Lesson 1: All Hamzas are Late. Elena and Shira kept gushing over how this big shot actor dude was going to come to our rehearsal and teach us something. I never heard of him or saw him. His first impression wasn’t good since he was late. Not awfully late, but still late. All people named Hamza are always late (Cardinal Rule #1). That’s okay though; if a Hamza in your life is early, something is terribly wrong.
Lesson 2: Don’t Underestimate the Impact You Have On Other People. We have a scene called "Preggers" in the play. In the scene, a young couple is dealing with an unplanned pregnancy. The story revolves around how the couple deals with their parents who aren’t too happy about it. The boyfriend’s father has traditional South Asian values. Talking about sex itself is a big hurdle and in this scene the boyfriend has to tell his dad that he made a girl pregnant. The story touched Hamza a lot since he also comes from a family that has traditional South Asian values. He told us how accurately we portrayed the scene and how he wished that this sort of educational theatre was given to him, because when he was taught sex education, they used a "One size fits all" approach that didn’t consider the different cultural nuances. For example, you can’t just go up to your dad and talk about sex in traditional South Asian cultures (I tried kinda, it was bad…trust me). For the first time I felt the impact we are having on the audience with this scene. Lesson 3: If You Are Gonna Do Something, Go All Out or Don’t Go At All. We have a court scene where the two lawyers are supposed to be cheezy lawyers. But Hamza took those cheezy lawyers and turned them into the CHEEZIEST LAWYERS in the world. It was incredible and the whole scene changed for the better when he did that. He took the scene to a level we didn’t even know was possible. He reasoned, “If you are gonna be cheezy, might as well go all out." We couldn’t argue with this flawless logic. In conclusion: Hamza Haq is an awesome human being who taught us kids something and we taught him something too. Follow Hamza Haq on social media @GoHaqYourself