?
As far as relationships are concerned, I would say they are all in flux: Hamza is in the middle of a fight with someone in his family that has exacerbated the political divide between him and the rest of them; Hamza goes back and forth in how deeply he trusts his friends, and how genuine his connections are with them. In terms of individual motivations, Hamza’s is the only perspective we are really given - he does everything he can to deduce everyone else’s motivations based on their behaviors, to varying degrees of success. I hope that audiences will find excitement and tension in the complexity of Hamza’s lived experience. The ways in which he tries to contort subjective thought into objective thought, his awkwardness, loneliness, confusion, and rage, will hopefully influence the atmosphere of the piece.
7. Do you intend for audiences to see aspects of themselves reflected in the characters, especially within the play’s specific historical and political context?
Absolutely, though I suspect different audience members will resonate with different elements of Hamza. I hope that any child of immigrants will see themselves in how he talks about his family, the way he carries his parents home within him, even as they wrestle with how his relationship to his background has guided him to his conservative politics. If there are conservatives who come to see the show, I hope they will feel I have reflected their ideology with nuance, even as it is clearly being challenged. I hope that progressives will see themselves reflected in Hamza’s little sister, who is so enraged by America’s rampant imperialist violence it nearly renders her catatonic, even as they confront Marx’s deeply problematic and seemingly paradoxical beliefs on India and British colonialism. And I hope that all audience members, no matter their beliefs or identifiers, feel themselves implicated in the present moment, where the most powerful country in the world is about to turn two hundred and fifty years old.
8. What do you think the play has to say about America’s past and current state - and what could it be saying about the future?
The violent imperialist past and present of America is definitely explored, albeit briefly. It felt important to explicitly name at least a few of the horrific atrocities the American Government has wrought over recent years, namely aiding and abetting genocide in Palestine, bombing little girls in Iran, and shooting civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota. But more than anything else, the play is about a second generation American desperately searching for a sense of belonging and affinity in our modern world. In my opinion, he is looking in the wrong places, but I nonetheless sympathize with how he has been seduced by the story of American Exceptionalism, and the contradictions between that story and his lived reality. My hope is that by the end of the play, I haven’t provided a didactic means of how he might resolve these contradictions, but rather how it behooves us all to actively and collectively wrestle with how they exist in each of us.
9. What do you hope audiences take away from the production?
I hope that audiences take away how racism can adopt a spectral form. There are certainly moments of overt racism directed Hamza’s way in the play, but there are also moments where Hamza’s own mind has been twisted by white supremacy. It isn’t necessarily in what is actively being done to him in the present moment, but rather in how he processes what has been done to him, that the consequences of his stigmatization make themselves known. In spending the entirety of the play inside Hamza’s head, I hope audiences will come to understand and/or feel validated in how for global majority folk, self doubt, anxiety, and self contempt are all symptoms of living within an inherently racist society. That questioning whether something was or wasn’t in fact racist is a byproduct of racism’s insidious effect.
10. Was there a specific reason for choosing to stage this play at the Bread & Roses
Theatre?
I love working at the Bread & Roses Theatre - Velenzia and the whole company are just so welcoming and accommodating. We performed another one of my solo shows here last year and had such a positive experience, so I knew this would be the perfect place for this show. Anyone interested in putting their work up in London should definitely consider doing so at Bread & Roses! Also as an American, I am really taken by the idea of pub theatres - we really don’t have an equivalent across the pond, and I’m inspired by how easy it is for theatre makers to produce their own work here in this city, and that people come and see it!
11. What are your ambitions for the production beyond this run?
I honestly have no idea. I suspect that once July 4th 2026 passes, the play will take on a different meaning, as it will no longer be exploring our literal present. This is by no means a dealbreaker - countless period pieces have been staged to tell a story about our present. But this is a different context to what primarily excites me about this piece - namely, that the story is about the very time in which it is being performed. In one sense this makes me a little sad - there is only one real moment where this play will be at its most potent. But in another sense, this evanescent potency is part of what draws me to theatre - it exists only for a moment and then it’s gone forever. For now, all my attention is directed towards putting the play up for this one night, and if it ends up having an extended life I’ll be extremely grateful. I’ll definitely be interested in seeing what the audience thinks about how this play can continue to live on, or if it is only supposed to exist in this one moment, before America’s 250th birthday is behind us.
12. Looking ahead, what are your wider ambitions as artists and theatre-makers?
One thing everyone on this team is deadset on is to continue collaborating together. It is wonderfully validating to have a core artistic group that always has each other’s backs. Everyone on this team met while we were Masters Students at Rose Bruford College. Over the last three years we’ve worked together in myriad ways, all of us wearing designer, director, performer, and deviser hats in different moments depending on the project. I have come to understand that my work is greatly improved upon when there are trusted collaborators in dialogue with me. As far as my individual ambitions are concerned, I have this tetralogy of fantasy plays I’ve been working on for the last seven years that I would love to finish - two stage plays and two radio plays. Each play is a standalone narrative that builds upon the collective world, and deals with a series of political upheavals and ecological disasters. One stage play and one radio play have already been written, but I am keen on writing the other two and would love for all four of them to one day be produced simultaneously.
13. Finally, why do audiences need to see the play right now?
SESTERCENTENNIAL takes place on America’s 250th birthday. Mere hours after the show finishes, that birthday will be upon us. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a play that takes place during the exact time it is being performed, which is part of what excited me about this idea. If there was ever a time to see a play that wrestles with the state of America at this very point in history - in all its diversity, bigotry, community, discord, aggression, and potential - I suspect it would be right now.